From The Gift – Around The Way Queen by Jimetta Rose.

Buy: https://jimettarose.bandcamp.com/album/the-gift-around-the-way-queen

Sometimes a gift can take a lot longer to deliver than you would hope. You can’t find the right tools to properly package it. Or it’s not as shiny as you think the one receiving it would like it to be.

Jimetta Rose began this journey in 2014. Her and House Shoes had linked up for “Castles” on his Let It Go LP a couple years prior. ‘Shoes had started a record label, Street Corner Music, and launched the label with a series of ten handcrafted beattapes from relative unknowns, “The Gift”.

He had an idea for a full length SCM project with Jimetta, where they would choose one beat from each of The Gift volumes. Could be crazy.

So they got to it, going through the series and choosing the tracks that elicited responses from the pair. After a few hours they had the backing sonics for Jimetta’s own volume of The Gift.

They began meeting at Tenacity’s small studio apartment in Glendale. She would record her vocals in a closet, some hip-hop shit if there ever was any. The songs were coming out incredible, with a few very out of this world moments included.

With all the vocals now recorded, the next step was to mix.
This was a pivotal learning point for all involved. See, The Gift was dusty. Grandma’s basement dusty. Rusty two-track wavs at best. In some cases mp3s. No stems to properly separate and balance the production with the sometimes 30+ tracks of Jimetta’s vocals. So it went to another engineer, and another, and another.

Then it kinda just sat there. They kinda gave up on it. Years had passed. It hadn’t gotten any better. One of LA’s best engineers said he couldn’t get it anywhere near a space he would want to put his name on. Fuck.

Shoes got a lightbulb one day and sent it to Mags, his homie from back in Detroit who was the in-house engineer at The Disc in Eastpointe for over 25 years. He definitely had strong experience dealing with similar situations over the years.

So that bring us here. Jimetta Rose – The Gift : Around The Way Queen. Royalty from the hood. Dirty soul at it’s finest. The Queen surrounded by her court, Nameless, Dert Beats, EXT. TUAMIE, T-White, Cream Of Beats, Shoes, Raj Mahal, Denmark Vessey, DRUGS BEATS, Joseph Leimberg and I-Ced.

It took a very, very long time.

But your Gift has arrived.