When you hear a striking variety of vocal styles and tones of voice on a single track, the most likely explanation is that the music was a group effort, maybe a hook farmed out to a singer, a guest feature commissioned from a rapper, and harmonies contributed by someone else besides. $avvy has plenty of performers in his circle that he can call on for that sort of thing, a few of whom — including his predecessor and Nashville independent hip-hop pacesetter Mike Floss — appear on his upcoming album The POOR Tapes. But the markedly different singing and rapping styles on the album track “Go!,” produced by Dmndstr and premiering exclusively on WNXP, are all $avvy. To get across the idea of exasperation building up to a parting of ways, he laid down euphoric, falsetto interludes, tauntingly relaxed verses and emphatic hooks, and to help him calibrate the tone of each of those parts, he turned to the mellow, psychedelic melodicism of Tame Impala and the scrappy, punk-schooled hip-hop of the duo Paris Texas.
Here’s what $avvy said about the creation of “Go!”:
“Paris Texas is a huge inspiration for me. I love the music that they make, the way that they’re able to blend the rap style that I love with these indie garage band-style production. And I say ‘garage band’ as a literal garage band, literally like a band playing in their garage. That’s how it feels. It feels authentic. It doesn’t feel like, ‘We’re trying to make something that sounds like punk music or like indie rock.’ No, we literally made this in the garage and we made this sound so raw, and the beats and the guitar and everything like that.
“I just love that feeling. And maybe I love that because I’ve gone to punk shows around the area and been in mosh pits and been able to see live performers. And it’s just that emotion; it’s just so different from rap. Like, with rapping, a lot of the emotion flows through what you’re saying in the way that you say it and the flow and the rhyme schemes and stuff like that. But with with punk rock, you can just play the guitar, play these chords the way that you play them and go and scream and belch out that pain or that emotion and somebody can feel it. I just wanted to try my own take on blending the two things. It’s the first time I’ve ever made a song like that.
“But Tame Impala is another good example of a style I love. I just love music like that where you can just sing with the windows down and just kind of listen. I just wanted to make something that felt good, but also still was giving the message of, ‘I feel like you should go. Where I’m at right now, if it just doesn’t feel right, I think you just need to go.'”
“I think that’s something that’s been a struggle for me in my life, is just being able to let go of things or being able to say goodbye. But it’s something that I know, as I’m growing and becoming more knowledgeable, it’s important for me to let go of things. So if something’s in your space that you don’t feel like is welcoming or is it beneficial to you, sometimes you’ve got to tell it to go. So that song came from that.”