#nathsroom

About this time last year we did a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Toms Room’ posts. Now we’re gonna run a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Naths Room’ posts. These shall be written by none other than Citizen X himself. TRACK 08: ALL BLUE (BEAT BY ELECTRIC SEA SPIDER) When we made ‘Toms Room’ we had what I would describe as the opposite of a plan. We almost showed complete contempt for organisation or forethought (haha!) but when it came time to start making ‘Naths Room’ I had a small list of things that made up a ‘mission statement’ of sorts. A big part of that was the type of beats I wanted: progressive, dreamy, a little bit more challenging to write to than a lot of the stuff I’d been writing to in the past. I was actually listening to this song a lot just as an instrumental as intended and never even thought of it as a beat I could write to. Then all of a sudden one day I was listening to it and I was like ‘I wonder if I could write to this?’ I saw it as a challenge to try and find a flow that would work with the wonky feel of the beat. I chucked it into Logic, put on some headphones and just seemed to lock into the groove really easily. I think this is probably my favourite song on Naths Room for that reason. The whole feel of the beat and the melodic, staggered flow that I use to open each verse with, the summery vibes + imagery and the tripped out outro section. It fits the Naths Room aesthetic I set out to achieve super perfectly and its funky and cruisey as well. It makes me want to get faded and go to the beach and get salty in the sunshine haha.   As a kind of stupid side story, one of my brothers (Chris) is a hip hop fiend from way back but he mainly only listens to the classic stuff and tends to hate on the newer, more musically progressive stuff (hes one of those ‘striclty hip hop’ cats). Anyway I lost my phone earlier this year and when I finally got a new one set up a couple of weeks later the first messages I recieved were from him. I think he must of been drunk when he wrote them but there were three: MSG 1: “Just saw wu-tang and they fuckin destroyed. Only 93-99 era Wu on stage. Everyone was there except Meth was there and the RZA was so powerful. He ran the show. But on another note ‘all blue’ is one of the best songs you ever made.” Then a little bit later... MSG 2: “MAN ALL FUCKING BLUE! Its unreal.” MSG 3: “It just builds so well!” It was definitely a nice trio of messages to recieve after not having a phone for a couple of weeks. Chris has also been one of the first people I show all my music to. He’s basically heard every song I’ve ever made since I was about 16 years old so he definitely knows my catalogue well. Its cool that even though we have quite different music taste we both have the same favourite Citizen X song haha Download ‘Naths Room’ featuring ‘ALL BLUE’ by Citizen X for FREE from https://lostbrain.bandcamp.com/album/naths-room Cheers

About this time last year we did a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Toms Room’ blog posts. Now we’re gonna run a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Naths Room’ posts. These shall be written by none other than Citizen X himself. TRACK 07: BREATHE DEEP SEEK PEACE (BEAT BY CANVAS GOODS) Canvas Goods aka Paddy Malone is a somewhat eccentric but quite gifted creative-type (musician / producer / artist / writer) that’s been down with the Lost Brain Entertainment crew since its inception. He was there the day we came up with the name ‘Lost Brain’. He was living with Canvas when we made ‘Toms Room’ (he even helped write the hook for the title track of that project). In fact, he still lives with Canvas right now in the Lost Brain House in Lillipilli. Anyway, for reasons unkown to any of us he never ended up making an appearance on Toms Room, and that being the case I really wanted him to contribute something to Naths Room. So yeh, the beat to ‘Breathe Deep Seek Peace’ ended up being that contribution. I think the beat sat on my desktop for a minute but at some point during the writing of Naths Room I must of been having a bit of a stressful time and not feeling the best so I decided I was going to blow off some steam by locking myself in my room and writing a song. I pulled up this beat and then the opening lyrics pretty much sum the way this song got written on their own: “Hey yo I can’t believe I’m back in this motherfucking deep dark hole again / so whats my role again? I’m certainly no holy man / let me roll again, let me smoke again / let me think about shit with a pen in my hand let it all pour out / pour me a drink, turn the beat loud / like I could care who can hear this shit now... I’m just tryna let / this air out, this air out / breathe deep seek peace, try clear this doubt, clear this doubt...” Download ‘Naths Room’ featuring ‘BREATHE DEEP SEEK PEACE’ by Citizen X for FREE from https://lostbrain.bandcamp.com/album/naths-room Cheers

About this time last year we did a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Toms Room’ posts. Now we’re gonna run a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Naths Room’ posts. These shall be written by none other than Citizen X himself. TRACK 06 MILLIONCHOLY (BEAT BY CLAMS CASINO) IMO is one of the strongest songs I’ve ever written. I remember I was living in a tiny little room in a crowded party house - the kind with bins overflowing with beer bottles and pizza boxes and all the appliances and facilities are broken or in the process of breaking. I had no money, no job, no car and was struggling to find work as it was coming into winter (which is the quiet season in Byron Bay which means work opportunities are slim). I had been job hunting for weeks and this one particular day I went out again and came home empty handed and demoralised to a trashed house and an empty food cupboard with no money in the bank and I think I just freaked out. I don’t know exactly why, but caught a bus to Ballina on some ‘I need to fix my life right now’ type shit, put my ipod headphones in, listened to a couple of beats, found this one, came up with the opening line “I got a million reasons / to want a million dollars / and probably a million reasons why I havent got it” and by the time I had ridden the bus to Ballina and back I had written the whole song. When I arrived home there was a bunch of people drinking and smoking on my front porch looking like they were gearing up for another big night of partying. I was broke and stressed so I bypassed their invitations to join them and instead locked myself in my room to record the vocals to this new song. I remember I tracked it in less than 3 takes. It was just one of those songs that seem to channel right through you. I think at the time we were still working on finishing the Toms Room project, but we knew instantly this song would have to be for a solo Citizen X project - one which could potentially be a sequel of sorts to Toms Room. So in a way this song was the catalyst for the inception of the Naths Room project too. The beat is ‘All I Need’ by Clams Casino off his ‘Instrumentals’ mixtape that came out in 2011. I was (embarassingly) late to discover it but Canvas showed it to me sometime near the end of 2012 and I lost my shit. Clams Casino and Kanye West are still my favourite producers to this day. The whole tone and tempo of pretty much everything Clams does seems to suit my rapping style so well that I’ve actually had to stop myself from rapping to Clams beats in order to keep moving forward and pushing myself instead of relying on something I know is guaranteed to work. Its kind of hard to explain, but I think the whole ‘Millioncholy’ concept is based around the idea of having nothing and wanting everything but at the same time not being sure if having those things would lead to a sense of happiness anyway... the complex feeling of melancholy that comes with that realisation, combined with millions of percieved problems and solutions compounding all at once is what had me struggling to explain my mood as anything other than ‘Millioncholy’... Download ‘Naths Room’ featuring ‘MILLIONCHOLY’ by Citizen X for FREE from https://lostbrain.bandcamp.com/album/naths-room Cheers

About this time last year we did a seres of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Toms Room’ posts. Now we’re gonna run a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Naths Room’ posts. These shall be written by none other than Citizen X himself. TRACK 03: STILL MY IMAGINATION (BEAT BY BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD) This song is the sequel to the ‘My Imagination’ song that appears on ‘Toms Room’ (check it out here: https://lostbrain.bandcamp.com/track/my-imagination-feat-citizen-x ). Like I’ve said before the whole of Naths Room is a sequel/brother mixtape to ‘Toms Room’ and this is just another one of the threads that ties the two releases together. The original track was just a freestyle about whatever I was going through in my life at the time, so the sequel is similar, just updated for the newer release. The beats for both ‘My Imagination’ and ‘Still My Imagination’ were lifted off of a Blackbird Blackbird album called ‘Summer Heart’ that I was listening to heaps the summer we wrote ‘Toms Room’. Its dope. You should check it out! haha You can download ‘Naths Room’ featuring ‘STILL MY IMAGINATION’ by Citizen X for FREE from https://lostbrain.bandcamp.com/album/naths-room Cheers