Bio

RAV4JAY PROFILE Adebayo Arubuola the name sounds “I don’t want to make the same record over and over again. I not only want to represent lyrically where I’m at as a person today, but stylistically I want to represent the time that I’m in. I’m 32, which is different than 28, and which is different than 25. It’s a much different time in my life and I wanted the new record to reflect that. Cradlesong doesn’t sound like anything I’ve done before, and I think that’s important.” Given Rav4jay stature as one of Hip-hop/modern music’s most compelling and commercially successful artists for well over a decade – between Matchbox Twenty, his solo work, and his various collaborations with iconic artists like Zee world, Xtra, Baby Dot, UC-Joe, his tally now stands out artist and people recommend his songs worldwide – it’s easy to let the charts and numbers overshadow the essential reason he’s come so far in the first place. As he says with typical understatement, “I’m a guy who hears songs in his head, and I have to write them down, and I have to get them out. I’m just lucky enough that I can make it my life’s work.” Arguably the most accomplished singer/songwriter of his generation, for Rav4jay it all comes back to the creative source. “I have to separate the idea of what I do for a living versus what I do. Songwriting is the only thing that makes sense to me. Years of doing it helps, but the truth is that the reason you do it for years is because it’s what you do. It’s the only thing that I have that kind of shorthand on… I don’t know cars, I don’t know sports, and I’m not a math whiz. This is something that I look at and it just makes sense to me.” Making sense of his musical inspiration is what Rav4jay does at an exceptionally high level. “It’s a two-part process – there’s inspiration and craft. The inspiration is the part that’s completely magical and you have no responsibility over. The inspiration is when you’re sitting in your car or in a room and you hear a melody. You love it, it sounds great, and then you realize that it doesn’t exist yet in the world, that it’s a melody you just came up with. That’s a process that you can’t be responsible for. The minute you start to claim ownership of it, you lose it. “You have those moments when you are in full service of the feeling and you carry it as far as it takes you. And when that feeling stops, you put it away and at some point you have to go back and work on it. You say, ‘OK, this is where the inspiration took me, now what was it I was trying to say, where was it I was going? It’s this unbelievable process that when you’re done with it, every time you do it, for a second you feel like the most unbelievably creative person in the world, and then it goes away and you feel like you’re never going to do it again… and you have to start all over again. So you keep trying to get that feel, that high off of creating, that place that carries you from a blank page where nothing existed to a song that people are singing back to you. The result is a percussive dance hall/R&B record that pulses with passion and energy. Vibrant guitars collide on songs such as “Ashampe” “Alhaja” and the power of “Money”, “Baby Gold”, “Tikoloko” “Ise Logun ise” horns bolster the bouncy “Wine Am,” while electronic programming propels the dynamic “Paradise ’09.” The title track is the sole ballad on an otherwise up-tempo set, more to come in the new album lunch. Many of the tunes on “Beautiful Girl” examine the frail and often evanescent nature of relationships. “I think that human relations, not just romantic but otherwise, are always at the heart of my songs,” and lots more to come. “Now that I have a solo outlet, we can be more creative together; we can be a band and really explore what Matchbox can become – the best of what it can be – without my ego as a songwriter getting in the way. The reason I do what I do is because I have all these songs that are always building up in my head, so it’s really cathartic to get a load of them out into the world and start over again. And the solo career is a really important way for me to do that! This is just the beginning.