Trevor Lawrence Jr.: What happens when you take a classical conservatory pianist who loves hip-hop and you drop him in the studio with the likes of Dave Matthews, India.Arie, Eminem, and Dr. Dre? You don’t just get a beat — you get classics like Busta Rhymes’ “Get You Some,” India.Arie’s “Brown Skin,” Eminem’s Relapse and Revival albums, and so many more. My guest today is the definition of range. He’s one of the secret weapons of Dave Matthews, also a composer scoring heavy documentaries like The Alabama Solution, and the innovator breaking barriers with K-pop’s Big Ocean. He’s the bridge between symphony and the culture. Today on The TrevBeats Show: Grammy-nominated visionary, the one and only Mark Batson. Trevor: Mark, what’s up, man? Mark Batson: What’s going on, Trev, man? Good to be here, man. Good to see you. Trevor: Man, thanks for coming, man. I really appreciate it, bro. It’s tough these days with these schedules and stuff, man. Mark: Yeah. Trevor: So, man, I want to get everybody familiar with, first of all, the way I came to know you. We have a mutual friend named Steve Lindsey, and years ago he was like, “Man, have you met Mark Batson yet? Have you met Batson yet, the professor?” And I was like, “No, I haven’t met him.” And he was like, “Man, you gotta meet Mark Batson.” So in my mind, all the time till I met you, I thought you were gonna be like a Scott Storch-type cat from your last name. It threw me, you know what I’m saying? I was expecting this kid in glasses and kind of nerdy that’s gonna be some classical guy. And then here comes Mark, the brother’s brother from Brooklyn, man. And I was like, “Yo.” And ever since then, man, we’ve been such close friends. We made so many records together. So it’s just a blessing to have you here, man. Mark: Thank you, man. Absolutely. Trevor: So let’s get a little bit of background, man. You started off in New York. Tell me about your background leading up to when you came to LA or whenever you started making your first records that started coming out. Mark: Yeah, you know, I’m from Brooklyn, New York. I was born in the Bushwick Projects, raised in the Bushwick Projects. My father was a classical opera singer. But there weren’t a lot of Black opera singers generating big income doing their craft in the ’70s. My mom played a bit of classical guitar as well. So myself and all of my siblings had piano lessons. I started at the age of four in the projects. Our piano teacher was in Bed-Stuy, and we all went to these piano lessons together, starting in classical music. By the time I was 12, 13 years old, we were playing in competitions, piano competitions, playing at Carnegie Hall. And at this time, it was also the birth of hip-hop. This is the beginning of hip-hop. So I got to witness what the birth of hip-hop was. My brother and my sister had a summer youth job in Harlem, so I would go up with them to the parks and listen to Jazzy J. He was the periodical master — the biggest DJ back then — and he DJ’d out in the park. We got to see some of the first MCs, the first rappers perform, and kind of grew up with it. When I lived in the projects, rap came from Harlem and the Bronx into Brooklyn. Outside of my window, where I lived on the fifth floor, there was a time when people would come together and there’d be drum circles. People from Jamaica, Africans, Jamaicans, Latinos — they would have these big drum circles right under my window in the projects, and they would play into the night. And at some point, those drum circles went into turntables. Somebody took the cables and wired it up and put it out in the park. This goes back to the blackout. The blackout was a big part of the birth of hip-hop, or the development of hip-hop, because there was a big looting that took place during that time. Electronic stores all got raided, so a lot of people got the equipment coming out of the New York City blackout. So they set the equipment up outside, and the way it went down was DJs at that point would play just the breakbeats on records. It was the whole thing about playing the song up to the breakbeat and then having the two turntables and just mixing the breakbeat back and forth. So for me, what I saw was a simulation of the drum circle. To me, hip-hop was an electronic version of the drum circle. It went from those drums to electronic drums that were being mixed back and forth. So myself and my brother had a rap group. We went outside, we rapped in the park, we rapped from area to area. So at that point I’m doing hip-hop, I’m playing classical piano, I’m playing gospel in church. I’m getting blessed to learn a lot of different styles and understand them as one thing. Because in my building, all the hardcore dudes in my area used to come up to my floor to listen to my brother and sisters and us practice classical piano. So at that point, I’m seeing music is not like Black people like R&B and hip-hop and white people like classical and folk. I’m seeing gang dudes from my neighborhood loving classical music on my floor and respecting it. So at that point, I’m starting to see music as one universal language. From there, I got a scholarship to be the jazz pianist at Howard University. While I was in school, I got hired to be the pianist for the Smithsonian Museum African American Culture Department. I had an 18-piece big band and I played Duke Ellington at the Smithsonian. That was about having the Duke Ellington charts, learning all the music in the charts, and transcribing them out into my 18-piece repertory ensemble. I got out of school and my first gig was being the keyboard player for Eric B. & Rakim. From there I had my own rap group. We got signed to PolyGram. That didn’t work out well. Then I started to tour a lot. I toured with Caron Wheeler from Soul II Soul. I played with Arrested Development when they did their MTV Unplugged. At some point I was inspired when I met Pharrell. Pharrell kind of changed my life. I was going back and forth playing in different bands, and Pharrell and Rob Walker, who was the third horseman in the Neptunes, asked me if I would take Kelis live and get a band for her. So I put together a band for Kelis to tour around the world for her first album. Then I was seeing Pharrell and them making records, doing all that, and I was like, “I want to get serious about this. Real serious about this.” My first record I was serious about making was India.Arie’s first album, Acoustic Soul. It got nominated for seven Grammys and an Album of the Year nomination. Soon after that, I worked on Seal’s album and I moved to LA. Then the rest is me, you, Dre, and Dave Matthews and everything that comes after. Trevor: Yo, that’s wild, man. I’ve known you all this time and didn’t know some of those early stories. And what I’m hearing is, yes, I know you went to church and played in church, but you had just as much classical influence from a young age. You may be one of the first guests I’ve had that doesn’t attribute their total influence just to coming out of church. You had classical music early, and I can hear it. Obviously you’re an accomplished pianist. There’s something to be said about having that knowledge and then bringing that to hip-hop. Everything you make is high-aptitude music. One of my favorite hip-hop beats of all time is what you played on “Get You Some” by Busta. Mark: Yeah, right. Trevor: Such a classical harmony and melody. It almost reminds me of a harpsichord part. So that’s one of the things I want to talk about. Today we have all the options — drag and drop, drum machines, all that kind of stuff — but with you, I noticed you lean on your keyboard playing and do a lot of stuff where it’s takes. How much of that is your workflow? Are you getting the drums and all the other stuff together and then trying to get a piano take? Or are you constantly chopping it up in the four-bar, eight-bar things? Mark: That changes for me all the time. It depends on what I’m bored with. There’ll be periods where I’m just bringing up drums, programming drums, or grabbing loops to play to, which is pretty fun, and finding things that I like in that. Then other times I’m doing it the opposite way, where I’m recording a couple of bars of music, playing the bars of music, and then putting the drums back to that. So it depends on what my workflow is. And when I get tired of that workflow, I’ll try something else that sparks me. Sometimes it’ll spark now — like I’m recording a vocal, I’ll sample the vocal, put the vocal back in, and start creating around the vocal. And when I’m working with different artists, it depends on their style as well. So like when India.Arie is coming in, I’m trying to find acoustic guitar loops. I’m trying to get her to play some acoustic guitar loops. Same with Dave Matthews. Sometimes I’m in the studio with him, I program drums, and we just start playing music. We just jam. And then it’s like, okay, we’re trying to find these four bars, we’re trying to find these eight bars. To me, that was my advantage for a minute in making hip-hop records or beats because of my background of learning hip-hop and understanding what those four bars need to do — what do those four bars need to do that make everybody go, “Ah.” There’s a record called “Games People Play.” It had this old piano playing. That record was so impactful for me when it came out. Being in the clubs, being a kid, going to the skate park, being in the park — those records were so impactful for what was being accomplished in that four-bar group. So I’m always looking for that. And I feel like for me with Dre, “Get You Some” is the highest level of us coming together where it’s that beat, and then we get those four bars that are just like, “Ah.” That’s what we looking for. Trevor: Yeah, the joint you’re talking about, that’s the one they used for “Nobody Beats the Biz,” right? That piano sample joint. Mark: Exactly. I remember when that joint first came out, it was just like, “Oh my God.” Same when they came out with the loop from the song “Freedom,” with that trumpet part. That was like the main record of the neighborhood. Anybody who had a radio just played those. Essentially that’s what the DJs were doing at that time — trying to find that break and keep looping it back and forth to keep that impact. We started to move away from the song and just get to the loop and the break, and that became the foundation of what became essentially the hip-hop that we know today. Trevor: That’s amazing. And you’ve done so many different genres, and now you’re saying you sometimes use some of that methodology from hip-hop when you’re making other types of music. That takes me to my next question, which is you’re also a very accomplished composer. Congratulations on the Critics’ Choice Award for the amazing documentary The Alabama Solution. I watched that not knowing that you scored it — what a gripping documentary. So when you’re composing, how do you switch from your mindset of making a record and trying to capture emotion in those four bars to mirroring the emotion that’s on the screen? Mark: Scoring is a totally different mindset from making records and beats because you’re trying to find your way to what is most suitable for the scene. Sometimes when you’re making a record, you want to take over everybody’s attention. That’s the goal: how do you make everybody stop and say, “Yo, what is that?” The idea of scoring is how do you enhance the scene itself? So the performer becomes the actors, and the scene becomes the main emphasis. Sometimes it requires you to slam into it. Action sequences — when I’m scoring Power, everything’s gotta be big. But in the case of a film like The Alabama Solution, now you’ve got to figure out how to accentuate what’s going on without getting in the way and without leading the viewer around. The subject matter is really heavy. We’re inside of this prison. We’re seeing it from the perspectives of the people who are incarcerated, and we’re saying, “Oh wow, this is slavery.” If you don’t conform to the slavery, you can be murdered. So the instinct of a musician is to start creating these heavy, horrific sounds to accompany it. But then sometimes you find that the film is already a heavy watch, so now it’s going to be too heavy. So how do you find your way to sounds that keep the viewer engaged and also complement the story itself? That is instinctive. It’s something you kind of pick up after a while of scoring — how to ebb and flow with the character and how to find your voice. When I first talked to the director, Andrew Jarecki, we agreed that because of the subject matter, the score wasn’t going to lean into a traditional “people are incarcerated, so it has to sound bluesy, weeping and wailing” kind of sound. I said that would stereotype the film we were making. I told him: this film is an American film. This is an American problem about Americans. So my tone was to create an Americana landscape. When the film opens, it feels more like Aaron Copland than B.B. King. It feels more like an American tone to say these are human beings first. These are Americans. So overall, scoring is about finding ways to accentuate, interpret, and make the viewer connect with the scene as much as possible without leading them around with the notes. With a film like The Alabama Solution, it was often about being patient, staying out of the way, finding original sounds that complemented the characters. Sometimes different characters had different sounds. Sometimes when I leaned into what the response was to these problems, I leaned into a more comedic tone. Sometimes we’re talking with Governor Ivey or a state representative, and I thought that conversation was ridiculous — but I didn’t want to make it sound too laughy. It’s finding those tones, those sounds, and working closely with the director to make sure we’re complementing their vision. Trevor: That’s amazing. I’m going to go back and watch it again now with that in mind. One of the biggest testaments to what you just said is the fact that I didn’t off top know it was you, or know it was somebody who did hip-hop. We say this a lot when it’s songwriting: serve the song. But when it gets to movies, it’s serve the scene. It’s not about what you want — it’s about what the scene is telling you that it needs. Now, I read you’re working on a multimedia Cosmic Divinity project. Mark: Yes indeed. From The Roots, yes I am. Trevor: That sounds incredible. Sonically, what does Cosmic Divinity sound like? Mark: We just formed a new company — an immersive company called Spectacular Arts. What we’re creating is musical presentations and visual presentations that service domes and immersive outlets and planetariums. We have two projects slated. The second project started a couple of years ago when me and Black Thought started working on an album. The question we were asking was: when you look to Western society or sometimes Hollywood, Western culture associates most things that are dark with evil. Darkness and evil are treated as the same thing, which we know is ridiculous. We’re born in darkness, and the universe itself is darkness. So we had conversations with physicists and talked about dark matter and dark energy being 95 percent of the universe. If you talk to a theologian, the closest thing that they would know to be a description of God biblically would be something closer to dark energy and dark matter, which is more vast in the universe than any other thing. So it was like: how do we convey these ideas also to break the cycle or the idea that darkness is evil, darkness is bad? And metaphorically, if people thought darkness was evil and darkness was bad, what does that mean to people who have darker skin? Is that automatically or internally perceived to be bad or evil? So it’s challenging those concepts in a sense of our darkness and our Blackness being connected to a cosmic divinity. Our project is coming together. We’ve cut maybe 12 or 13 songs, and we’re working on developing the visual component this fall. We want to do a deal or collaboration with IMAX theaters so that we can set it up there and also perform in them. Trevor: Crazy, man. That is so forward-thinking. We generally do associate everything positive with light and everything negative with dark, and that has been framed and forced on people. So let’s switch to another medium, which is Broadway. You and I both have a mutual friend we worked with in Alicia Keys, and you worked on so much of that music that became Hell’s Kitchen, which just won a Grammy. So again, congratulations on that. What’s it like seeing your records deconstructed, rearranged with the pit orchestra, and played for a theater audience? Mark: It was mind-blowing, Trav. I’m from New York. I grew up with my parents taking me to Broadway. Stephanie Mills went to my church, so she was the first superstar of The Wiz. The whole family would pack up together and go see this girl that we knew from church starring on Broadway. I had a lot of friends who were in The Lion King, so I went to see that quite a few times. So this was the first time I sat down in a Broadway theater and heard a piano riff — something we put together — for the opening theme song of the show. And it revisits throughout the play. It doesn’t just play once. It’s pretty much the theme sound of Hell’s Kitchen. Then we wrote another song — myself, Alicia, Swizz, and Harold Lilly — for “Pour It All.” It’s a huge showpiece moment in the play. So I went down with my mom and my sister and we saw Hell’s Kitchen. It was like we were back in the days going to Broadway shows again, but this time we were a part of it. The family name was on it. It was unbelievable. I can’t even put it into words. It was surreal. A full-circle moment for me. Trevor: That’s amazing, bro. It takes you back to a whole time in your life. I’ve got to get out there and check out the play too. But I’m big on technology, and I want to talk about this whole other concept I discovered when I was doing some research, which is the Big Ocean project. So you worked with the first hearing-impaired K-pop group. Is that correct? Mark: Yep, that is it. The company wrote me. I have a friend named Brian Shum, who’s like a military hero. He does a lot of the advising when they do military reenactments for film. He’s Korean, and he put me on the phone with them. They said, “Look, we have this group and we have this technology and we want to change the world. We want to see if we can make this hearing-impaired group a K-pop sensation.” And it sounded like, “Whoa — how are you going to do that?” And they said, “We’re going to use some AI to help translate the voice, and we’re going to use every bit of technology that we can.” For the dance numbers, they use body sensors and light. They wanted me to be involved in this historical moment of, can we make this happen? They showed me videos and things they were working on that were outstanding. Sometimes when I’m going to work, it’s not just to make a living. It’s important to make great music, but I’d also like to be important. What are the important things I could work on that would be impactful for future generations? I saw this as a moment to be impactful. So I joined their tech team. They showed me everything they would do to work on it. We worked on the song. I worked on the lyrics so they could fit under certain guidelines and make it work phonetically. We put together this project, and it wound up being a Top 10 K-pop project. It’s a very historical moment in the future of diversity and inclusion. It’s the idea that people who are hearing-impaired can get out there and sing, dance, perform, and blow people’s minds, which is what the group does. They’re outstanding to see live. I recommend anybody go online and check out their videos and see what technology is capable of when used in a beautiful and humanistic way. Trevor: That’s unbelievable, man. I’m definitely going to check that out myself because that’s so cutting-edge. Real quick, if you’re new here, welcome to The TrevBeats Show. Make sure you subscribe if you want to stick around, and for the regulars, if you ever feel compelled to throw some extra support our way, check out the membership options next to the subscribe button. It’s strictly for those who want to help us do more, but your viewership is supporting us. Now back to the show. And staying in that — wait, wait, you hear that? Oh, it’s the big elephant in the room: AI. We’ve got to talk about the big elephant in the room, man. I’m always interested in people’s take. You’ve done so many things that are pushing the line with immersive work and technology. With all the tools that you already have — all you need is a piano, man — what is your take on AI as a tool in music? Do you believe it’s something you’re going to be using moving forward? Do you use it now? Mark: This conversation starts for me with Napster. When Napster first came out, I was infuriated. To me, I’m just a producer saying, “Why are they giving our records away?” We’re going to the studio, spending all this money, committing our time and our craft to this art form, and then here comes this guy with a program and people are just giving it away. So I tried to put together a movement of people to stop Napster. I talked to people, wrote letters to Congress. In the last panel that I had — which was supposed to be like 500 musicians showing up — it was about four people there and my lawyer. Then the lawyer says to me, “Mark, I’m going to tell you something about technology. Technology is like a steamroller. Either you’re driving it or it’s going to roll you over.” That stuck with me for the rest of my life. I see AI as just another technology that you have to learn. You have to be a part of it. I tell my students at USC: you don’t have to use it, but you at least have to be aware of it, because now a 14-year-old songwriter, that’s the first door they’re going to open. They’re not going to open up Logic first. They’re not going to open Pro Tools first. That’s going to be their first door. And as technology advances, by the time they’re 21 or 22, the systems of technology for music are going to be geared toward the people who started to use that at 14. So if you don’t start using it, in five years it’s going to be like saying, “I don’t want to use Pro Tools. I’m going to stay on tape.” Five years later, you’re behind. So for me, I see it as another program, another technology, and I’m not really upset about it. They’ve been taking our keyboard loops and drum loops for so long. How could I be upset now? I think people got upset when they started taking singers’ voices, but they’ve been taking everything musicians have done for a long time. So I definitely use it. I use it for ideas, to bounce ideas off of. If I want to hear what this track would sound like as reggae, or what this part would sound like as gospel, I learn from it. I don’t like to keep the masters from it because I feel like at some point that’s going to come into question. So if I get an idea, I go humanistically cut the project and cut the record. But I love it. I love the film work from it. These programs are phenomenal. They put the creative process in the hands of every human being, and I’m all for that. But I can’t make you a concert pianist. I can’t make you a legendary percussive genius like yourself. AI is not going to do that. They need you for that. They need me to be that. So in the future, these skills that we have will be even more appreciated. Younger generations won’t know how to do those things. All they know is drag and drop. But when it comes down to really doing it — sitting in a room with people — the thing that human beings feel, AI is not threatening that at all. Trevor: And even if that does happen, it’ll still be things that we’ve already played. The ability to pivot on the spot — that’s what makes humans humans, right? Mark: Exactly. And if you’re dope before AI, you’ll be dope after AI. You’re just going to use these tools to help. Just like we used DAWs. We used Pro Tools, Logic, and all these softwares, and it put those tools in your house. Anybody who had those tools had the same advantages of a record-company-based artist. Now in some ways, do I miss the gatekeeping? In some ways I do, because I miss certain quality records being able to be made instead of 100,000 records a day being uploaded to Spotify. I miss the curating process of high-level talent that got us to the Marvin Gayes, the Stevie Wonders, the Earth, Wind & Fires. But I also appreciate that every individual now has the capability to develop and create their ideas and present their ideas. AI is just taking that to another level. The quality of songwriting is still what it is. Just because somebody has that program doesn’t mean they can write a good song or understand song structure. I think 10 years from now, the skills that we have will be cherished. People will say, “Can someone please come and play an instrument?” What people are missing in this is that music lessons are a cheat code. Music lessons — the training, the discipline, the practice, the focus, the patience — that process of growth, we’re going to miss that in the future. There’ll be a time when people will say, “Please come down and show us how to do this. Show us the value of it. Show the youth.” Trevor: Yeah. And the correlation is that the records became a higher level of output because things that weren’t good never got that far. When you had to spend that much on a record, you had to be a little more prepared and a little more focused. Right now we’re seeing a lot of things that would usually be ideas getting flushed out and sold as records. Sonically, MP3s happened, so the sonic part of music went down. Now you’re seeing a huge pushback for vinyl. People are starving for those old experiences that used to be the norm. So I believe what you’re saying makes a lot of sense. The skill sets of people who actually worked on their craft are going to become more valuable. So let’s talk about the future and the present. You’re now professor. How’s that been? And what was the journey to going to USC? Mark: Jason King, the dean of the music school at Thornton, came to me and said, “Mark, I really want you to do this.” At that time I’m thinking, man, I’m in Studio City and we’re talking about going to USC. I couldn’t do it. Then he kept shrinking it down and said, “If you could just come once a week.” I still wasn’t all for it. Then I’m getting ready to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to see Dave Matthews Band. I got on a flight at the last minute, and Jason King gets on the flight and sits right across from me. Then I get to the venue and he’s sitting across from me there. I see him at dinner. I’m like, “It’s too serendipitous.” If God is telling me to do something, I’ve got to do it. So I signed up. I go once a week. I work with a pop class as they develop a song. They go from writing the song, showing us the chart, reviewing it, taking the students into the studio, recording the songs in groups, and then at the end of the semester all the songs are performed live in concert. It’s the life of a song being born, from ideation to performance on stage. It has wound up being one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life. The talent level is so high — the ability to sing, write, produce, and create beautiful sounding recordings right out of the laptop. I just wish when I was in school that I had those opportunities. Trevor: That’s beautiful, man. USC is one of the hotspots to be now, especially if you’re really trying to get in the industry, because you’ve got masters there. It’s one of the best film schools in the country, one of the best music schools in the country. The future is being born there. But Mark, we can sit here and talk forever. We’ve got to talk about Relapse. If you don’t know, Mark and I were basically sequestered with Dre in a freezing Detroit back around 2009-ish, and we did an album called Relapse with Mr. Marshall Mathers. That was one of the funnest times, man. We were making so many records. One that stands out for me is “Bagpipes from Baghdad.” I’m not a keyboard player, so I only have a few records that really made any statement where I played keyboards. One is “Get Your Walk On” by Xzibit and the other one is “Bagpipes from Baghdad.” I had a Roland keyboard at the time and it had this bagpipe sound. I thought it would be interesting to play a Middle Eastern melody with a bagpipe sound, and that became the theme of the record. Then on the intro I was like, “Mark, I need you. You gotta bless me on this.” So Mark came and killed the intro, and then we made this record. The whole album — “Crack a Bottle,” “We Made You,” same song and day — so many records, man. But we do have the one story in Florida, in Orlando, when Marshall came in the room and said, “Y’all gotta hear this.” Mark: We went to his room. We had our room making beats in there. What people should know about Marshall is that he thinks the most bizarre things are hilarious. He might say something and everybody’s like, “Oh my God, why did he say that?” But he thinks it’s the funniest thing ever said. So we’re in one room making beats and then he says, “Come over to the room. I want y’all to check something out.” We walk in the room — me, you, and Mike. He’s looking at our faces the whole time to see how we’re going to respond. Then he puts on the record: “I was born with a dick in my brain…” and we’re all looking at each other like, “Oh my God.” That was “Insane.” It was so outrageous. I’ll never forget how he was looking in our faces, because he wanted to see how much we were going to respond to the most outrageous hip-hop we’d ever heard in our lives. That was a tricky one for me because when we first made Relapse, a reporter pulled me to the side and was like, “You got the new album.” To me, the album was one of the most incredible pieces of artwork I had ever made, but I knew it was challenging because of the lyrics. I said the best thing I could say is it’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” of hip-hop. It’s Edgar Allan Poe on wax. When the record dropped, some of the fans were like, “We don’t like the voices.” He had made some voice sounds. I even felt worse about the accents because at the time there was a Jamaican cat coming around and he’d always say, “A little bit of the ganja.” I thought maybe the accents were Marshall playing with that Jamaican thing, and I took responsibility for that. And then somewhere in the middle of the recording, Proof’s son passed away. There was a moment where we had to hold everything together until Dre was physically and emotionally able to come back. It took a lot of responsibility. That’s how I feel about records — it’s my responsibility to push the artist to the next level. Sometimes that happens, like with Alicia Keys’ As I Am. Sometimes it doesn’t happen in the way you hoped. I felt like Relapse didn’t take him past where he had already been. I take those moments heavy because I really want to push the artist. But this is why I tell people to keep going and keep creating. Ten years later, a whole cult following formed around Relapse. Now there are all these people who believe that’s in his top three albums. It just took that much time for the culture to form around it. Now that album is considered one of his classics. There was another song we made called “Big Weenie.” When I made that, I was like, “I don’t know, man. I’m not sure.” Then one day my niece sent me something from TikTok and they had “Big Weenie” up on TikTok, and now it’s this huge record for the next generation. Who would have known when we made it? So just keep going. Sometimes you make records that break the rules. Sometimes you make records that upset people. Sometimes you make records that feel like they didn’t do anything. Keep making more records. Keep trying more things. Sometimes people are going to have to catch up to what you did. Trevor: That’s real. I just got hit the other day for a very new artist that’s taking a beat I wrote like seven years ago. There are records that came out that I wrote 15 years earlier. You just don’t know until it’s out. Especially now, with AI, you can realize ideas. That’s one of the greatest use cases for it. It’s older ideas getting new energy. I’ll never forget this. My daughter is now 17. When she was born, we were working in Hawaii. I flew to Detroit, then home for the birth of my daughter. After she was born, I go back to my phone and I see a text message from the crew: “Yo, Trev, we got one on 50 called ‘I Get It In.’” Kid you not, on the drive from the hospital to go get some more clothes for myself and my wife, I heard “Crack a Bottle,” followed by “We Made You,” followed by “I Get It In” on the radio. That symbolized a period in life where your dreams are coming true. Divine timing. And my brother, we’ve shared a lot of those moments. So for that, I also thank you. Mark: Thank you for doing so great, man. Thank you. We have so many things in common, but bro, you have always been the same guy. I hold you in such high regard. I’m so happy to come on the show and speak with you. Here’s to us doing a whole bunch of more stuff. We never know what that’s going to look like, and I’m all for it, brother. Trevor: Thank you so much for having me, Trev. Mark: This was great, man. I love what you’re doing. I appreciate all that you do. Every environment that you’ve ever been in, you always elevate it to another level. That’s what we want from our creative partners — not only to do good, not only to do great, but to elevate the whole thing. So I appreciate your ability to do that as well. Trevor: I appreciate that, man. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Batson, my brother. I appreciate you, man, and we’ll have to do this again in the future for sure. Mark: Definitely, man. As things unfold with this new company, I’ll reach out to you so I can come back on and talk about it and see what we’ve done with this new technology to inspire people. Trevor: Looking forward to it, man. Thank you very much. Mark: Thanks, Trev. Trevor: Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. We really appreciate that. It helps us with the content moving forward. Also, we have our membership program, Backstage, with various tiers, and you can also join that now. Also, our store is connected to the site now, so if you’d like any merch — anything from the TrevBeats Store — check that out. And that helps the channel move forward as well. Until then, we out. Peace.