Adam Feeney was born in Toronto long before the music industry’s microscope was placed on the Canadian city. By 13, skateboarding had turned him onto rap, and by 16 he was a DJ and obsessive record buyer. Before long, he bought an MPC and, like any nascent producer, began to learn the craft through imitation. “I started dissecting my favorite beats. Like, ‘What did Premier do here?’ ‘What did Dilla do here?’” he says.

Though Feeney says he had no intention to become a professional musician, he sent some of his early beats to Mo Jointz, a Toronto manager who then represented Feeney for short period of time. In 2008, Mo Jointz relayed Feeney’s music to G-Unit’s Lloyd Banks, and the budding producer had his first industry placement, to his own surprise. “I was like, ‘Oh shit, I might be able to make a career out of this.’ I was in my early twenties at the time, and getting paid $5,000 dollars to make a beat seemed like a really, really big deal,” he recalls. Though the song would take years to come out—it eventually appeared on the Raekwon-featuring “Sooner or Later” on Banks’ 2010 album Hunger for More 2—its initial sale earned him entry into the G-Unit circle, and soon he was making beats for 50 Cent. (Apparently 50 Cent also stocks a deep vault: the instrumental for his 2015 song “9 Shots” was a beat Frank Dukes made years prior.)

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It was working for 50 Cent that changed Feeney’s entire approach to production and, to use his word of choice during our interview, began a creative "evolution." Unsurprisingly, a sample was at the root. In the process of making the song that’d go on to become “Talking in Codes,” he initially sampled the soul-revivalists Menahan Street Band’s song “The Traitor.” He couldn’t clear it, but he befriended the bandleader Thomas Brenneck and joined some of Menahan’s sessions in Brooklyn. “At the time, I didn’t know how to utilize live instrumentation to sound the way I wanted it to,” says Feeney. “You can’t just plug your guitar in your computer and make it sound like an old record. Menahan records like it’s still 1968—everything is straight to tape. They didn’t have a computer, so I had to use my ears instead of looking at a screen.” He ended up co-producing two songs with Menahan on soul singer Charles Bradley’s 2013 album Victim of Love. But more importantly, Feeney says, “Menahan opened me up to a whole different mentality.”

After learning how to recreate the sounds of the 1960s and 1970s, he had a new strategy: to make something new sound like something old, so he could make it sound like something new all over again. He stopped trying to “just make beats,” but instead create loosely formed “musical ideas” that were performed by himself or Toronto musicians like River Tiber and BadBadNotGood—with whom he co-produced Ghostface Killah’s Sour Soul LP—original source material, essentially, that he’d use to develop into something full-fledged later.

“The Kingsway Library was a product of all these ideas,” Feeney says, opening his process to all. The project was also a response to the increasingly restrictive legal and economic climate he’d experienced clearing samples. “When I got my first few placements and got back my publishing splits, I saw what I had to pay to clear the sample and thought, ‘Someone is getting the better deal here,’” he explains. “I didn’t create Kingsway for financial gain, it was just the road I was going down. It happened to line up on the business side of things.”