Squadda B: He hit me up on Twitter and we DM’d about it for a minute. They were new producers at the time. They hit me saying how much they loved my stuff and they felt like we could vibe with them. I heard their stuff and it was like, “Yeah, we could work with this.” We went out there and they were just super loving — let us come record, smoke, all this shit.

We vibed with the sound super easy. All the stuff that y’all heard was in the first two sessions of us recording. “Rap Paradise,” “Perfect Skies,” a lot of that stuff came from our first time meeting. We did it super organic. We didn’t go through no email, we went to go meet up with them and record at their spot. That was like, a risk on our part. You know, Moms was like, “Don’t be meeting up with people off the internet.” But we did it and it was the shit.



They had [their sound] packaged already. It was so consistent. They had found their zone and it only grew. Any time we went over there to listen to a new batch of beats, it was consistently hard and it was original.



When we would go over there, we’d record but we’d also geek out to the latest music that was out too. That was the thing about James: We made music together, but we were fans of music first. A lot of times we’d just be in there, smoking and joking, watching music videos, talking shit. That was what fueled a lot of the sessions. We’d record six songs, seven songs at a time, running through beats for like five hours and we’d wanna chill.



It’s crazy. Like we have shit going on and we want them to be a part of it. It’s the same thing when [A$AP] Yams passed. It was like, “Damn. So Yams not gon’ be able to hear the future of the music that he loved so much?” It’s the same shit with James. We gotta keep doing it for them and just know they were the people who gave a fuck. They were people that wanted the music to be a certain way, a certain quality, a certain freedom, a certain expression. James was one of them people. It’s sad to lose that. It’s sad to lose life period, but as far as music goes, we all took a loss.

We all wanted the music to be beautiful. We all searched for that, we all studied that, and put that over everything and anything. James didn’t have to make 3,000 beats. He was studying every day.



He was dedicated. First and foremost, he was loving and kind, but he was dedicated. It was right there on his face. He was about the shit, about the music. He was a dedicated musician. Those are the type of people I’m inspired by. He gave a fuck about music. A lot of people, I can’t say that they don’t, but I saw it instantly with James. That was one thing about hanging with him every day or talking with him every day: He gave a fuck about music. It wasn’t just music to him, it was everything.