Donald was like, “you’re gonna have to record the song for Paper Boi.” He had me and our homies Kari Faux and Malik [bLAck pARty] each write a version of the song.



I rap, and I work with this dude named Chemist, who lives in Virginia. He’s my go-to producer and does a lot of my own music—he’s on my Rich Black American mixtape. I needed a beat for “Paper Boi,” so I started looking through beats on my computer. I came across a really old one from two to three years ago that I had from Chemist, and I was like, “this definitely sounds like an Atlanta rap beat.” It reminded me of Rocko’s “Umma Do Me,” which is funny because when I talked to [Chemist], he was like, “Yeah, the beat’s inspired by that.” I decided to use it for the song.



Now we’re in Atlanta getting ready to shoot the pilot, and Donald’s like, “I need that song,” so I head to Blue Room studios, where I normally go to record when I’m in Atlanta. In the script for the first pilot, Donald wrote Paper boi, paper boi, all about that paper boi, got a team to serve a fiend from Cali to Decatur, boi­­—something close to that. I used that and tweaked it a little and made it the hook. So I’m in the studio, I got the beat, I had thought of chords a little bit, and then, in about fifteen-twenty minutes I wrote the song. Two verses, everything.



I went in the booth and I rapped it, and my homies Swank and Keith [Dawson]– Keith engineers for Migos, Future, YFN Lucci– were like “man, this is kind of good.” I thought, This song works. There are some lines that might go over people’s heads, but it’s catchy.



My favorite part of the song is still the “paper clip” line: paper clip, paper clip, yeah I need a paper clip. Once I knew the song should feel like that, it was easy, like kind of filling in what it should be. Like I said, I’m already a rapper, I’m from Atlanta, so I get that Jeezy-type rap or that Gucci Mane rap where it’s more feeling than anything else.



I sent the finished song to Donald. He said it was hype enough, and he ended up picking my version of the song for the pilot.

I think everything worked perfectly because I already rapped, I already did music, and so the song was real. It strikes a balance, where the audience is like “this is good, but it doesn’t feel cheesy, and it doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard, either.” It’s because it was written by a person who’s a rapper who understands that it’s about having fun—this is a fun song.