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Thursday, May 31, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

HOPELESS

Rap releases of 
5/25 are varied

William Ryan Key talks 
life after Yellowcard, EP

MUSIC REVIEW

Stepping out as a solo artist can be 
daunting for a musician, especially 
for one who has spent over a decade 
being associated with a particular 
band. Luckily, Ryan Key is up to the 
task.
Key first gained a footing in the 
musical scene in the late ‘90s, as a 
member of rock and pop punk band 
Yellowcard. He spent 17 years as the 
band’s principal songwriter, lead 
singer and rhythm guitarist, pen-
ning such hits as “Ocean Avenue” 
and “Lights and Sounds.” The band 
released its final album, Yellowcard, 
in 2016, and now Key is branching 
out on his own as a solo artist.
“After Yellowcard, I was going to 
get into some songwriting and pro-
ducing of my own,” Key said in an 
interview with The Daily. “But then 
I had this opportunity arise to play 
guitar with New Found Glory…When 
they asked me if I’d play guitar, they 
also asked if I’d open the tours, just as 
myself.”
The need for songs to play on tour 
was part of what led to Key’s debut 
solo EP, released under his full name, 
William Ryan Key. Thirteen, out May 
25 from The Lone Tree Recordings, 
is a surprising departure from the 
rock Yellowcard fans may be familiar 
with. Each of the five tracks is acous-
tic, gentle and beautifully introspec-
tive, from the clipped and poetic 
“Vultures” — which may be the most 
familiar bridge from Yellowcard 
material into this new, folksy ter-
ritory — to the existential “Great 
Unknown.”
“Over the last year or so, I’ve been 
doing a lot of smaller acoustic shows 

… I wasn’t sure if that was what I 
wanted my own songs to sound like,” 
Key said. “It took a long time to get 
started, but once I started writing the 
songs, it really started coming more 
naturally.”
The new EP is full of folk influenc-
es, both in the melodic compositions 
and lyrics of the songs. Key cited a 
wide variety of artists as instrumen-
tal in helping to build his attraction to 
singer-songwriter music, including 
Ben Folds Five, Explosions in the Sky, 
Ryan Adams, Jason Isbell, Death Cab 
for Cutie and Bon Iver.
“I’m always looking to a lot of sing-
er-songwriters,” Key said. “When 

I picked up my guitar and started 
writing, that’s where that influence 
inspired me.”
While a diverse array of influences 
factored into Thirteen, it is still by 
all means its own project. The new 
EP is a unique and individual effort, 
thanks also to the fact that it was pro-
duced by The Lone Tree Recordings, 
Key’s own recording studio based in 
Tennessee.
“I produced the EP myself with 
my friend Arun Bali. He plays guitar 
in the band Saves the Day. We co-
produced it together. He just has this 
really cool, analog, indie rock vibe,” 
Key said. “He’s an amazing guitarist 
and really had a lot of influence on 
the atmospheric songs you hear on 
the record.”
The fact that the entire EP is self-

produced through The Lone Tree 
gave Key a lot of freedom to work 
with in developing his new sound.
“The nice thing about having your 
own record studio is that you can 
press ‘record’ whenever you want,” 
said Key, adding that he knew from 
the beginning that he would aim 
to have about five songs on the EP. 
“So once I had five ideas I was like, 
well, I’m not even going to write any 
more.”
This allowed more freedom for 
making these songs sound polished 
and complete. Working on his own 
without Yellowcard to bounce ideas 
off of, Key would often “let the music 
direct [him] melodically and lyri-
cally.”
“So the process is different from 
with Yellowcard, but there are a lot of 
similarities as well,” he said.
Yellowcard often released acous-
tic versions of their own music, 
including the albums When You’re 
Through Thinking, Say Yes and Ocean 
Avenue. Nevertheless, the tender feel 
of Thirteen is new territory, and Key 
admits to being apprehensive about 
the adventurous delve into his own 
direction.
“I was nervous because it’s so mel-
low. I mean, I don’t even use a guitar 
pick on any of the songs,” he said.
Reception to the music so far has 
been positive; the single “Vultures” 
was released recently to widespread 
popular approval. Key called the pub-
lic reaction to the new music “amaz-
ing,” adding his appreciation that “no 
one’s standing out in the crowd, yell-
ing at me to play Yellowcard songs.”

LAURA DZUBAY
Daily Arts Writer

On Friday, May 25, the hip hop 
world received two of the most 
highly anticipated albums of 2018: 
A$AP Rocky’s supposedly avant-
garde Testing and Pusha T’s entirely 
Kanye-produced DAYTONA.
While these projects would never 
be compared if it weren’t for their 
shared release date, as Rocky’s New 
York-swagging, 
subwoofer-rum-
bling sound and Push’s tradition-
ally bent, soul-leaning sound reside 
in completely different arenas of 
rap, it’s natural for fans (myself 
included) to have some analytical 
fun with such a big day in popular 
music. Personally, choosing just one 
of these albums to formally review 
would be a deviation from the natu-
ral thought processes of music fans 
and an ignorance to the drama and 
power of release dates, so I present 
a brief breakdown of the hip-hop 
happenings 
of May 25.
The most 
general 
distinction 
between 
these two projects is their respec-
tive degrees of experimentation. 
Pusha T, who rose to relevance 
as half of the mid-2000s rap duo, 
Clipse, largely remains in the vein of 
standard hip hop on DAYTONA — 
he drops bars about cocaine and dis-
ses Drake for ghostwriting through 
classic rap flow and the bread-and-
butter format of a few verses and 
choruses that both old and young 
heads can enjoy. The content is safe, 
and with crisp, undeniably Kanye 
beats, the album gives fans a com-
fortable listen, especially with a 
digestible runtime of twenty-one 
minutes.
Conversely, as the name indi-

cates, Testing strays from the 
traditional, and Rocky made this 
artistic experimentation known 
during the album’s rollout. Empha-
sizing his desire as an artist to push 
sonic boundaries, Rocky claimed 
his third studio album delivers 
sounds he’s never heard and might 
not be fully appreciated until three 
or four years 
post-release. 
These state-
ments 
scream 
Yeezus, 
but 
Testing 
is 
surprisingly palatable today; Rocky 
certainly plays with futuristic 
weirdness. “Distorted Records” 
opens the album with blaringly dig-
itized bass, and nearly every track 
is filled with psychedelic glitches 
and pitch-manipulation, but the 
laid-back flow and pompous lyrics 
characteristic of the Harlem rap-
per still manage to cut through the 
noise. Listeners can even hear an 
unprecedentedly auto-tuned Flacko 
on “Fukk Sleep” and “Buck Shots.”
Essentially, DAYTONA vs. Test-
ing is a question of the role of art-
ists in general: Should musicians 
deliver what’s expected for the sake 
of immediate reception, or should 
they strive to dodge expectations 
and risk temporary discomfort to 
slowly evolve their artistry and 
the artistic field as a whole? Pusha 
T might have delivered the more 
technically sound project by hip-
hop standards, but Rocky deliv-
ered a true project. With that said, 
as aforementioned, DAYTONA vs. 
Testing is also ridiculous. If one of 
these albums was released a month 
later, this article wouldn’t exist — 
it’s purely a coincidence of time. So 
instead, let’s just revel in the fact 
that on May 25, we just got to enjoy 
some good hip-hop.

MIKE WATKINS
Daily Arts Writer

William Ryan 
Key

June 1 

Pontiac, Mi

MUSIC INTERVIEW

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Testing

RCA Records

A$AP Rocky

DAYTONA

GOOD Music 

Pusha-T

RCA

