“10 From 11” Song by Song - “ Ned the Red”

The second song on “10 From 11”, my new album on beats by DJ Moves, is a heater. (sorry).

I had a lot of fun on this one. I think I wrote it on day 3 or 4 during the 10 day writing and recording process for the album. I was doing a song each day, from scratch, and can remember having trouble thinking of something to write about. Listening to the beat just kept making me envision flames dancing. That imagery gave me a few options to run with, but I’ve already got a song about burning this whole shit down (haven’t released it, yet), so I didn’t want to retread.

I play DnD on a weekly basis. While the other rappers are out fucking yo bitch and skkrtting off in the foreign or whatever, I chill out and roll dice with a few good friends. We just finished a campaign where we dinged lvl 20, killed the Mad Mage, all that. No big deal. I’ve been into DnD for maybe 5 or 6 years now, after realizing it was the basis for all the digital RPG games I like.

One of the other guys who plays had told me I should write a song about the game a while back, and I’d explained that I hate joke raps where the main punchline boils down to “this isn’t the way a rapper typically looks/behaves”. There’s plenty of that out there, and it all gets a billion youtube hits, because people are quick to have a laugh at the extra over the top nerd kid who raps, or the granny who raps, or the guy who raps while wearing silly shit, or whatever other schtick they see and think “oh look, this isn’t my steriotype of a rapper, but they’re rapping! Its so zany!” Suffice it to say that I wasn’t going to just write about our weekly night of sitting around rolling dice (online digitally since COVID). I don’t want to play to the “haha his punchline was about cheezies and mountain dew instead of guns and Hennessy” crowd, at all. Plenty of people who don’t fit cliche “rapper” tropes make plenty of songs about their real lives, and I don’t want to add to the idea that doing so is inherently silly because they aren’t posing as gangsters to meet mainstream expectations. Many people overlook the broad range of Hip Hop that actually gets made because the most highly promoted names are typically embracing the glamour gangster image to some degree.

My views on typical Youtube joke rap aside, I do try to incorporate as much of my reality as I can into my music. My DnD character was a fire wizard named Ned the Red. I designed him to only really use fire spells, which isn’t the most powerful build a lvl 20 wizard could come out as, but I went that direction anyways, because a red fire wizard was a cliche I could get behind. The games easy enough without power gaming.

So, for this song, I got to thinking about how easy it would be to write generic battle rap type bars about how dope I am and how awful my opponents are, but from the perspective of my DnD wizard. Use a bunch of fire references, “roast mics”, ect ect. Earlier in my music making endeavors I’d often just write that type of stuff without a topic to tie it to, just battle raps for days, aimed at no one specifically. It’s a talent, sure, just not the most artistic one, in my opinion. Lots of guys have made careers off of doing nothing but those bars, yo mamma joking their way into battle rap league notoriety, and I’m happy for them and their success, it’s just not what I’m currently trying to do with my words.

Lately I’ve been making an effort to write lyrics that typically carry some message deeper than “I’m fucking sick and the other guys aren’t”. If you pay attention, a huge portion of Hip Hop boils down to that sentiment, and it can be pretty boring if it’s not being done in imaginative ways. It makes me think of a seminar I went to once where Touch, an veteran Edmontonian emcee, was talking about how being unique will often get you further than trying to mimic whats popular. He mentioned a song he’d wrote about Tribbles from Star Trek that got more attention than a lot of the less left-field stuff that he’d done. We’ve all heard the whole bit about fucking your bitch so many times that it was already long since played out when Jay Z mocked it on 444, year ago. It’s still said on most of the new singles I hear in one form or another. I get that people who are 17 years old (who have money to pay for music) haven’t maybe heard that type of trope beaten to death yet, so I can see how people continue to succeed with that type of retread, but meh, not for me, as a listener or as an artist.

The bars on this one came easily enough. I tried to use references to DnD that would only be noticed by other people who knew the game. Ideally, I thought no one would know this was a song about my DnD character, because we’re all so use to hearing rappers just brag about being dope or being “hot” or “flames” or “lit” ect ect. There are songs I could name where artists use fire references, its been done before and will be done again, I’m sure. I tried to do fire bars with hidden references to spell names or DnD rules, things like saying “any action you’re done. Touch me once and burst to flames like you scratched the sun”. DnD turns get one action each turn. It’s not that sneaky, but I enjoyed that that line works for people who do or don’t know that I’m referencing the Players Handbook. I also referenced some other nerd shit like “The Name of the Wind” when I talk about quoting Kvoth and focusing wind on someone. Just having fun making deep cut references.

The hook ties a bit more to my own personality, while still relating to Ned the Red. In game, a wizard isn’t intended to do much except deal a lot of damage to enemies. I talk about taking damage without noticing, being resilient enough to keep up the output while still feeling like I’m walking through a fire storm. I reference my tendency to be a bit hot under the collar and act without a lot of thought for my own well being. Those ideas resonate beyond the fire wizard trope, and add a third layer to the track. There are also some references that are much more specific to things that happened during the DnD campaign, but I won’t bore you with those details, those are just for the homies.

This is one of two songs on the album where I wanted to incorporate SFX into the background, and my dude Deez Waxx came through big with helping find some good whooshing fireball sounds and explosion noises to help thicken things up a bit. He worked overtime getting everything here balanced and timed properly, and I thank him for putting up with my being a bit picky during the mixing process.

I really like the end result of this track. If I had all the money in the world I’d pay someone to draw a cartoon video for it, and it would be epic. Maybe one day.

Hope you get more from hearing it after reading this. Thanks from taking the ride with me.

Stay Up.