#MonthlyMonday Album Pick of the Month
This month’s local album pick is Vision Da Poet’s EP Reflections that was released June 20th on AudioMack.
“This is my first official project. I started off like dropping singles and trying to work on things, and life gets in the way of course. It’s actually kind of a last minute thing; the project was supposed to be bigger. It wasn’t supposed to be an EP. It was supposed to be an actual album called Plane Sight, but I changed the name of it to Reflections EP partly because I lost music trying to transfer files over to my hard drive and corrupted files in Logic,” says Vision.
Over a year in the making, this debut project is the product of Vision navigating life and opening up as an artist. He began writing while out of state training with the National Guard.
“We were in Louisiana not doing anything, and I ended up getting injured. I sliced my hand open. So I couldn’t really do anything but sit there on my phone and man the radio and play instrumentals. So that’s where a lot of it came from; I was going on deployment. I was doing a whole bunch of training, so it felt like it was going to be my last words,” says Vision.
The original idea behind the album Plane Sight was a bird’s eye view perspective of life and interacting with others. Vision discussed his experiences with coming into adulthood, taking accountability for his life, and stepping in other people’s shoes. As an album, Plane Sight was very close to being finished when the artist lost many of the files.
“I was sitting around and life is folding in on me, and I’m feeling really pressured about the project. If it’s one thing I’m gonna do I’m gonna drop this project, I’m tired of waiting on it. People need to hear something,” says Vision. “I first started off with ‘Faith Sessions’ which for me I connect that to Reflections because the first thing I say is like I need this session I’ve been bottling this up, and that’s the last song I actually made and finished about two weeks before I changed the name to Reflections. That just set the tone of it.”
Recording at his apartment and taking turns mixing songs with local rapper Jah, the EP came together quickly. The artist used the trials and tribulations of getting a project out to drive his music and get a solid base started using the resources he has, which includes a network of childhood friends.
Discussing the third song on the EP ‘Pace,’ Vision says, “That one was how we all came together. Vino had just came back down here from Chicago, and that’s the first song we were working on as a collective. We’d all been divided and split up for like 5 years, and we all knew each other through school. Adult life hit hard, but we all managed to meet up 5 years later and were like yo we’ve been doing this the wrong way. It’s about pace, and then that became the word.”
It’s clear that the struggles of life and coming into your own weighed heavy on the rapper’s mind while creating his debut music, but there’s also a heavy influence from his relationships. One of the most influential relationships for Vision was with his father.
“I lost my dad at a young age, when I was 9 years old. The music he listened to was like Outkast, Bone Thugs...he listened to T.I. to a lot of Nas. He was a music head. That’s where I get my influence from,” says Vision.
As a debut, the Reflections EP is a smooth start for the artist. Vision plans to put a big visual push behind this EP as he continues to polish his craft and prepare for an album drop in the future. For much of the process he’s faced so far, “reflection” has been a key word.
“What I want people to take away from the project is, we all have to reflect before we move forward and try to judge other people. A lot of the time, you see conflict and you see arguments and you see things go wrong because people don’t know themselves. So, it starts off with knowing yourself. Reflecting on yourself is the first part of seeing things from a broader point of view.”
Check out Reflections on AudioMack, and be sure to follow Vision Da Poet on Instagram and Facebook for updates!