This article previously appeared on Audiomack World.
Mavi has been waiting for the release of his new album Laughing so Hard, it Hurts since he wrapped his 2019 debut, Let The Sun Talk. Since that opus arrived, the North Carolina-bred MC has been through tragedy and triumph, trauma and success. By the time he had gotten deeply invested in his original sophomore effort Shango, Mavi had experienced so much change, the subject matter wasn’t honest with where he was at in his life.
Whereas Let The Sun Talk and Shango were powerful statements on being Black in America, Mavi’s psyche was begging for something more personal, something more reflective of his growth as a man, partner, and person. Laughing so Hard, it Hurts, released October 14, is that reflection, a deeply intense and emotional ride wrapped in the warm sounds of a rap band lullaby.
“On this album, it’s man versus man, me in the mirror, and I always want to make it pretty enough to keep people dancing and bring certain people to the dance,” Mavi explains to Audiomack World. “Certain people don’t care what you’re saying, for real. They deserve good music as much as the people who do, in my eyes.”
Photo Credit: Wyeth Collins
Laughing is joyful and celebratory, but the words pierce through these moments of happiness to reveal a person reckoning. It’s a masterful piece of artwork that uses complexity, not for its own sake but to reveal something fundamentally true about its creator. Mavi could have folded under the pressure of his personal life, but he stepped back from his work as an artist to prioritize his commitment to the people he loves. Now, he’s clear-eyed and more motivated than ever to keep showing the rap world why he’s an essential voice.
On dropping after four years… I’m very afraid to drop the new record, but I was raised in a household where what you are scared of don’t matter. My daddy was like a push-you-in-the-pool, shut-up-that-crying type of guy. I internalized that a lot. Sometimes, I don’t know if this is a gift or trauma, but shit I be scared of, I approach it more. My fans might hate it, which is what makes me nervous.
On shelving Shango… It broke my fucking heart, man. But it is my artist development process. In this job, as much as it is about what you want, you got to be open to changing what you want. I’m blessed that I don’t have to be constantly creating. I feel like my last album stuck and more than creating pressure to follow it up super fast, it was more pressure to create something else that stuck.
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On how long it took to record his new album… I recorded all of the lead vocals in 10 days or two weeks, and then came back to add live instrumentation and ad-libs shortly after. It was all in LA, so I was moving across the country, and the sessions were patchwork. It took a month to take it from reference tracks to a playable album.
Photo Credit: Wyeth Collins
On mourning… I was just going through some real urgent shit personally, to where I was no longer in a position to mourn the album. Shango, I had to mourn stuff that wasn’t this personal—it was only music. I had to process that grief quickly and be an effective man for my family at the same time. They needed me. From that challenge, the first eight or 10 songs came out in about two days.
The record reflects the things I went through before the real meteor bad thing…Touring and going through shit with my girl and seeing how her perception of me changed over the course of us being a couple romantically. I had to force myself to be a man at the same time. It made for some real complicated self-reflection and I needed to write during that time.
On the fear of being personal… To be so personal, it definitely did scare me. I had a lot of fears about it. I have lingering fears about it now, but I feel like the ability to be so vulnerable on this record, to find the urgency behind me putting this one out, felt good. Especially after being so unsure of my next direction after not being able to put out the last one, it meant a lot to me.
On “lullaby music…” I call what I do lullaby music. That’d be my goal almost every time or, at least a few times per record. On Let the Sun, I was talking about more weighty social shit, like love and money, about paying the Black tax and shit like that, or how Black families are set back from a place of wealth, and [how] coming into money as a young Black person is complicated. I needed to make that album super pretty because it is super heavy thematically.
Photo Credit: Wyeth Collins
On Laughing so Hard, it Hurts’ philosophy… It’s like if you made a damn Arnold Palmer out of the pain of grief and the joy of the end of suffering.
By Will Schube for Audiomack
