Cautious Clay Lays Out His Magic Formula for Songwriting | Squarespace Making It

Sometimes I just have a melody in my head, you know, and then I just sort of mess around with it and dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun, and it kind of just runs throughout, you know.

I want a vehicle classic, black boys wrapped in plastic. Yeah, stuntin' is a habit. Whatever you want, you could have it.

A lot of good songs will have memorable qualities in them. I don't feel like they necessarily have to be catchy, but I feel like it has to have an emotion to it that sticks with people. I usually have a bunch of notes of lyrics in my phone, and I'll just run through those ideas. And until I feel like something sticks. I feel like that's a big part of my writing process, is having some sort of cohesive element that ties everything together.

I wanna be a cult classic. Black boys wrapped in plastic. Guess nothing is a habit.

I spent quite a bit of time making beats and writing music, and I felt like it was always just the one thing that was the easiest thing for me to do and understand. I guess the breaking point for me was when I was randomly asked by email to work with these Korean rappers. I sort of just had a conversation with myself at one point where I was like, okay, I'm doing this real estate job that's paying me a decent amount of money, but it's not really fulfilling my urge to create that was very strong. At the same time, what am I gonna be able to do otherwise? Oh, she better catch me. Had a plan at that point already to put out some of my own music, and then I finally, when things started to take off, I just went off and quit. I'm trying to push the conversation around what it means to be an artist because I think people just need to have someone who they can kind of draw from, and I think that's really what it means for me.