deek’s burner 🦧 @DerekBase - Twitter Profile

Ultra 85 cover soon. No money changed hands. Though I’ve made most of @logic301 album art over the last decade, w the world of Luci I’ve built since, rather than another job, I proposed to him: an old world barter system. Art for art between artists of different mediums. This will be our last cover and in exchange, Logic will be taking off the rap hat and going full musical producer with grand instrumentation creating the musical score for my world and story of Luci. I have turned away every album cover and every project for the last few years to focus on Luci. If I was gonna return one last time, it needed to be a celebration of our friendship, acknowledgment of what he helped me begin, and an end to this story loop. This exchange felt like the perfect way to close it. Having been in the studio with him many times over the last decade I always would see him and 6ix in an absolute flowstate when lyrics were removed from the equation. He seemed most free there. Filterless, raw, primal. After so many years helping to create his visual world. I wanted to know what it would be like to see what he would create if stripped of “Logic” and helped me create the sonics of mine. So after listening to an early cut of Ultra 85 when he came to NYC, we had a very brutal conversation about saying goodbye to the things that hold us back. All the little stories we have told ourselves over the years. I have only heard an extremely early cut of the album, but what I hear is someone going through the very ugly, honest, and beautiful process of trying to get out of their own way and the prison of their own nostalgia. You can feel someone trying to breach their past, and the spiraled path treading similar ground and they learn what it means to not step in footprints they already left. The album as I heard it, is an arc through this process. One that is hard whether you are an artist alone in your room filled with ideas you don’t even know how to take the first steps towards or someone like him whose life has been marked with stacks of platinum records and sold out arena tours. The scales of this attempt goes infinitely up and rhyme with one another along the way. Our covers together were extremely formative for me. Not only did they help support me at various stages of my time as an artist, let me save, build, and connect to others through them — in the works I was able to worldbuild, see what it is to have his supporters comb through details, find out secrets and stories beyond the readily obvious, planting seeds for those who look closely, as his diehards know there is an an entire separate arc to The Incredible True Story saga purely on these interconnected album covers. Luci would not look the way it does without our time working together and through the deep friendship formed I wanted to close this loop together with a graceful handshake. I can’t wait for you to hear his music for the next chapters. It’s a crazy honor to have his absurd talent pointed this way. This is goodbye to a character for both of us. A hopeful goodbye to one form and a pursuit of another. Note: I say goodbye, not retirement, as we all know how much that sticks.

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