GET FAMILIAR: Moose Got Tha Juice
Moose Got Tha Juice is a shapeshifter, a genre-hopping shaman dedicated to dancing on the pocket no matter where he finds it. If that all sounds like a little too much, you probably just haven’t checked out one of his projects yet. No surprise, then, he’s a lifelong student of music who loves every aspect of the game. We had a great conversation here, and it’s a perfect kickoff for the next season of the GET FAMILIAR series.
VTHH: What was your introduction to the Hella Fader family? Were you there from the start?
I’ve been apart of Hella Fader since the beginning, along with Juni, and Lewis (KISH4WN). My introduction to the group was when our friend Warren took Lewis and I down to the smoke shop Juni worked at. We would start going what seemed like weekly to kick it and spit some freestyles then slowly started to hangout outside of the shop. Juni would bless the gang with his amazing cooking while we would all chill, smoke and listen to beats with each other.
VTHH: Do you recall a specific point when a young Moose realized he wanted to spend his life making music?
I really realized it when I was about 10 years old because I recorded a happy birthday song for my dad at the Boys & Girls club. Seeing the joy it brought him gave me the confidence and courage to try and achieve that from more people. I’m very thankful for that because it opened my eyes to so much that I could achieve if I worked hard enough and stayed focused. When I started hearing feedback from the people I looked up to in the music scene I started to take myself even more serious.
Hearing that I’ve been improving and getting better keeps me going on top of other things, but the support from the fans and my close friends and family is what keeps me going because I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing this for everyone I love so I can show them w e all can achieve our dream it just takes patience and hard work.
VTHH: Your style is a wild diverse gumbo. What is your biggest influence that absolutely nobody would ever expect?
This is a hard one, but honestly I would have to say the two hands PierceThe Veil and Sleeping With Sirens. The two of them really inspired me to start writing and wanting to actually have a band. I didn’t think that could work out so it eventually let to me writing raps and freestyling with my friends. Now ten years later I’m here, and damn what a decade it’s been.
VTHH: You've always had top notch sound quality on your releases; that's one of the things that really distinguished the whole Hella Fader camp to me right off the bat. How involved do you get with the technical side of mixing and engineering your work?
To start I know I can speak for all of us when I say thank you we really appreciate that because we’ve worked very hard to get to where we are sound wise.
At the start we would send our songs in to Zach Crawford and he would mix and master our tracks. Over time we started to learn a bit on our own, Lewis and I would start to engineer for each other and Juni. Once that started there wasn’t really stopping us. We started pumping out a lot which made it hard to afford sending Zach every song we did so we started to really put in work to get it sounding well ourselves. I started to dive really heavy into the engineering aspect after learning I had a good ear for those little noises and really found a passion for it.
VTHH: Would you be interested in pursuing audio engineering as a career, or is that just a means to an end for you?
That actually is one of my main goals to be honest. I want to make a career of my songs but at the same time I would love to be the engineer people run to when they want a song done. I love making music wether it’s someone else’s song or my own, just the feeling of creating art and seeing it make people feel some type of happiness makes me feel great.
VTHH: I respect how cohesive your projects are. In recent years it seems like you've gotten really focused on delivering a full album experience, proper old school LPs. Was that because you were raised on albums, or is there a business strategy there, too?
I was raised with artists dropping full length albums as well as mixtape after mixtape. With that I wanted to capture a certain vibe or general concept to my projects, so I usually begin with the name of it and then try to build around that. I feel having full length projects increases the chances of someone liking at least one song (hopefully more). My goal is to try and have something for everybody, but still keeping the overall concept of the project the same.
When it comes to a business strategy, I really don’t know what I’m doing. I release music the way I watch the “bigger” artists release theirs, a couple singles then the whole project. Numbers don’t really bother me and aren’t the goal I’m just trying to inspire the youth and even the people older than me to know that anyone can do this if you practice, work hard and stay dedicated to the art and love of music.
VTHH: When System Overload dropped, I was extremely impressed with how mature and polished it was. But it also made me wonder what the road was like getting there: how long had you been doing the trial and error of home demos & experimental tracks before you reached that point?
Honestly it feels like forever, but I would say I was messing around for about a year before I found the sound I wanted on my own. To be real the whole System Overload project was written in a night back to back, one after another. Then I recorded them all 2 days later, so it was a little easier to capture and create the same vibe for every song.
It took a lot of time to get what I wanted out of my production. A lot of nights without interaction with my significant others so I really take my time seriously when I create music because there is NO time to be wasted in this short life.
VTHH: What was the process behind assembling More Than Moose? Were there a lot of songs that didn't make the cut, or were you focused on making music explicitly for that project?
The process was actually very fun. I was trying to keep a similar but unique vibe to each track and there were a few that got left out but it’s because they fit better with other songs so they’ll still see the light of day in time. I mainly wanted to show my range of genres and styles that I could pull off so people can fully understand I am more than Moose, I don’t consider myself a rapper because I’m an artists at heart, no matter the medium.
VTHH: How did your connection with Yung Breeze happen for that "Malibu" joint?
Oh man, my boyy. Facebook. It honestly was a blessing. He was doing a livestream where artists could submit songs to have played and an honest opinion/review to follow. He was really impressed with one of my other songs “Like Me”. He originally wanted to feature on that song since it was unreleased when I had sent it to him. I decided it wasn’t the one for him I knew we could do better. When I had finished recording Malibu I thought I had it finished as a solo song, but I’m so happy I was wrong. I again submitted this song to the livestream and he was blown away and the energy he gave back was what made me really think about it. He had asked me over the course of almost a year to keep being on it and I just had to make sure he really wanted to do it and not just off the hype of hearing it. We talked a bunch and when he sent his layers back I couldn’t stop messing with it and had it back to him in days. That really was the start of something great, now having met him and Sam Martin in person the work is never gonna stop.
VTHH: What are you cooking up for 2023 right now?
Currently I’m working on project titled, “Dying 4 Love”. Over the past 5 months I’ve been going through a lot of mixed emotions. With the loss of friends, relationships and my past self, I have been growing into a new version of myself that I couldn’t be happier about. It’ll have an R&B/soul vibe on top of the classic “Moose” sounding tracks where I try to express my emotions on these tracks in a way I haven’t yet before. You guys are really gonna feel me on this one.