Why Tree is the Robert Johnson of rap

An everyman-rapper in a way not every man can be

I love liner notes. There’s few things I enjoy more than prepare a cup of coffee, put on a great jazz album and then sit down with it all while perusing whatever additional context that slab of text on the back of the sleeve offers.

Of course, most art can very much be enjoyed for its own sake. But once you start to build up a personal relationship with any work, knowing more about the how and why of it all can only deepen how your bond with it. The fact that liner notes mostly seem to be a jazz thing and it has never transferred to rap classics has always felt like a lost opportunity to me, especially now that journalism on the genre is in its most dire state since, well, ever.

Suffice to say it has always been a dream job of mine to write liner notes for an album I love, so when the opportunity to was offered to pen them for the first ever vinyl release of Tree’s WE Grown NOW., my answer was a resounding yes.

It’s been out in the wild for a while now, and I can wholeheartedly say that it is a thing of true beauty. Major kudos to Smoove Business for the way the typography of the text echoes the album’s original artwork. What a great design decision.

Special thanks also goes out to an insomniac Tree, who talked very open-heartedly about the album’s creation on what was a pretty random Monday morning for me, and a very late Sunday night for him, until it eventually became different ends of a Monday morning for us both.

If you’re in The Netherlands, you can pick a copy at highly recommended record stores like Waaghals in Nijmegen, or Rush Hour in Amsterdam. The latter is also handling international distribution of the record, and you can order your own copy through them as well if you’re outside the lowlands.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with all of this and are still wondering what all the fuss is about, thanks for barreling through. You deserve a small part of the liner notes as a taster, which you can find by scrolling on.

“Can you trust me with your heart / Like you used to, babe?”

Somehow it sounds understated and rumbling at the same time, a voice like a bouquet of roses wrapped in sandpaper. Swaying through clouds of smoke, honed by a couple sips of whisky perhaps, but definitely spiced by a life well-lived, it is the kind of voice impossible not te be reeled in by. When he asks to be trusted with a heart, his tone exemplifies he’s already given his.

There is something interesting going on in the way Chicago rapper Tree vocalizes the words art and heart throughout “Like U Used 2”; they sound so similar their meaning starts to bleed into each other, rendering both terms almost interchangeable. “You’ve got my heart and / love is an art and / in love there is no wrong way”, he sings. You’ve got his art, which is imbued with the full weight of heart. Can he trust you not to step on it?

TREE’s WE Grown NOW is a gem. Get yours if you like great rap and well-packaged physical media. This was all done with the utmost care and respect by the entire team behind it and I’m very proud of to have been a small part of that. Here’s the product description through Rush Hour:

Since its digital release in 2019, WE Grown NOW. is praised as one of TREE’s finest recordings by both fans and critics, even inspiring a full length film of the same name. His raps - sometimes sung, mostly off the top - combine the harsh reality of growing up in the notorious Cabrini-green projects of Chicago with the joys of being a father, husband and just being alive. As Jaap van der Doelen writes in the album’s liner notes, this “fearlessly earnest way he shares glimpses into his life is a key part of what makes WE Grown NOW. such a timeless work. (…) Tree is an everyman-rapper in a way not every man can be, like a rapping Robert Johnson that managed to survive to middle age.” The production is steeped in rich and vintage soul music, complementing TREE’s voice, whilst still having a firm low-end presence. Six years after its release the album is finally coming to vinyl courtesy of Waaghals records. Limited to 300 copies on “all blue everything” blue vinyl, with restored and expended artwork and liner notes detailing the creation of the album.