RJD2 lived in Philly while recording his upcoming album, Dame Fortune, which is set for a March 25 release on his own Electrical Connections imprint. The sounds of that city, from hip-hop to soul, filtered through his sensibilities and ended up infiltrating the tracks.
“Living in Philly provided a context for a lot of soul music that I had liked,” he explained. “I didn’t have any cultural context for this music that I liked—it was just music that I had stumbled across as a beat making nerd. Philly was a place where there were enough people who had the same musical vocabulary that I did, which made the music more than something I had just discovered on my own.”
The album also includes contributions from guest vocalists like Son Little and Jordan Brown. The album’s first single, “Peace of What,” which you can hear below, offers up a mighty performance from brown, and was inspired by ’90s hip-hop crew Main Source’s “Peace Is Not the Word to Play.” The other piece of good news that goes along with the album’s impending release is the fact that RJD2 will spend a good chunk of the year touring in support of the record, so you’ll get a chance to catch some of these tracks coming to life right before your very eyes and ears.
Track listing:
- A Portal Inward
- The Roaming Hoard
- Peace of What (featuring Jordan Brown)
- The Sheboygan Left
- A New Theory
- We Come Alive (featuring Son Little)
- PF, Day One
- Saboteur (featuring Phonte Coleman)
- Your Nostalgic Heart and Lung
- Up In The Clouds (featuring Blueprint)
- Band of Matron Saints (featuring Josh Krajcik)
- Portals Outward