PROJECT PROFILE: CANYONLAND

https://henrycanyons.bandcamp.com

Henry Canyons: Canyonland

Release Date: June 16, 2015

Henry Canyons’ latest album Canyonland came out earlier this summer on Mello Music Group, and has been one of my favorite hip hop projects to come out this year. The entire album has a cohesive sound with a unique fusion of blues and jazz in the beats, soulful vocalist Zoe Rose harmonizing in 4 of the tracks, and Freddy Jay on the cuts for 2. Canyons has a commanding voice and smooth cadence that blends wonderfully with this style of instrumentals. His wordplay is articulately constructed at an advanced level, and often approached from a more poetically abstracted perspective.

Below is the bandcamp bio given for the project by Henry Canyons:

“Canyonland is not a mythic, unworldly place or a complete invention of my imagination. It is rather, the encapsulation of my experience that became my world five years ago; that of a half-French, Jewish Brooklynite transplanted in Los Angeles. The canyon is the point of the vista. From the top you see where you stand in respect to where you’ve come from, and where you’re going. Canyonland is my experience getting adapted to this environment, struggling to do so, finding my personal and professional spheres, further embracing my identity, my challenges and success with women, witnessing a completely different lifestyle with its various breeds of people, and the place where “dreams come true.” This is my journey through the desert in the hopes of finding the oasis.”

While Henry Canyons has a cohesive idea tying the project together he does not allow it to box him into his writing process. His lyrics are largely guided by the assembly of wordplay, which he uses to weave in and out of the overarching ideas more naturally than a strict cohesion to the concept might. As can be gathered by his bio above, the primary ideas presented are personal to Canyons and his perspective, including struggle and transcendence, music and hip hop, abstracted observations of contemporary culture, and relationship/escapades with women. These ideas are often intertwined and revisited from track to track.