Interview: Sa-Roc

One of the most talented MCs around, Sa-Roc has built a reputation over the past decade-plus as a reliable source of stunning lyrics and sonically rich albums. Her craftsmanship has attracted such collaborators as MF Doom, Black Thought, and Styles P, and yet there’s a sense that she’s just getting started.

Prior to embarking on a co-headling tour with none other than Rah Digga, the Atlanta-based hip-hop artist spoke with Asheville Stages about self-expression, being part of the Rhymesayers family, and why you don’t want to see her notebooks.

Edwin Arnaudin: What’s your history with Asheville?

Sa-Roc: I’ve actually been a couple of times. I remember driving there and I'm supposed to be focusing on the road, but I'm just transfixed by the beauty of the mountains and stuff. And I love the whole spiritual scene — going to the salt crystal caves and the hot springs and good vegan food. So, I love the town for that.

EA: I'm guessing maybe you've already been to Plant, which is my favorite restaurant in town.

Sa-Roc: So good.

EA: Yeah, it's a special treat.

So, y'all are going on tour in just a couple of days. Do you have any kind of pre-tour traditions before hitting the road?

Sa-Roc: I’m always scrambling to get ready. That's the tradition that will never change. [laughs] I'm a procrastinator, so packing and all that stuff always waits ’til the last minute. [laughs]

EA: [laughs] Cool. Well, speaking of Asheville, I'm actually seeing your buddies Slug and Ant [of Atmosphere] tonight at The Orange Peel and got to have a really good interview with with Slug a couple of weeks ago. It’s kind of fun to have a couple of Rhymesayers interviews so close together. How did you get connected with them and the Rhymesayers family in general?

Sa-Roc: They reached out to me. One of their guys who has been with the label for years and years and years, he's an avid music head. He’s like an encyclopedia when it comes to artists and lyrics and when records came out — the year and the date and all this stuff.

So he luckily came across some of my music and apparently he would play it in the office. And then he caught the attention of the label head of Rhymesayers and they invited me out to play at Soundset, the really big festival they had every year [in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area]. And I think that was them kind of courting me to see like how I perform and the response and all that. And then after that, we started being in talks to work on a project together.

EA: What's the personal significance of being part of the Rhymesayers family?

Sa-Roc: I think it's dope because it's very much in alignment with how we approach music and creating music — just being very authentic in the process and not having the pressure to just put out a project. Of course, there's expectations that projects are finished and all that, but just really focusing on the artist, finding the best way to showcase their voice and what they're feeling and all that.

That artistic freedom is really, really important to me. And that's what I had before I partnered with them. And the fact that joining them, I was able to keep that same freedom and then be on the label with other artists that I really admired their work. And everybody is giving something different. This eclectic mix of point of views and stuff, that's really dope to me.

EA: And looking back, what are some opportunities that have come up by being on the label that maybe wouldn't have happened otherwise?

Sa-Roc: Soundset — that was my first huge festival that I'd ever done. And then having the opportunity to play that several times was really, really dope because it expanded my stage performance and repertoire because it's a totally different thing performing in a club, which is more intimate and you get to connect with people in a different way, than performing on a large stage like this. You have to be a bit more expressive. Your scope has to be larger and there's certain songs you would do for a big, huge show like that. So it allowed me to work that into my skillset. And it was just cool to experience that and be on the bill with so many dope artists.

But I think in general, just the exposure, the growth of the platform. We've always consistently gone on tour when it was just myself and Soul Messiah, who's my DJ and producer, but it's always been kind of spot dates and stuff. But the ability to actually get a taste of the actual tour life where we're doing night after night, and sometimes we're leaving out at five o'clock in the morning— that kind of thing. It really, really helps to develop you and season you as an artist. But the exposure has allowed me to get heard by so many more listeners and just expand the reach.

EA: They've just got such a good reputation, too, that when they keep adding talented folks like yourself and Soul Messiah…to me as a fan, it shows that they're paying attention. They’re really keeping their finger on the pulse of quality lyricists and producers, so it just grows their tradition, too, which I think is really awesome.

Sa-Roc: Absolutely. It's completely on-brand.

And then another huge opportunity that I would be remiss to not mention was having the opportunity to collab with Doom before he passed — him being a label-mate before he passed. They're still releasing music on the behalf of his estate and his family. But having that opportunity — I don't think that I will be able to…I mean, I know that I wouldn't have been able to be able to have something as legendary as that. I don't even know that I would have been on his radar had the head of the label not shared my music with him. And so that goes down in my book as one of the dopest I was able to secure by being on the label. But I just have so much love for them as a team and everything.

Photo by Beth Saravo

EA: It's great to hear from this side that it seems so welcoming and loving on the inside as it does from the outside.

So, whenever I interview MCs, I'm always interested in their writing process: do they keep a notebook? Is it memos on the phone? Do you write to a beat or do you pick that later? So, yeah, what's your general approach and how has that evolved over the years?

Sa-Roc: I feel like it's all of the above. I have notebooks that I've transitioned to since I used to write on my phone. Well, I started off with notebooks and then I went to my phone and then transitioned back to notebooks because I wanted to go back to the source — the original way that the MCs used to write on actual paper, and the bards and writers and literary scholars. They wrote on paper, so I wanted to get back to that.

So, I've transitioned since back to paper, but I typically start with a beat first and let the beat kind of guide me in terms of emotion and just what it evokes in terms of bringing out certain parts of my voice. The timbre of my voice will change depending on what the beat sounds like.

But when I first started, Soul Messiah, who I've worked with exclusively since the beginning, he would be like, “OK, you have write and then memorize all your verses before you get into the booth. That's how we're going to record.” That's how they did back in the day. You don't read from a piece of paper because you want to get the inflections correct. You don't want it to sound like you're reading something. So, that's how I used to do when I first started. But then I was like, “That's taking too long.” [laughs] That was too long of a process.

And when you're trying to just get something down, you're excited. You’ve just written something, you want to get it recorded. So, I didn't have time to wait the two-three days to memorize something. So now I just record on the fly. I'm usually recording at odd hours in the morning, in my pajamas. But I have to set the vibe for when I start to write, and oftentimes I have to cleanse my palate — my mental palate, if you will. I don't typically listen to music or other people's music before I start to write. I'll typically try and look at a documentary of someone who inspires me, maybe another writer, like a novelist or something of that sort. Or a visual artist or something like that, because I like to explore and pick the brains of a different kind of artistry, because ultimately that creativity comes from the same vein, but they're using it in a different way.

So, I do that. And then I light my little incense and just kind of create a vibe for the purest, unfettered creative flow that I can produce, and then just get to writing. And oftentimes there are starts and stops, and I'll be throwing away…I have tons of scribbles and scratch outs.

It's funny because somebody asked me, like, “Oh, would you share your notebook on a [Instagram] Live or whatever?” And I was like, “Y'all don't want to see my notebook. [laughs] If you saw my notebook, it would look like someone who's disturbed.” [laughs] I should have been a doctor — my handwriting is terrible. And there's tons of just inked-out pages and stuff like that. It's very disorganized but it works. It works for me.

EA: And thinking about your writing and recording, Sharecropper's Daughter was such a landmark album for you on lyrical, production, and guest verse levels. In the last couple of years, I'm curious what topics and issues, both personal and global, have really been at the forefront of your mind while you've been working on this next project?

Sa-Roc: Family is always at the forefront of my mind and always weighs pretty heavy on my heart. I’ve definitely had some familial challenges in the last few years that have transformed me both as a person and as a writer.

But now, there's so much happening, but I think that the thing that's really present in my mental space is the whole labor force thing and the strikes and the demand for better wages and living wages. And how we're living on this planet where the people who make the planet run are begging to be able to exist comfortably — to have homes and be able to feed themselves and feed their families while millionaires are very cavalierly dismissing these demands as privileges. So I think that that's something that we can all relate to and it's something that we need to discuss communally because it's affecting us all across the world — not just America, but everywhere. So that's pretty much at the forefront of my mind right now.

EA: Very nice. What other details you could share about your upcoming album at this point?

Sa-Roc: We're just working. We just released the first single off of the album, “Talk To Me Nice.” That came out July 27. And we're in the writing process. We have a good chunk of it done. But I think that this album, it's still going to have the reflective nature that is Sa-Roc. The whole point of me doing this music thing is to explore those parts of myself that I typically wouldn't feel comfortable revealing just through conversation. But through a sonic conversation, I'm much more comfortable sharing but still kind of like uncovering, because that's the process, right? That's the process of healing, and art is so healing for me.

But also, this album — I think is going to be more demanding. I think there's a sense of urgency with this album, artistically and personally, just because it's been so long time since we dropped Sharecropper’s Daughter [in October 2020]. But the tone, I think we'll have that sense of urgency because it's necessary. I feel that it's necessary for unique points of view like mine to emerge within this landscape of music.

And just for women within this musical genre to be heard. There’s so much out there that tells us to second guess ourselves. That tells us to conform. That tells us to do all these things that are contradictory to who we are as artists. So for me, I think it will strike that tone. This is necessary. You're going to hear it, whether it makes you uncomfortable or not. And yeah, talk to me nice.

EA: Yeah! Looking forward to it.

And then lastly, it's so cool that you're touring with Rah Digga for these dates. I’m curious if y'all have crossed paths before and what kind of impact she's had on you as an MC over the years.

Sa-Roc: We actually have crossed paths, once or twice. We have some mutual homies in Dallas that brought both of us out for a show and we shared a bill in Dallas. Very dope person. And I'm excited because our energies kind of match.

For me, it was always dope to see a woman within Flipmode Squad that held her own with Busta [Rhymes] and them and came really hard, but also it didn't feel like she was putting on. It just felt like that was her. Dope lyricist and her, along with Lauryn Hill and so many other dope women that have gone before her that weren't afraid to be very powerful in the way that they presented as artists have been super inspiring to me. There's a certain amount of cutesiness and almost a little bit of timidity that is encouraged in artist sometimes and female artists sometimes — and I don't feel like being cute. I want to be ferocious and I want to be angry when I need to be angry and I need to be powerful. And I need you to feel that you might get hurt when you come up here on this stage with me, but you can also get the other side of me.

This is the freedom to express the fullness and the dynamism of who I am as a person, and so she's always been representative of that to me. And so I'm so excited to be able to share the stage with her and we can both do that together, unapologetically. And it's going to be crazy and it's going to be energetic and it's going to be fun.

IF YOU GO

Who: Sa-Roc and Rah Digga
When: Saturday, Aug. 12, 9 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $20

(Photo by Idris Abdullah)