RJD2 has been doing his thing for a while, and he just released his 10th studio album Dame Fortune. He’s one of the best at picking and utilizing samples, and that talent is on full display throughout the album’s 12 tracks.
Elements of rock, funk and soul find themselves intertwined with eclectic electronic sounds and live instrumentation, coming together into something that consistently evades categorization. Phone (of Little Brother) appears on track 8, but there are few overall features and only one true rap feature: Blueprint on track 10. Dame Fortune delves deeper into RJD2 (real name Ramble Jon Krohn)’s experimental side, as he draws heavily on the musical influence of his hometown of Philadelphia.
“Living in Philly provided a context for a lot of soul music that I had like,” Krohn explained to Rolling Stone. “I didn’t have any cultural context for this music – 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.” It’s great to hear a producer getting in touch with the songs they sample beyond whether or not they simply sound dope.
We’ve previously featured the album’s single “Peace of What.”
