Behind The Beat: Chase N. Cashe

Chase N. Cashe just turned 28 last week, but he’s already a veteran in the music business, a multitalented rapper and producer who was working with the likes of R. Kelly, Yung Joc, and G-Unit well before he had his first legal drink.

Though he is equal parts rapper and producer — “Chase the rapper is my life and Chase the producer is my job” — this article will place the lens on his production.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Chase has been making beats since he was 13 years old. “I knew I wanted to be a producer when I first saw the N.E.R.D. Lap Dance video,” he said. “I was like, "I wanna be that guy, the dude on the bike rapping. And I heard he makes the beats too?"

Though he hasn't quite attained household name status, Chase is without a doubt one of the most prolific artists in all of hip hop. In the past year alone he has put out five projects, and he has at least as many planned for release in the near future.

He came by HNHH offices last month, dressed in an Atlanta Braves jersey with a toothpick dangling out the side of his mouth. A laid-back, smooth, talkative, Chase bears similarities to Snoop Dogg, but with a slight Southern twang. We talked about his recent tape with Curren$y, his youngblood days coming up in Los Angeles, his production style, and what he’s got next on the docket.

Last month, Curren$y dropped a 7-track mixtape called Cathedral on which Chase N. Cashe produced every track.

Both products of New Orleans, Chase and Curren$y were put in touch by Jet Lifer and mutual friend Le$. They immediately got to churning out tracks, getting together in the studio and corresponding via email. “We both smoke a lot of weed,” said Chase, “how could the music go wrong?”

Though they just linked up for the first time at the beginning of this summer, Chase estimates they’ve already cut as many as 20 records. They were initially (and are still) working towards a collaborative project called Canal St. Confidential. “We were just making so much music and on a roll, and I guess he felt the time was right and it seemed like the time was right.” Chase had no idea the tape was coming — one day Curren$y simply “decided to wake up and drop it.”

On the tape’s penultimate track “Plug,” Chase throws Curren$y a changeup, a mafioso, sandpaper-ish, creeper of a beat. He repeatedly mentioned “Plug” in our interview, making it clear that this was the beat of which he was most proud. “I love Plug just because it’s so visual, it gives me like a Kill Bill feel.”

Chase said he aimed to blend spookier, G-funk influenced beats with the sort of nostalgic, soulful, string-based production that is squarely in Curren$y’s traditional wheelhouse. He gave “It’s Nothing 2 Us” as an example of the latter: “That’s me knowing that he likes to ride to music, and I like to ride to music,” he said. “I’m a car guy, man. People listen to music on their phone with earphones, I’m in the car, man. To me, that’s forever the test if something is hot.”

Getting his start and Surf Club

Already popping on MySpace, Chase hit the road for Los Angeles in 2006 at the tender age of 17. to get his music career off the ground. With the help of a mentor who taught him the ins and outs of the business “paperwork-wise,” he immediately started getting placed working with big names. The first two tracks he produced were the title track from R Kelly’s double-album Double Up and Yung Joc’s “Pak Man.”

Chase’s wunderkind-level success doesn’t mean that he wasn’t challenged on a consistent basis. “You know, when we was making beats at the house, it was almost like playing video games,” he explained. “And when you get in the studio, and you with a real engineer, and [you have] the pressure of knowing that someone else paid for the studio time, and you gotta come in here and produce, you gotta come in and pump out a fucking record."

He describes Los Angeles in the mid-aughts as one of the most exciting times of his life, when a bunch of “youngsters” were running around the city — Game, Cassie, Kendrick, YG, Ty Dolla Sign when he was still in Ty and Cory. “Schoolboy Q might have still been running around with Tyga at the time when I was first out there,” Chase said. It wasn’t long before he linked up with Hit-Boy to form the artist collective for which he is best known: Surf Club.

“Me and Hit-Boy were like the producer versions of Soulja Boy,” said Chase. “We were popping as fuck on MySpace. I was working with Sean Kingston… Hit-Boy had sent some beats to Sean Kingston, and I had heard ‘em, and I thought they was dope, and I reached out to him, and then we met up.” Just like that, Surf Club was born.

Over the next few years, Surf Club would go on to produce for a who’s who of rap and R&B stars - Eminem, Pussycat Dolls, Keri Hilson, Flo Rida, P. Diddy, Brandy, G-Unit, Lil Wayne… the list goes on. Weezy's "Drop the World" is possibly their best known track. Below is a great video in which they explain how they put the beat together.

Chase is nothing if not versatile. Like a musical chameleon, he makes a conscious effort to not impose his own musical will upon the artist, but rather to meet them in the middle, to give them a unique set of colors to paint with. He prides himself on his ability to tailor his production to artists' needs.

"As much as you want to get off these creative sounds and palettes, the job is for you to be there for the artist and create a palette that they can best express themselves on," he said. "It’s not my job as a producer to go in the studio and get Drake or Currency or Troy Ave to rap on my best beat, my favorite beat. It’s on me to find the music in their head. The melodies that they can’t play in their head, I gotta figure out a way to get them into the beat."

He attributes his versatility in large part to his upbringing in New Orleans, a small city with a rich musical tradition that spans and often blends genres as varied as blues, jazz, rock, funk, and rap. He explained:

"I think a lot of people have heard New Orleans music, but they don't necessarily know what moves us, what influences us to make the music that we make, that we listen to a Wu-Tang, that we listen to a Jay-Z, that we listen to a Snoop Dogg. And at the same time, we listen to music from our city, and then combine everything together, because New Orleans IS a melting pot. Gumbo."

Chase' naturally bred versatility is broadened further by his inclination towards sample-based production, which itself has been broadened in recent years by the advent of the internet as a source for potential samples. "I just love sampling," he said. "I love taking things that I didn’t know about and putting my own spin on it. I don’t care if it’s fucking Italian, Russian, polka, it could be anything."

He says he is most proud of his production work on songs like MGK's "La La La" and Iamsu's "Problems," where he and the rapper brought out best in each other, where he gave them something a little different than what they're used to while still tapping into the essence of what they're all about.

Chase produced every track on Green in Gold by Krondon of the legendary California underground crew Strong Army Steady. That dropped in August not long after Cathedral, but he still has much more planned for the rest of the 2015.

He's been working on putting the finishing touches on his rap album The Air Up There 2 ("I’m hoping to drop in October, around basketball season. Ball is life."), but for the most part he's been making moves on the production side. In addition to recently getting studio time in with Bizzy Crook, Troy Ave, Mac Millerand Fabolous, he's been putting together projects with Hit-Boy (!) and Dee Goodz, both of which he hopes to drop before the end of 2015. He has tracks on the upcoming Dreamville project and Le$ upcoming Steak and Shrimp 2. "God is great for Chase N Cashe beats right now," he said.

And when asked if we can still expect that second Curren$y collab project to drop sometime in the near future, Chase chuckled, removed his toothpick from his mouth, and yelled, "fucking right!"