Last year, we covered the transformation of the artist formerly known as Don Lifted into … himself. That would be multimedia Renaissance man Lawrence Matthews, of course, who soon followed through on that promised transformation in real time during his show at the Overton Park Shell last September. After a solitary delivery of songs from his Don Lifted trilogy, Matthews stepped offstage for a moment, only to reemerge with a rougher look and fellow rappers Idi x Teco flanking him in classic rap posse style. Don Lifted, the beloved emo-alt-hip-hop persona, was gone.
It left many of us wondering, “Where will this artist go next?” But it turns out he’d already gone there. All the while, parallel to his alter ego’s greater exposure. Matthews had been creating music emanating from his truer self. “I had been making a rap album at the same time with IMAKEMADBEATS,” he says of the time leading to Fat Possum’s release of Don Lifted’s 325i album. “So at the same time that I was asked to make 325i, I was already seven tracks deep into a rap album.”
No one’s heard those tracks with IMAKEMADBEATS, but Matthews’ latest work is very much a rap album and very much not Don Lifted. On May 18th, the world will hear “Green Grove (Our Loss),” the first release from his upcoming album Between Mortal Reach and Posthumous Grip. Kicking off with some classic soul strings, it dips into some very Don Lifted-esque atmospherics until a harder-hitting beat kicks in. Matthews’ new voice is one of grim determination, mixed with a new playfulness that might even make it scarier. “This blood, this soil, infused, this river/This money, this drink, devour your mental …”
And just then it cuts to some mid-song banter from an old record by Mississippi Fred McDowell. And that’s typical of the whole album. As Matthews explains, “My narrative mirrors the narrative of so many folks who have lived and died poor, fighting for scraps, even while their songs are known all across the world. I felt a kinship with them, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be that. So while I was signed to Fat Possum, I started to pull from their catalog for samples. Nearly every sample on this new album is from Hi Records, Fat Possum, or Big Legal Mess. And even though I’m not signed with Fat Possum now, we have a great relationship and they’re helping me take care of business. So this project, to me, was channeling those artists’ stories.”
Yet the spirit of the album is not celebratory. If the near-emo quality of the Don Lifted work captured both the alienation and the romanticism of youth, the newer work seems more obsessed with sex and death. It’s an approach he dubs Southern Gothic. “Outside of one Stylistics sample, every person sampled on the record has passed. There are four Syl Johnson samples on this album. He passed while we were making it,” Matthews explains. “And because I had Covid early in 2022, death was very prominent in my thinking. Most of the songs are about death — death and love and obsession. And, being from the South, violence. How much violence I’ve experienced in life, and how much violence is brewing in me, because of what I’ve experienced. Those elements of my life had no place in the music I made as Don Lifted. But with this project, I could express my anger and frustration more directly. I’m expressing the ways violence has come at me and comes out of me. Now, I’m leaning into that without shame.”
And yet he’s also leaning into it with considerable intention and thought, with a sense that this is larger than himself. “There’s also the story, these folks’ energy that I’m channeling, and what they have to say,” says Matthews. “In Memphis, in this geography, there’s a lot of dead Black and brown people under us, in this space that we create in, and I feel that. I feel that energy. And that can lead to something beautiful. I think this project is the most beautiful thing in the world, but it’s also scary. The South is all of that: sex and violence and beauty. It’s this cauldron of energy.”
