Just last month, CBC Music named Shad the second greatest Canadian rapper ever, falling right behind Maestro. It’s fitting, considering the godfather of Canadian rap recently took the younger rapper under his wing and gave him a little history lesson.
“Maestro drove me around and told me a lot of the music history of the time that I wouldn’t know about, back when he was starting off,” Shad says over the phone. “That was super cool, on a personal level and just as a fan. Even in Canada we don’t know some of the history of hip-hop and how far it goes back.”
It’s just one of the instances in the 30-year-old rapper’s career that has caught him by surprise.
“Pretty much anything I’ve done in my career so far has been like, wow, I didn’t expect that,” he says. “Working with k-os or hanging with Maestro, these weren’t things I wasn’t thinking were in the realms of possibilities when I first started out.”
He was even recently included alongside some of the biggest names in rap, such Nas, Common and Black Thought, on the J. Period mixtape Rage is Back.
“A lot of my heroes in music are on that thing,” he says, adding that his track, “Raw Freestyle” (which you can listen to at around the 53-minute mark below), set to a late '80s-style breakbeat, was “a lot of fun because it’s not what I usually do. I was channeling Big Daddy Kane and putting my own spin on it.”
As a Canadian rapper coming up in the early 2000s, “when there weren’t really a lot of rappers in Canada who had an audience across the country,” Shad’s career has been on a consistent upward trajectory, from his radio competition-funded 2005 debut, When This is Over, to his first breakthrough with 2007’s The Old Prince, through to 2010’s Juno Award-winning TSOL.
Shad’s lighthearted yet conscious style of rap, which usually includes more than its fair share of Cancon inside jokes, has always seemed to resonate with audiences (personal fave: “Between low-cut tops and teeth with gold caps, that new school look's more crazy than OCAD's”).
That would explain the anticipation for his upcoming album, Flying Colours, expected later this year.
“All the recording is done, it just has to get mixed, and that’s pretty much it,” he says. “I worked on it all fall and most of the summer and I’ve never had a better experience working on an album, so hopefully that will be felt.”
In a recent email to fans, Shad wrote that the album was “mainly inspired by kyle mooney, kanye west, kendrick lamar, eli stone, queen/spadina, grandview calvary baptist church, my friends, my family, 30 rock, we are the city, tolstoy, good weather, and the idea that trying is worth it even if you fail.”
Asked to elaborate on that last point, Shad says that “success and failure is one thing I wanted to dig into. At this point in my life I feel like my peers and I have become acquainted with both, and I wanted to explore how you can become true to that and carry these successes forward in a way that makes you better, not bitter…. I like that theme because there’s no easy answers, but there is a lot to explore. It’s something that is close to my heart and leaves a lot of room to write.”
While he’s still tight-lipped on producers and other rappers who will make an appearance on Flying Colours, saying he can’t confirm or deny anything except for the fact that he was working on a track with k-os —“I hope it makes it, I think it will” — Shad did give us some insight into where it will go sonically, describing it as a more fully realized The Old Prince.
“With The Old Prince, I took a few more risks, and it felt like that when I was making this one,” he says.
He adds that fans shouldn't expect a huge departure from his past material, adding that recording the album made him more so realize his own style.
“After working on this one I was like, I guess that’s my thing, that’s a thing that I do, but at the same time it’s different,” he says. “It’s not the same album again. I’m still interested in all of the same ideas and themes, and musically I have the same sensibilities, but hopefully it’s just better.”
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