Erick Sermon Credits Dr. Dre With Influencing Him To Stop Writing Down His Lyrics
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Erick Sermon has opened up about Dr. Dre’s impact on his approach to creating records, crediting the legendary producer with influencing him to stop writing his lyrics altogether.
In an interview with HipHopDX, the EPMD member recalled working with Dre in the studio, claiming to have created three records in one studio session.
“We go to Malibu,” Sermon said of the location where the recording took place. “As soon as I press play, we do one record. I press play again, we do two records. I press play again, we do three records — in one night. The guys said, ‘Erick, we’ve been here for eight years, we ain’t never seen that before. Nobody has done what you did today.’”
The Green-Eyed Bandit also marveled over Dre and his collaborators’ assembly-line like process to making music, as he would also work with Snoop Dogg and other songwriters during the session.
“I put another beat on and he calls Snoop over,” Sermon remembered. “Snoop been working on the records that I did. Then I come back and Dre is working on the record that he rapped on. So I said, ‘Yo, let me rap on that. Let me do your style how you rhyme and how you put your records together.’”
However, when Sermon pulled out a pad to begin penning lyrics, he was informed that writing rhymes was not part of Dre and his songwriters’ workflow, with one writer telling him “We don’t do that here.”
According to Sermon, the experience would forever alter the manner in which he creates music, opting to come up with lyrics off the top of his head rather than writing them down.
“Dre would say the cadence and then we would all say a rhyme, and then if the rhyme sounds good, then we put that down,” he explained. “So there’s no writing; it’s just 16 bars of whatever your freestyle may be.”
See Erick Sermon’s interview with HipHopDX below.
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