#DaFiveFingerDiscount: Corina Corina – Run the Blues [Exclusive Preview]

This FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30, Corina Corina will be celebrating the release of her new project Run the Blues at Brix 581 in Oakland. In addition to a live performance by Corina herself, DJ HALO, Breathless aka Honey B, dubldragon and more will all be spinning sets. For more information, check out the Facebook event. Before y’all party this weekend, the Bay Area singer gave all of us Da 5 Finger Discount – a behind the scenes look at five new tracks from Run the Blues! Take some time to get to know the vocalist and hear how the new project came together.

I don’t do many party jams but this one is always really fun to perform. I wrote this and “Disappointment” over a year ago and have performed been performing them for close to two years now. When I was choosing Run the Jewels beats for the project and chose this one, it was a little challenging already having the “get it” vocals in the instrumental so I decided to build the theme of the song around them.

Being that I’m often the only woman on a tour, I definitely have my share of male rappers stepping to me on the road and I’m almost never interested. When I occasionally meet one who doesn’t conduct himself that way around me, I naturally find him the most intreguing. This song was inspired by a rapper who I’ve meet on various tours and have always had a great time with but he’s kept he mystique up enough that I still to this day don’t know if he was ever interested. I’ll never tell who he is But I’m glad I got a dope song out of it!

Because of the unconventional format of the instrumental, this song was challenging to arrange. I loved the beat and knew I wanted to write something really heavy to it so I was intent on making it work. I was in the middle of a breakup with someone who had moved on from me but whom I still had to see frequently. Although the song sounds sad (and it is) it had kind of a fucked up twist to it. “You’re mine…She thinks that you are hers but we all know that’s a lie” most  of the lyrical content is bits and pieces of conversations that we’d had over the years and writing this song was really cathartic for me.

Originally I was going to entirely cut out the outro after the break but I had wanted to add dj Halo to the project anyway so this seemed like the best place to put him. Instead of the guitar solo that many ballads have, I chose to have a dj solo and I love how it worked out.

I think some of the best songs are written organically and I honestly can’t even remember how I made the decision to talk throughout the song and keep it so simple. Stylistically, it’s one of my quirkier songs but somehow just works. This was the last song I wrote for the EP. I had a few pieces that didn’t make the final cut because they just didn’t fit. Once I listened to the “Jeopardy” instrumental again, it all came together as a sassy love letter to another guy I had met on a tour who I couldn’t get a read on (notice a theme here?). The the hook was inspired by Method Man’s line “no oj, no straw, when you give it to me hey give it to me raw.” Mine is a reference to coffee of course but it can be applied to pretty much anything. I wasn’t sure how it would be received but it’s really fun to do live. This was originally going to be the lead single and I even shot a video for it but I ultimately went with “Disappointment.”

I wrote this song back in 2014 at the end of a really grueling tour. It was inspired on a particular night where someone who I really wanted in the audience didn’t show up for a really important show. Although it was sparked by a specific situation, I have felt this way multiple times. It’s one of the painful parts of being an artist. Pouring everything into something and having it disregarded by either the masses or a specific person whom I really was trying to impress. I usually introduce this song by saying “I’m no facebook ranter but I have a lot of anger about people’s lack of support for my career, here’s how I express it.”

 This was a very ambitious piece of writing and took a lot of practice to make it work. Before this I had never done a straight up rap song before and to an el-p beat at that! The first time I ever performed it was to a crowd of hip hop heads in Berkeley when I opened up for Acealone last year. Not a single other person had heard this song yet and that’s how I chose to PREMIERE it. My heart was beating so loudly in my chest but somehow I pulled it off and it felt amazing. It still does every time I perform it.

Ddfh, the original beat used was definitely mine and dj Halo’s tour jam for months. What a banger! I definitely knew I wanted to include this on the project and tried a lot of different concepts for it before I landed on this one. The way the Deshawn Timothy became involved was last summer when I was introduced to him through my 2015 tour partner, angi3. The three of us did a great show together in Philly and he and I got to talking about Run the Jewels afterward. It turns out that he had recorded a track over an RTJ beat on SoundCloud already. I told him about my Run the Blues idea (back then it was in its very early stages) and I decided that he’d be my one and only vocal feature when the time came. I’m sure he forgot about it by the time I reached out to him 6 months later but I kept my word. We came up with a super bragadocious rap track and I got my whole family on the hook, even my dad!