Rising multi-talent Kevin McCall has quickly risen to the top of many industry insiders & artists lists for go-to collaborators. Specifically for his work with Chris Brown, and their shared hit “Deuces”. The LA native spoke with new magazine, Page 21, well before most of us heard his name, and they got the inside scoop on this must-watch new artist. Speaking on his first break into the music industry.
A year after graduating from school I met a guy named Andre Merrit who wrote “Forever” and “Disturbia”, Chris Brown and Rihanna. I was pretty cool in music but I had the look too and I was kinda in his entourage basically. I was hanging around the stars and for a while people didn’t even know I did music until one day we were in the studio with Tank and Chris Brown and Chris left the room and said, “Man I need some beats.” All this time I been hanging with him, he didn’t know what I did. So I pulled out one of my CD’s, bogarded everyone else and said, “Stop playin and put this shit in.” Chris stepped back in the room like, “Hey, we’re not writing to nothing else. Don’t play no more beats. We’re writing to that.” He still didn’t know it was my beat. I go in there and shoot some lines for the song, and he thinks I’m just some writer in there tryin to write on it, and he’s like, “Yeah, I kinda wanna change this part.” I was like, “You know when I made the beat, I made it like this…dah dah dah.” He (Chris) was like, “Wait, you make beats?! YOU made THIS beat?!” And I was like, “Yeah.” And that’s when we made the Rich Girls “Smile & Wave”. That was the first song I ever did with Chris. Ever since then, he made me do more beats, and I became one of his go-to guys. We made the “Twitter” song a year later. That got a lot of buzz, but, I really started getting the buzz earlier this year when we did the “In My Zone” mix tape that was dropped on Valentine’s Day. He flew me out to Virginia, and for hours we pumped out about 6 songs per day.
Check out the full interview HERE.
