TAKING A POST- GRAMMY CHANCE ON ‘ PARADISE’
When Chicago’s Knox Fortune took home a Grammy last winter for his work on “Coloring Book”— megastar colleague Chance the Rapper’s history- making 2016 release— homewas a dinky, crowded dwelling in Wicker Park, your basic starving artist scenario.
Unable to afford even an Airbnb for the Grammys’ splashy telecast in Los Angeles, the indie hip- hop producer ( and emerging singer- songwriter) crashed on an L. A. friend’s couch, collected his gilded- gramophone trophy engraved with “Best Rap Album” and flew back to his $ 300- a- month basement bedroom. “Howis this my reality?’” Fortune remembered thinking, during a mid- October interview at the Sun- Times offices.
Now Fortune headlines an album- release concert for his own luscious debut, “Paradise,” on Nov. 13 at Lincoln Hall. It’s the culmination of his work to date: multiple years spent on Chicago’s fecund young indie- rap scene creating beats for his peers— notably Chance and his Save Money crewmembers, including Vic Mensa, Joey Purp and Kami— while simultaneously diving deeper into his own songwriting and singing.
Until recently he’d kept the latter pursuit prettymuch sub rosa. In fact, when a serendipitous chain of events resulted in Knox’s role on “Coloring Book”— he composed and sang the cheerfully rowdy ear worm of a hook on album track “All Night”— it surprised Chance.
“Chance told me recently that when I did ‘ All Night,’ he’d thought Iwas [ strictly] an engineer,” Fortune recalled with amusement. “He said, ‘ When you gave me the vocals back, I really was not expecting that at all.’” As it happens, the engineering expertise of Knox Fortune ( birth name Kevin Rhomberg) happens to be entirely self- taught.
Now25, he grewup Oak Park, his house filled with Beatles, Beach Boys, Talking Heads, Prince. “Iwas not one of those kids,” Knox remarked, “that denounced my parents’ music.”
Then, amiddle- school obsession with skateboarding acquainted Fortune with the sport’s more subversive soundtrack: the visceral, elegant noise of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno and Joy Division. “And I LOVED it,” said Knox, whowas rapidly overtaken by a new fixation: making “strange sounds” of his own via the family iMac’s Garage Band music software.
“I wasn’t a musician,” he acknowledged, “so things like reverb and [ other] effects were super- cool to me: making my voice sound like a guitar, or recording it to a keyboard and playing my voice by pressing the keys. Iwas good at manipulating sound in the program.
“Then I started getting more into understanding what a song is, its components. And I think getting into rap music and beats, the sample- y type stuff, helped expand things from there.”
Meanwhile Fortune’s oblique approach to songwriting continued apace, gaining focus courtesy of high- school friend Chris Bunkers, a formally trained musician. “I’d learned how to make cool sounds first, but had no knowledge of howto structure them like the songs on the radio,” Knox reflected. “Then Chris came in, and Iwould see him arrange his songs in a logical, more practical pop sense.” Thanks to Bunkers, “I could understandwhat a hook is, and a verse.”
Bunkers contributed drums to three of the 11 tracks on “Paradise,” a feast of chewable melodies and beats— garnished with love- centric lyrics and infused with the rapturously off- kilter feel of a sultry summer day.