Happy to take his time with a song
Producer’s patience nets success for himself and dozens of pop, rap stars
“You never really know what’s going to be a hit.” Happy Perez
HAPPY Perez’s eyes light up at the sight of an early-1960s Harmony Bobkat.
Jonathan Chan, an engineer at SugarHill Recording Studios, hands Perez the undersize guitar, which Chan recently purchased.
“Everybody hated them, they were cheap little Sears catalog guitars,” Perez says. “But over the years they’ve become sought after. And they sound great. My first guitar was a Harmony out of a catalog.”
Perez — whose writing and production credits include work with pop stars Ludacris and Miguel, as well as dozens of Houston rappers including Z-Ro and Paul Wall — holds a particular affinity for things slow to find their purpose.
For 20 years, he’s been creating beats and producing songs, and though he had an early taste of success, his career has more often been one informed by delayed gratification. He’ll write a piece of music and sit on it for years. Sometimes a hit takes its time finding its audience.
Perez doesn’t concern himself with a song’s aftermath. He’s a tireless worker up front but takes on a laid-back vibe once a project is complete.
“They talk about the 10,000 hours. I’ve put in my 40,000 hours, so I work all day until we get something right,” he says. “It’s all business, but then I punch out. I’ll take
three days on the couch, watch TV.”
This year is one of Perez’s busiest with plenty of travel built in to work on the fourth album by R&B hit-maker Miguel.
Much has changed with Miguel since he and Perez made the breakout single “Sure Thing,” which became a million seller and launched Miguel’s career as a pop star. He’s had two albums sell a half million copies, with eight charting R&B singles.
First, though, was a prolonged gestation period followed by listener indifference.
Perez created the beat for “Sure Thing” in 2006. The mix is intricate but distinctive: a little hand-played percussion figure dances with a classic R&B guitar part. The modern hook is a whining keyboard that courses throughout the song. Perez and Miguel recorded it in 2007, and the tune lived for a while undiscovered on Miguel’s MySpace page. It was finally released in 2011 and made a star of Miguel, an R&B singer from California.
“You never really know what’s going to be a hit,” Perez says. “So many things have to go just right for a song to be a hit. But I didn’t care what went right or wrong. I knew that song was going to be a hit the first time I heard it.”
They made a standout track, “Don’t Look Back,” together on Miguel’s second album, and another pair of tunes on “Wildheart,” which last year pushed Miguel further into the mainstream. Now instead of Miguel flying into Houston and working in Perez’s home in Spring, Perez finds himself jetting to Los Angeles for the fifth album.
“It’s always going to be a priority of mine to work with him,” Perez says. “He’s become such a rock star now. This year will be spent attacking that album.”
A delicate touch
Nathan Perez was a nomad who always felt pulled toward Houston.
He was born in Victoria but lived in Corpus Christi, Austin, Three Rivers and Ingleside. He grew up playing guitar, but a second-hand $20 Casio keyboard given by an uncle was his portal into coming up with instrumental pieces that would serve as the bedrock for other artists’ lyrics.
With his father’s permission, he dropped out of high school to focus on his music. “My goal that day was to not let him down,” Perez says.
He started composing beats on the cheap instrument, quickly coming up with a regional hit for rapper Young Bleed in Louisiana called “How Ya Do Dat.” The song caught the ear of hip-hop mogul Master P, who picked it up and released it on his No Limits record label.
“That’s exactly what you want to happen when you’re that young,” Perez, 38, says. “I haven’t stopped working since. It opened every door I could imagine.”
Perez’s parents had settled in Houston, and he would visit and scour record stores. “I’d just buy anything that looked like it was from here,” he says. “Anything that had a Houston P.O. box listed on the back.”
He greatly admired the work of Houston producer Mike Dean, who worked with local rappers Geto Boys and Scarface. In the late ’90s, Perez finally set up shop here.
“How Ya Do Dat” gave him enough confidence to approach Carlos Coy, who recorded as South Park Mexican, at that point a rising rapper in Houston. They collaborated regularly until 2002, when Coy was handed a 45-year prison sentence for a ghastly sex crime.
But by that point, Perez was a go-to producer for rappers in Houston, including Baby Bash, with whom Perez had a hit in “Suga Suga.”
Over the years, Perez developed a delicate touch as a producer.
The hooks and instrumentation on his productions is distinctive but always complementary to the vocalist. A heavy guitar riff never gets in the way on Miguel’s “A Beautiful Exit,” and a slinky keyboard figure gently steers “Sure Thing.”
“To me, the artist and the song is the star,” he says. “A lot of producers go crazy, but I feel like I could write amazing beats all day. If no one writes a great song and puts a great vocal to it, it’s just another thing on my hard drive.”
Sometimes he’s almost anonymous. Perez created a beat that was eventually used for “End of the Night” by Ludacris. But the rapper and producer didn’t meet until much later.
“Years after that song, I’m in a studio in Los Angeles, and he opens the door,” Perez says. “He asked if he could use the studio for five minutes to play something for somebody. He’s Ludacris, I’m not going to tell him no. But I did tell him my name, and he instantly knew who I was.”
Other times, prime placements don’t have immediate financial benefit.
Perez contributed beats to be paired with lyrics by a songwriter named Frank Ocean. Ocean, it turned out, broke out as a singer, and Perez’s work on “Songs for Women” and “We All Try” was widely circulated. But since the tunes appeared on Ocean’s free download “Nostalgia/Ultra” release, he says, “I didn’t see $1 for those beats. But they affected my career in so many other ways. I got to work with this incredible artist, and people still hit me up about those songs.”
‘No blueprint’
Perez’s work takes him to both coasts, though he cites advantages to being based in the Houston area — both for him and for the artists with which he works.
“I’m trying my hardest to do everything I’ve done everywhere else here,” he says. “My family’s here, so I like being home. So I’m doing a lot of work with artists that just got signed. They can fly me out and spend crazy money on hotels, or fly the artist to Houston and have them show up at my house, which is way cheaper. Hotels in Spring are cheaper than hotels in Hollywood. So I’m reaching out more for things like that.”
But he still describes flying to New York one day to work with rapper G-Eazy, and then back to Houston the next to work with his partner, rapper Le$.
“There’s really no blueprint for this,” Perez says. “People ask me for advice, and I don’t know what to tell them. I only know what I did and how I got here. I guess I just try to avoid putting a time stamp on what I do. Just make the best song I can possibly make.
“I’m not troubled by trying to fit in. I’m not really interested in what radio sounds like. That’s done me well.”