Free School
You’ve already heard Los Angeles four-piece Free School’s music. You just don’t know it. Their songs are performed at sold-out stadium shows, but they’ve only begun to book gigs.
The collective of prolific co-writers – Jean Baptiste, Nick Marsh, Michael McHenry and Replay (just Replay) – have quietly been writing hit songs for chart-topping, platinum-selling pop acts, including Kid Cudi (“Heart of a Lion), Kelis (her forthcoming album), Black Eyed Peas, and Good Charlotte, to name a few.
“We meet up in the studio and we see who’s on the list for the day. It’s Black Eyed Peas, or it’s Good Charlotte or whomever,” says vocalist/songwriter Baptiste. Marsh adds: “You get so much better when you put yourself in the situation of having to write something out of your comfort zone, and we’re all really good at that.” They have a proven knack for writing bankable pop hits, but when the working day is done, Baptiste says, he or Marsh may suggest a melody. McHenry offer up a beat, “and that’s when we write what we like, not catering to anyone else, just us.”
Free school is about to drop that material on the world. In every song on their forthcoming record, there is a unifying, ultimately relatable theme. Take the pulsing, Auto-Tuned banger, “Megan Fox.” “Megan Fox is like chocolate,” Baptiste says. “We’re all trying to have sex with her. That’s what that song is about.” The band’s first single, “Give It To Me,” is a modern chunk of funk that could light up the dance floor of a hip after-hours joint and simultaneously make an old school fool remember the gloriousness of The Gap Band. The ironically named “22nd Century,” with its house beats and raspy, sexy female vocals (“Autogirl,” she’s called, the band jokes) might reactivate long forgotten traces of designer drugs lingering in your system from a warehouse party a decade ago. Its Funkadelic rap breakdown might make you see the mothership.
Baptiste and McHenry come from rap backgrounds. They met in the early 1990s. Jean was into Souls of Mischief from Oakland, Calif., and Run DMC from Hollis, Queens – as he describes it, “nerdy backpack rap.” Michael was into Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, and the whole suite of East Coast rap from the golden era. They were both comers in Northern Virginia’s tiny rap scene. “Michael was the best in his school, and I was the best in my school,” Baptiste says. “ So the first time we met, we battled.”
To this day, neither man can remember who emerged victorious, but they still spit rhymes at each other, “just to see if he’s still got it, the old man with the cane,” McHenry says, ribbing Baptiste.
Jean went on to sing in an ambient, soulful hip-hop group that toured around the U.S. and, at its peak in the early naughts, opened for the Black Eyed Peas. “That’s where I met Will.i.am
“Once my band broke up, I never wanted to perform,” Baptiste says. “I wanted to tell my stories with other people.” McHenry came to work alongside Baptiste. And Replay was already working with the Peas’ Apl.de.ap when he was introduced to Jean and Mike. It was clear they had chemistry, and the three worked on the group’s latest album, The E.N.D.
Marsh, a co-songwriter and laptop composer from the San Francisco Bay Area, rounded out the Free School roster. At just 11 years old and bored with the guitar he picked up at 8, he got a hold of his dad’s friend’s four-track tape recorder. “Once I was able to record myself and hear the playback, I was hooked.“ He’d eventually give up the guitar for laptop-generated music, though, and he set out as a solo artist, creating live music in the vein of Simian Mobile Disco or Justice. In the months before he hooked up with Free School, he played gigs with Afrika Bambaataa and was invited to play shows with Crystal Method, among others.
In the months that have followed the formation of Free School, the band has hammered away in the studio, drawing up would-be hits for both themselves and the artists who pay their bills. “A lot of the songs that people take are songs originally written for the band,” Baptiste says, laughing. “And that’s okay. We’ve got songs with the same types of melodic sensibility, the same structures, but they’re more us.”
The offers they’ve had as lately seem to be coming from increasingly more famous performers. “There are things that are happening that I don’t want to jinx,” McHenry says. Considering the work that goes into maintaining their rep as one of pop’s most potent secret weapons and the effort the put into their own ambitions as a band (including a developing live show), 2009/2010 are shaping up to be grueling years for Free School. And not one of them is complaining.
“We’re happy. We’re honored. I just want to write more of these so people know what we do,” Baptiste says. “We get paid to do music for a living. We get paid to do our dream. In that sense, I could write 40 songs a day. It’s not like I’m writing the Macarena, you know what I’m saying?”