Mike Dreams Breaks Down New Track “Success Is” (Listen & Download) Posted by Mike Dreams (Michael A. Hannah) on 11/02/09 | Filed under Downloads, Features, A Dreamer's Perspective

As most of you know by now, this week I released the finished, mastered CDQ version of my lead single “Success Is…” from my forthcoming debut album “Dreamer’s Poetry”. (The track is also available below). I thought it would be interesting to some of you out there if I spoke about what the record meant to me and where it all came from. “Dreamer’s Poetry” is almost finished and even though I’ve dropped projects in the past, I really look at this album as my real debut to the world. I played with a couple of different concepts and tracks for this album as early as September of 2007, but I can really say that the album and my spiritual mindset for it started when I finished the original, first draft of this record back in March of 2009. I was in a very interesting place in my life. It’s almost similar to where I’m at now, except the circumstances were a tad more grim. That’s when I really started to figure out what “Success Is…” to me.

During this time, I wasn’t doing too well in college, and I knew the problem. It was the same problem that I have struggled with since my senior year of high school. It was music. Music had consumed me and I couldn’t think about anything else. The problem was, I had such a desire to get my music out to people, but I had trouble figuring out how I was going to make it all happen. I didn’t have a recording studio and my mind was going a mile-a-minute on the daily. I was working a dead-end job (that I eventually got fired from) and things were looking hopeless. The beginning of my blessings began when I finally connected with my friend and local producer AJ SOUL who had a home studio setup. We got to work, during nightly recording sessions in an outer suburb of Minneapolis. A lot of nights would begin very late, and end even later (or early…it depends how you look at it). I would get off of work at my the job I had at that time and I’d head to the studio to knock out some records.

In the first verse of the song, lines such as “driving with the lights off so they won’t see me coming” and “I’m just gon’ sit calm (sitcom) like Laverne, Shirley” signifies how I feel about how I plan to approach the music industry. Some come through mass media attention and gimmicks, even selling out. Now, this isn’t to say that I wouldn’t want to have a smash record that maybe takes off one day; I just am ready to take the patient approach and let my music speak for itself until it’s my time to rise to success. In the second verse, I spoke about real life events that occur right now in my city. In the age of technology and music, presentation is everything. Someone could in turn make themselves look like a golden prodigy, when they really could just be a bronze basement brute. In my city, I haven’t acquired a great deal of fame, but people tend to know me at times around the city and ask me to rap and what not. Afterwards, they assume I can help them launch their career or do something of that nature, not realizing that I too am just a struggling artist, “…still out dreaming, watching stars in the sky, as I’m taking out the trash on my evening 9 to 5, if that even makes sense, I guess you’d call it 5 to 9.” The final verse of the song reflected on my ambition to still make it through whatever circumstances, without compromising who I am, and relying on a cool confidence to evade those against me grind.

Two main influences on the record were Drake’s “So Far Gone” and Kid Cudi’s “A Kid Named Cudi” project, that were in heavy rotation nightly between the months of February and April. The influence of these two artists’ introspective music highly influenced my life greatly at that moment. I felt I made good music before, but I had never really self-reflected and put my real life out there in a vulnerable nature. I would always make records from a third-party looking in standpoint, giving my outlooks on life. “Success Is…” was the first record that I just wrote that was sort of like therapy. It allowed me to vent the position I was in at the moment. I wrote the song in one hour on a Saturday in early March and headed to the studio with AJ Soul on Sunday evening to record it. We spent seven hours on the song that day, recording and mixing the original version of the track. That record, as well as another song you will hear on the album called “Highway” are basically anthems created from the late-night drives home. Just like records such as Drake’s “Successful” or Kid Cudi’s “Man On The Moon”, there’s a very feeling a record can give you when listening to songs like that in their element, such like a late-night drive home to really feel the song in your spirit and have that moment where it feels like time freezes for the four-and-some-odd minutes while you let the record resonate. I hope listeners enjoy and relate to the contents of the record. It is truly a reflection of myself.

Thanks for the support.

-Mike Dreams

To download "Success Is", produced by Izzy the Kid & Jimmy Easy, click here or here. Or take a listen first below. Enjoy.