Shyland Flowers just took home an Upstate Music Award for his 2020 single “85″ and if his new album “…And Flowers For All” is any indication, the Greenville rapper is continuing his winning streak. The 13-track album, recorded at Sit N’ Spin studio in downtown Greenville, is a tour de force that kicks off with a fierce statement of purpose, “Take It 2 The Grave,” and then plumbs the depths of Flowers’ mind and heart.
Flowers paints vivid lyrical pictures over sparse, spaced-out tracks and miles-deep grooves, dipping into unsettled paranoia (“The Killing Joke”), pure swagger (“Lost In Space,” “Burning Man”), and falling in love (“Sooner Or Later”) before closing out the album with the upbeat “Best Day Ever” where he declares, “Life is too short to wait for forever.”
As good as his 2018 album “RU Shoeless: The Carolina Theory” was, “…And Flowers For All” is a bold new direction and throughout, Flowers spits rhymes with rugged confidence and soulful poetry. Even when he’s talking about fear or insecurity, he sounds completely in control.
“I wanted the album to represent a rebirth,” Flowers says. “My goal in music is to be a world-builder, to be able to provide an escape. I had a lot going on in my personal life and I wanted to create a world where I could escape from that for 47 minutes.”
Flowers says that he was conscious of making “…And Flowers For All,” which he worked on from last August through February, unlike anything he’d recorded before.
“I wanted to do something different,” he says. “My first project was cinematic; it had all these instruments and layers. And on this album I wanted to do something easier, more laid back. I wanted to rap on beats I wouldn’t normally rap on and find pockets that I normally wouldn’t find.”
It’s also an album that Flowers wouldn’t have been able to make without a little help from his friends. He collaborated extensively with other local and regional soul and hip-hop artists on “…And Flowers For All,” including Sydney Janay, Wordplay Luck, Will Cherry, Heartbreak Hutch, Serene Burgess, WVN and most notably Barryle, whose stunning vocal performance on “Hands High” still has Flowers in awe.
“We were trying to do that song all day,” he laughs, “We had a few different singers come in and no one could quite get it right. And then in comes Barryle, who doesn’t say a word to anybody, goes into the booth, does something like 60 takes in 15 minutes and every single one of them was gold. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
Rather than making an EP or a series of singles, Flowers says it was important for him to make an album because it was a long time coming.
“Initially, I wanted to do an album in 2019,” he says, “and then I started going through a lot of personal stuff and we ended up scrapping the album. So I didn’t want to disappoint anyone by not doing a full release when I decided to come back. It was going to be initially seven songs and it wasn’t until I wrote ‘The Killing Joke’ that I thought I could make this a full album project. Once I found my groove that’s the route we went.”
Flowers adds that he’s changed a lot in the three years between albums.
“Musically I’m a different person,” he says. “In my life, I’m a different person. As a son, as a boyfriend, a co-worker, every aspect of my life, I’m a different person. It doesn’t feel like that long a time, but the drastic changes in my life helped me grow and mature.”
