Jake Palumbo is a Tennessee-born, Brooklyn-based Producer, Emcee, & proprietor of SpaceLAB Recordings - an independent hip-hop label that has been releasing music since 2004. He is also an internet personality known for his dry humor & informative commentary about the independent music business. He is a decorated studio engineer with hundreds of recording, mixing & mastering credits on many major label & independent albums. Following his slogan "Jake It Till You Make It", the Brooklyn kid with a Southern accent has remained focused on building & nurturing a secure & dedicated core fanbase & existing as much as possible in his own ecosystem, to alleviate the worry of ever having to appeal to the mainstream.

As an artist, producer, or engineer he has worked with artists including Nas, Black Moon, Ghostface Killah, Jadakiss, Sean Price (RIP), Roc Marciano, Royce Da 5'9", Smif-N-Wessun, Twista, Ras Kass, Kool Keith, & many, many more.

How did you get your Artist name?

My real name is Jake, & I always wanted my stage name to be Jake ____ something. I felt like that way, I could remain true to my real self, but anything outlandish or wild I wanted to do, I could write off as being the character, the alter ego. I heard the name "Palumbo" on television when I was still a teenager. I got it tattooed on my arm shortly after high school, to essentially force myself to make this thing work; you didn't want to be staring at a tattoo of your big failure for the rest of your life.

How did you get into creating?

Growing up in Tennessee where there isn't much to do - & especially not having the internet & whatnot as a child - if you don't find something to occupy yourself with, you're going to get into trouble fairly quickly. I fell in love with music at a young age via my parents record collection & started teaching myself to play instruments as a kid. By the time I was a teenager that evolved into hip-hop, & being that I had a basic understanding of all the instruments, I was easily drawn to the one-man-band aspect of making beats. Eventually you've got things to say & thoughts to express so I started rapping (very badly) over them. It took years of evolution, but somewhere along the way I got better at it & was able to make Jake Palumbo into something I did not regret tattooing at all.

How has creating changed your life?

It's probably kept me out of prison or a psychiatric ward, but jokes aside it's facilitated me having a purpose in life, & eventually it facilitated a means for me to feed myself & pay my bills. The skills that I developed creating songs from scratch in my bedroom, eventually got me hired as an audio engineer after I moved to NYC. I was eventually able to parlay that into having my own studio, & using my recording & mixing skills to align myself with a lot of notable artists I admired who I later ended up collaborating with or in some cases doing entire projects with.

I was laid off from my last day job in 2008, the same week I got my first paid recording session as an engineer. Since that day in November, by hook or crook, sometimes poor, sometimes making a steady living, sometimes actually rich, & back again - I've completely survived off being a recording engineer, a mix engineer, a producer, a touring & recording artist, an indie label, selling beats online & as an occasional speaker / educator. It is by no stretch of the imagination an easy way to make a living, but it is generally a very fulfilling one.

Where are you from?

Born & raised around East Tennessee - Knoxville, Johnson City, Morristown areas. I moved to Brooklyn in 2006 with around $75 to my name, & have been here ever since.

How did growing up in your neighborhood/city affect you?

I'd say that growing up in Tennessee, big-fish-small-pond syndrome forced me to find a passion & focus & purpose. And I'd say that moving to New York forced me to put my nose to the grind & get more serious & focused about my hustle. I tend to benefit from sink-or-swim type of situations, & NYC is a place that gives out no free or un-earned love. It's like diving into the deep end of the pool with no life jacket sometimes, but I do feel this city rewards hard work.

What did you do to advance your skills/knowledge?

I've always been an obsessive studier. I've spent countless hours since I was a kid reading books, magazine articles, listening to thousands of records, watching endless hours of video & interviews & have basically always had an unquenchable thirst for more information about music & how it ticks. I can't tell you where my keys are, but you can name any artist & I can rattle off their discography & what labels they were on, or what their live show was like or some wild back story about them.

From there, it's really been nothing but trial & error, & what they call "woodshed" time. There's no substitute in an artist's growth for spending time just practicing their craft - whether you're making beats, rapping, singing, there's no replacement for thousands of hours of doing it in the studio & doing it live. Do it. Suck at it. Make notes. Do better next time. Rinse, repeat.

What does your current setup look like?

For the last 5 years my studio has been in Brooklyn (we were in Manhattan previously), it's a relatively small room - a control room & a vocal booth with a Mackie console, all my production & outboard equipment, & that's that. It's comfortable to mix in, & being that it doubles as my day job, we churn out dozens of records every week, for myself & many other artists.

Who inspires you? Why do they inspire you?

There isn't enough time in this interview for me to nerd out on every artist I've learned something from over the years, both in hip-hop & in every other genre from jazz or rock or soul or whatever.

But I've always appreciated artists with large catalogs. Frank Zappa for example is probably my favorite artist of all time, & someone who inspired me to be an outspoken & unapologetic weirdo. I've been listening to Zappa since I was 13. I own 42 Zappa albums on CD & vinyl & there are at least 21 I still haven't heard that he made when he was ALIVE. Not counting two decades of posthumous albums. When I was in high school, my girlfriend at the time bought me Zappa's autobiography for Christmas & it was pretty much what convinced me I had to be in the music business.

On the hip-hop side I look at somebody like Master P who not only did I learn from tremendously about how to be an independent label, but No Limit Records released almost 100 albums during their run, by dozens of different artists. Like them or not, they left behind a huge catalog of music for the people that loved it, & that's what I want to do.

What is your goal when you create?

To capture the moment - happy, depressed, angry, isolated, lewd & lascivious, whatever. I have a tendency to create with an audience of one in mind; it's about telling my story, & every single punchline is to make myself laugh. With that said though my music does contain a LOT of inside jokes & references that are meant for an audience of probably 5-20 friends who will get the joke. I've had fans ask me about what certain lines meant & it was usually way off!

But also to build a catalog. Going back to what I said earlier about prolific artists. SpaceLAB Recordings has released over 60 titles (albums, EP's, singles, mixtapes, etc.) in 15 years. They're not all Jake Palumbo albums, many are projects I've produced for other artists, but there is already a large span of musical growth there, & I look forward to adding a lot more to it.

Why do you create?

To keep myself alive, to keep myself sane and fulfilling some kind of purpose.

What's your go-to song right now and why is it important to you?

That changes from week to week, but I've been on a heavy UGK kick lately. "Wood Wheel" or "Still Riding Dirty" are probably the songs I'm using to get pumped up at the moment. The church organs with the hard drums, the gangsta gospel approach, it invokes a feeling. Bun B is one of the best lyricists ever out the South, & God bless the dead, Pimp C just so unapologetic. It's the take-me-on-my-terms-or-none that spoke to me the most about UGK.

What is your dream as an artist and what steps are you taking to reach your dream?

Not to be all "the journey not the destination"...but I try to wake up each morning & tell myself that I'm currently living my dream, & that I have been for almost 15 years now. I pay my bills entirely as a music person, I get to work with artists I admire & respect, I get to help guide up & coming artists not just in the studio making their record, but advising them on the business. I may not be a household name as an artist, but there are thousands of people each day on social media who tune in to hear me preach my sermon, & they make me feel very appreciated on a daily basis. I've always taken the approach of "gratitude, not attitude" because the bottom line reality at the end of the day is that you are one of millions & no one has to pay attention to anything you do. So for me to even have tens of thousands of people who genuinely care about what we do is a blessing I don't take for granted.

What is the best advice you would give someone with a dream?

The people who get to see their dream come to life, are the ones who give it the same effort when things are going TERRIBLY, that they would give it if things were going great. When your posts are getting 5 likes & no shares, when your streaming payout for the month is $3 dollars, when your show has 10 paid ticket holders, you still have to treat it with the same level of effort & care that you would if those shows were packed & those posts were viral. For 99% of we're not going to be discovered or have any type of cheat code to the finish line, so the people who make it are the ones who tough it out to the end of the grueling & brutal marathon. Most of your peers & competition along the way are going to eventually quit, the people who go the distance & take the long road up, are usually the ones who last.

That said, make sure you really do love it that much. Because achieving your dream may require a lot of sacrifice on your part, & there's nothing at all wrong with not wanting to live the oddball alien lifestyle of a professional creative. When it's working it's generally awesome yes, but it comes with levels of pain, uncertainty, stress & risk that are not for everyone.

Tell us about your most recent release

My most recent solo album is called "Plant-Based Libtard" & it was released on January 7th of this year. It was entirely self-produced, I did all the beats & rapped on everything, with some great guest appearances from Juice Crew legend Craig G, Nutso, Rim, Lex The Hex Master, King Magnetic, Jarvis Waterfall & cuts by DJ Evil Dee of Black Moon / Beatminerz, & DJ Dainja of Psyche Origami. The album is 14 songs but clocks in at only 36 minutes. I really, truly tried to make an album that was paced well & had replay value. Grateful to say that has reflected in the streams, the album has reached about 600k streams on Spotify in a little over 9 months.

Topically, it centers around humor, anger, the political climate of the US at the moment, the death of my mother, longevity in rap, & financial responsibility, all tied together by the kind of off-color jokes & side-notes you've come to expect from me. The album is largely upbeat, with hard but very melodic beats, though the album takes a sharp turn for the morose on the final song, "A Lot To Unpack" which is mostly about a bad breakup, but covers some other topics also.

The album title is inspired by me being a vegetarian, & by the 50,000 times I've been called a "Libtard" on the internet over the last few years - usually for suggesting radical things like universal health care of reproductive rights or police being held accountable. By self-deprecating myself as this soft, vegetarian "Libtard" as a decoy - it makes my punches hit harder when they connect, so to speak.

I chose the album cover for similar reasons - a picture of me as a toddler, with a machine gun slung over my shoulder. By displaying my childhood innocence, with the nonchalant presence of this other element that's very much not...it's just me in my comfortable space of being able to express my aggression & rage without falling victim to any kind of phony posturing.

Check it out here: https://open.spotify.com/album/7p7toDITHtuuPofhLTOlbr?si=YqDQJryZT1S0jg4YyKzlEA

Connect with Jake Palumbo

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/jakepalumbo

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jakepalumbo

Facebook.com: http://www.facebook.com/jakepalumbo.spacelab

Website: http://www.jakepalumbo.com

Photography credit: Jay Pluto (the 2 photos in studio)
Joey Fresco (the photo on stage with mic)

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