He found a sword in the studio, and made up a shockingly catchy song called 'Sword in the Studio' that's still rattling around in my brain.

He didn't know quite what he was making, but he was feeling it.Īll night, Lacy goofed around.

A few hours later, he began laying vocals, a breathy, wordless melody he sang directly into the iPhone's microphone. Eventually satisfied with that bit, he plugged in his Fender bass and started improvising a bassline. He experimented wildly for a while, then settled on a loose structure and began subtly tweaking it. For the next half hour, that's all Lacy did: play, tap-tap-tap, play again. He played the riff again, subtly differently. It took three taps: stop, delete, back to the beginning. Without even playing it back, Lacy then reached down and deleted it. He played a riff he'd stumbled on while tuning, recording it on a separate GarageBand track over top of the drums. With two thumbs, he tapped out a simple beat, maybe 30 seconds long. He paged through the drum presets in GarageBand for a while before picking a messy-sounding kit. That night in Burbank, Lacy had no real agenda or deadline. (Somewhere in there he also graduated high school.) The only connection between his many projects? All that music is stored on his iPhone.

Cole's '4 Your Eyez Only' and Kendrick Lamar's new 'Damn.' Earlier in 2017, he released his first solo material, which he's playing as part of the setlist for The Internet's worldwide tour. He's a sought-after producer, featured on albums like J. Last year, he was nominated for a Grammy for executive-producing and performing on the 2015 funk-R&B-soul album Ego Death, the third release from The Internet and Lacy's first with the band. It's a weird recording setup, but it's working for Lacy. He doesn't even call it recording, or songwriting, or producing. Lacy, wearing jean shorts and a plaid khaki shirt underneath an unzipped blue hoodie, sat on a drum throne in the center of the studio and re-assumed his previous pose: right leg crossed over left, Beats headphones on his ears, iPhone perched precariously on his bare knee (he swears this isn't how he cracked the screen) and connected to the guitar in his lap. He usually works in the vocal booth, where he'll light candles and hang for hours, but since I had a cameraman with me he agreed to sit somewhere a little more visually appealing-and bigger. Guitar ready, Lacy relocated into the studio. Lacy's smartphone has been his personal studio since he first started making music.

Rap beat on garageband