You're listening to song exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

This episode contains explicit language.

November 2014 Ghostface Killa of the Wu-Tang Clan released his 11th album called 36 seasons. A lot of people worked on it.

A Solan R&B quartet, the Revelations, serve as a kind of house backing band for the whole thing. Lil Fame from MOP and Engineer Daniel Schlatt helped produce.

And there's a host of guest vocalists, including the ones on this track, singer Tray Williams and rappers AZ and Cool G-Rap.

But the person who put the whole thing together came up with the idea and corralled all of these contributors.

It's someone who doesn't appear on the record. His name is Bob Perry and his title is A&R, which stands for Artist and Repertory.

Nowadays, that usually means a person at a record label who acts as a talent scout for new artists. But back in the day, the A&R reps were often responsible for much more.

In this episode, Bob Perry talks about how the Ghostface song The Battlefield came together. And Revelations guitarist Wes Mingus breaks down how the beat was assembled.

Here's the Battlefield on song exploder.

This is Bob Perry on the A&R on the album.

I was working on a record by a singer called Tray Williams who's a sort of Solan R&B singer. And the Revelations ended up becoming the band for Tray Williams album.

I also at that time was working as an A&R for Koch Records in New York. One of the artists that we had signed to our label was The Riza.

The Riza became familiar with the Revelations work. I played him some of the stuff. He was really dignity-cane to some of the shows.

And that led to a working relationship between myself, Riza and the band. We did two compilation albums. And then we collaborated with him on the soundtrack to his film The Man with the Iron Fist.

I had also worked with Ghostface prior to all of that. The idea was to do a concept album with Ghostface. I have a friend of mine who's a writer. His name is Matthew Rosenberg. He's a comic book writer.

He and I batted around a couple ideas for a narrative for an album. We came up with this idea of 36 seasons about a guy who'd been away from his neighborhood for a long time.

He comes back home. Things have changed up for the worse. Bad things happen along the road to redemption.

It's a different process than you have with musicians and most rappers. Most rappers would never let this kind of thing happen. But thankfully, Ghostface has the faith in the process to allow a piece of music like this to be created.

He has a huge amount of trust in me. Yes. I would say. And I'm thankful for that.

The thing is that what you got to understand is that that is really how he came up. He always worked with, I would say, strong voice producer. And he says, you know, I perceived myself kind of like an actor. You know, like I get called in. You know, the guys give me my script. I do my scenes. And then I leave so many months later, I see it on the big screen. And I'm like, wow, I never thought I was going to go that way.

I wouldn't take credit as a songwriter. You know, we just came up with the narrative for the album. But the rappers wrote the lyrics and the musicians wrote the music. I just was kind of an A&R.

...