Ever since joining forces several years ago, bbno$ and Yung Gravy’s sacred bromance has resulted in two mixtapes, a co-headline tour, and a genuine friendship that spans beyond just musical serendipity.
Linking up during their Soundcloud days, the duo have since released many tracks together, eventually making Baby Gravy into its own entity and brand. Both rappers have spent the past few years building their own individual careers, but have stayed friends and frequent collaborators through it all. From only being able to collaborate online to now being able to be in the studio together, their musical chemistry has evolved alongside their friendship.
Fresh off of their co-headline tour, bbno$ and Yung Gravy are gearing up to release the third instalment of their Baby Gravy project, appropriately titled Baby Gravy 3. Releasing on August 25th, this joint album showcases the classic Baby Gravy sound that fans have come to adore. With features from Rich Brian and Freddie Dredd, the project encapsulates a new era for Baby Gravy, while still within the sonic realm that the fans love.
During a Zoom call where the pair were having a “slumber party”, 1883 Magazine chats with bbno$ & Yung Gravy to discuss the forthcoming new project and their friendship.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with 1883 Magazine. I’m a long time listener and actually met you both at the Tampa show, so it’s cool to be able to do this!
Yung Gravy: That Tampa show was awesome.
It was a really cool venue.
bbno$: Where was that, Jannus Live?
Y: Yeah, that was sick.
B: Are you from Tampa?
No, I was living in Orlando at the time. I’m from Chicago, so I’m back here now.
Y: Awesome, I love Chicago.
Same! Let’s get into it, you’ve put out two singles, You Need Jesus and Goodness Gracious, from your upcoming album, Baby Gravy 3. How have you felt about the fan response to both of them?
B: Pretty good!
Y: I guess the only representation of how they feel about it is the live performances we’ve done.
B: Realistically, if you put a song out, how it does is based on if our fans like it. They’ve been doing pretty good, it’s not crazy like Lalala on Tiktok type shit, but it’s doing good.
Y: They’ve been lit live, that’s what I was going to say. They’ve had a pretty good response. I did Summerfest in Milwaukee recently, and there were a lot of people with signs about either of the songs.
I’d love to talk a little more about You Need Jesus, and how it came together. Did you start with the religion/Jesus theme and build off of that?
B: So I was in the studio, and some guy that was a recording engineer at the studio walked in with a bible. He slammed it down, looked at Diamond Pistols and I and said “you need Jesus.” So then I looked at Christian (Diamond Pistols) and said “you need Jesus, go back to church.” That was pretty much it. I wish I had more of an elaborate story.
That’s iconic in its own way, though.
Y: Yeah. I remember him sending me the song… it was just the basics, just the hook. I knew it was bomb. I knew that I wanted to put my Spanish spin on it, like I do on every album. I said Jesús instead of Jesus.
And the rest was history.
B: Exactly.
I’d also love to hear about the accompanying music video, it turned out so well. How did that come together?
B: Yeah, the video’s sick. I think it’s probably our best… it just looks like a movie. It was one of the easiest videos to shoot, too. Sometimes… like we just shot one two days ago, and I was slam dunked hungover, it was not easy. But for this video, we showed up, we did like 10-15 shots, it was done.
Y: It was a really good crew, and it was on a set. We just did a video where we were riding horses around in Alberta, and we were planning out all the shots. It was really fun, it wasn’t like it was hard, but it was a lot different.
B: A lot more planning.
Y: Yeah, when you don’t have the whole set up like with You Need Jesus. The video, the actual concept… My original idea was that I wanted to have us each start our own religious cults, and start beefing. I was pissed at first because they said it was too complicated, and we had to do an end of the world thing. I thought it would suck, because I’d never seen someone who was good at visual effects. Then they sent me some examples, and I was like alright, bet. It came out so good.
B: Yeah, it’s a really dope music video. It came out so fire.
Y: It’ll probably be the new video I send to people when they want to hear something, or see something, you know?
Totally. So you two have been collaborating together for years now, how do you feel that your collaborative process has evolved over time?
B: It’s gotten more fluid. We know what each other likes, it’s like when you date someone long enough, you can sort of pick your battles. It’s just easier now. Right now we’re chilling in Vancouver, at my parents house. My parents aren’t here, there are raspberries in the back, we might go pick some afterwards. Slumber party.
Y: Slumber party!
Love it.
B: It’s just easy. Sometimes I make music with other people, and it’s just so fucking complicated.
Y: We know each other’s strengths. There’s a lot of times where we just leave it to the other person. A lot of times he’ll start the very beginning of a song, and I’ll fill in spaces. I’ll do more of the hook, he’ll do more of the verses. Little things like that make it easier. We also get to work in person together a lot more now, where as when we first started it was all over email.
B: It’s still cool to make music so seamlessly over the internet. The way you can just become a musician these days is really dope. It’s very intriguing, because literally anybody can become a musician. I never saw this guy until two years into our relationship.
Y: We never met in person until I came out here for a video.
Yeah, everything is really accessible which is really cool.
B: Incredibly.
What do you think makes your relationship as collaborators so special? Do you think it’s because it’s based on friendship?
B: Probably to a point. How many songs have we made, like 40? At this point, if we were arguing over every small ass detail, we would just be wasting both of our time. We just kind of get it.
Y: It’s almost a paradox to say it, but I feel like we’re both humble, nice people. That’s not that common in music. We can just genuinely work together and be honest, and not make it a money thing. We’re just friends. I feel like that’s not too common.
B: We have our tiffs because we’re human beings, we’re not going to see eye to eye on everything. If we did, we’d probably be married.
Y: Facts.
B: I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to explain. Like, he’s my friend. That’s kind of it. A lot of the time when you make music with other people, they’re not your friends, you know what I mean? I think that’s the forefront of the simplicity of how we make music together.
Y: Also, the producers that we work with often now have become pretty good friends. Diamond Pistols, dwilly, Y2K… It makes music way more fun and easy when it’s people we hang out with outside of it.
B: We literally just make music with our friends. It’s kind of like an activity, like going to play soccer with a bunch of friends. It’s practically the same thing, but a little more chaotic and fried.
I think collaborations can feel transactional when it’s not with people you’re close with, so it’s really cool that you’ve been able to create that environment that’s based on genuine relationships.
B: Oh yeah, definitely.
You both make your own music individually as well, how do you discern which tracks are for Baby Gravy versus for your own individual projects?
B: A lot of times, you can just tell. I’ve been leaning more into singer/songwriter type of music. Matt has no place talking about heartbreak yet, until his little heart breaks! …That was a cook right there.
Y: I had a heartbreak! I’m not good at writing music about it, though. When I’m sad I do something else.
B: It’s actually really easy. When I’m writing sad songs, it’s just kind of funny the whole way through. It’s funnier than making funny music, because we’ve done it for so long. It’s like, how sad can a man get?
Y: I think if I put out a sad song, people would be confused.
B: It would go crazy though.
Y: You never know, maybe someday.
B: People would be confused. They’d be like, I understand his pain.
Y: Anyway, we’ll both work with someone on a beat. You can kind of just tell what songs will work well for collaborative stuff. His sad scene stuff… my end of that is dirty, 2000s reboot stuff. Like oops! and a few other newer things I’m working on. It’s just not really his style. We just know.
B: I feel like we meet halfway. I typically don’t use samples, and he uses very prominent samples. We meet right in the middle with a cool sounding latin type beat…
Y: Latin is the perfect crossover. We always do that. We have to backpedal when we make like, three latin inspired songs.
B: Always fire, every single time. It’s like butter to the ears, I don’t know why.
This is the third Baby Gravy project, how do you feel this one is different from the previous two?
Y: We’re better at making music now.
B: It’s interesting because it’s so incredibly subjective, but I feel that objectively we make better sounding music. I guess catchier music. Does it attract the same audience and give them the nostalgic flavor of our music? I don’t know, that’s subjective. But fundamentally, we make cleaner sounding music. Tighter mixes.
Y: We just know more about music. At least when I started, I didn’t know what could be changed in a beat, I was just rapping over it.
B: One time I sent him a beat and he didn’t know how to put an EQ on it to reduce the clap. The snare was too loud in his ears, so he couldn’t write to it. I remember reading that text and being like ‘holy fuck.’ Four or five years deep into making music and he doesn’t know how to put an EQ on to reduce loudness.
Y: I still struggle with that. I never had a music background, I learned as I went. I was a business kid!
B: Yeah, he’s better at that now. He’s leveled up! It would be interesting… When people refer to my discography, the highest is like, my album recess. It’s interesting because I think my recent album swipes it, a billion times over. It’s infinitely better, in my opinion. It’s all dependent on what people think. I just listened to Baby Gravy (1) recently and I was like, wow, this is fire.
Y: I think probably timing, too. My biggest project, overall, is Sensational, which was way back. I think it’s partially because those songs have a longer time to grow. Things have changed now, like with Tiktok. A lot of people are only finding music off of that app. If you look at our albums now, some songs that did catch on there are huge, and the rest of them are average. I think it just matters what the real hardcore fans like. That’s where you see what really matters, because you can’t change how the internet works.
B: Going back to your first question about reception to the recent songs, it sort of goes back to the same point. You can tell if fans like it. I remember I put out help herself, and there was no viral moment. The song ended up getting a ton of streams per day, until like the 8th month when it started going down. It’s still one of my biggest songs, and it’s always going to be one of my biggest songs because it was just fundamentally a good song.
Y: When you have songs that get millions of streams without any sort of trend online, that’s a good sign.
B: Yeah, the moment we made C’est La Vie, for instance, I knew it was going to rip. You can just hear it sometimes.
Y: It’s so much bigger than I thought, I check the numbers every day.
B: It’s huge. That in itself is another reason why we think we’re better at making music, I feel like it happens a bit more often than it used to. At the same time, you need to be cognizant that there is a larger fanbase that we have. Every day we’re growing, there might be another person that wants to put that song on.
Totally. So on this project there are two collaborations, C’est La Vie with Rich Brian and then a track with Freddie Dredd. Can you tell me a bit about how the collab with Freddie came together?
B: We sent him a message!
Y: Well, kind of, yeah. We brought him on tour. The show you came to would’ve been with Terror Reid. We had him for half the tour with him, then the other half with Freddie Dredd. It started with a message. He came to Family Feud with us!
B: Yeah, we did Family Feud Canada.
Y: He didn’t want to tour, but we convinced him to. I think we did something pretty good for him, because now he’s touring with $uicideboy$. When we were in San Diego for our show, we hit the studio with Jason Rich.
B: I remember both of us were legitimately begging him to go on tour with us. He’s a beauty, one of the nicest guys in the world for sure.
Y: Really good dude, really talented.
B: Crazy talented. Annoyingly talented. I don’t know how often you meet people who are like that. He makes beats, he does everything. Just so talented.
Y: We’ll probably work with him more in the future.
Yeah, I was going to say his style and flow really works well with your sound.
Y: His feature on the album is real good.
So, you both have been doing some festival performances this summer. How does performing at a festival compare to doing your own headline shows?
B: The primary difference is that people are typically more passive than our own headlines. Our own headlines are people that would ride or die for us, whereas there are people at festivals that just know, like, a song. Sometimes it’s hard to justify… like we just did a show in Calgary and the tickets were like $140. I’m gonna be real, even if I was a super-fan of someone, it would be kind of hard to justify $140. Sometimes festivals are reasonably priced, not saying they aren’t expensive. Usually there’s like, 20-30% of diehard fans there.
Y: We usually adjust the setlist, or I usually do. Mainly to appeal to the random people who might’ve heard a song, versus people that are hardcore fans. When I’m doing a headline show, I play the deeper cuts that they really love. It depends on where you’re at too, you can adjust what songs fit where. I’ve been doing a lot of country festivals, so I’m adding more country type music. Now we get to do a bunch together, which is exciting.
Last year, you went on your first co-headlining tour together. What was that experience like?
B: It was sick. I don’t really have another experience like that. We’ve toured in the past before, but everything was so dialed back. I’d get onstage, I’d know exactly what was going on, it would go insane, it was the perfect tour. It was great. The only thing I’d say is that it was like, 5 minutes too long every night.
Y: For us, but the fans loved it. You saw the show, we made it intricate with us switching back and forth, there were theatrics and stuff. It’s going to be hard to beat that.
B: It’s really cool to be able to do a tour where there are creative aspects to it, rather than just performing songs. Eventually, my goal was to turn my tour into a full blown circus. It was the first taste of being able to do that, financially. It was sick. It was a really cool time, and it kind of opened my eyes to adding more experience to the live shows. You hear about Aphex Twin, and his most renowned show was him sitting on a swinging piano. Every single time he does something new, and it sells out globally. Being able to offer an experience every single show, that’s the main goal, at least from my perspective. The music is one thing, but grabbing an audience is another thing.
Y: I can’t remember what the question was, but yeah. I agree!
Is co-headlining a tour something you see yourselves doing again?
Y: Oh yeah.
B: For sure, there’s no question. Realistically, I feel like we might do something in Australia. I don’t think I can go back to Australia by myself for a while, probably.
Y: We both toured Australia pretty recently. It’s definitely, after the U.S, my biggest fanbase.
B: My biggest cities are Melbourne and Sydney, out of all the cities.
Y: Minneapolis just surpassed Chicago as my number one. Chicago was number one for a while.
I need to stream more, I have to hold it down over here! To wrap up, what is your favourite memory from the creation process of Baby Gravy 3?
Y: Our horseback trip over the last couple days was pretty fun. We also hung out in Hawaii to film the video for Goodness Gracious which was fun. I guess the tour in general was kind of part of the process.
B: It’s interesting, because the tour… We’re kind of relatively deep into our careers at this point. But, I felt like doing that tour was the first time I ever did anything. I don’t know how to explain it. It felt really good, it was really refreshing and inspirational. A lot of the time you do shows, it’s amazing and super fun, but at some point it becomes really similar. It doesn’t feel new. During that tour, it was just really sick. I remember being on a call with my friend, and saying that I just feel like it’s the beginning of my music career.
Y: It’s definitely just been very good. No complaints. Every show I was happy. I think that made an impact on the album.
B: There was that one show that I was grumpy. There was one singular show, but that’s just because we didn’t sleep the night before, and it was a nightmare to get there. That show was good though.
Y: But yeah, we wanna tour together more. Australia is probably next, then maybe back to the U.S.
Baby Gravy 3 is out August 25. pre-save/add by clicking here. Follow Yung Gravy @yungggravy & follow bbno$ @bbnomula
Interview Brigid Young
Photography Sir John (John Chiaravalle)
