David Aaron Greenberg Shares ‘Snap Shot’ From ‘Trap Poems’
‘Snap Shot’ is the latest single from David Aaron Greenberg’s ‘Trap Poems,’ and it cuts straight to the core of what he’s doing here.
Greenberg, a multidisciplinary artist and one of the last protégés of Allen Ginsberg, has been circling this intersection of poetry and rhythm for years. On ‘Trap Poems,’ he tightens the idea into something more exact. The term is his, but it functions more like a rule set. The project is shaped alongside producer David Sisko, whose history with Greenberg goes back decades. As Greenberg puts it:
“David Sisko and I were introduced to each other by the legendary music impresario Steve Paul in 1999. Initially, we started writing songs together in a traditional manner. I’d bring an idea in with basic chords and melody and Sisko would maybe change a key or re-arrange it. Over the years, this collaboration has evolved. We’ve written songs in various ways and for other artists like Sandflower and Toots Hibbert (Toots and the Maytals). Our process has become very organic. Ideas can come from either of us and there’s always a certain kind of magic when we are in the studio together. For Trap Poems, Sisko played me a beat he had been composing and I spontaneously read a poem I had to that beat. I changed up some lines, repeated some more lines and just had fun with it. This sparked a new direction for us. I had years of poems to choose from and Sisko had years of beats. We worked out over the course of a few years which poems went best with which beats. I down over two years performing these poems at venues in NYC and in Asbury Park as part of the so-called New Jersey Poetry Renaissance. In the meantime, I published a collection of the poems entitled Trap Poens & Lit Drawings. We decided to finally make an album of this collection. By this point, we had worked out the timing and arrangements so that the album itself was a a cohesive music journey. Our years together writing traditional songs helped to create a very open and fertile atmosphere where ultimately something very cutting edge and experimental was able to blossom.”
That sense of long-built trust shows up in the music. The production stays pretty lean and deliberate, giving Greenberg room to stretch and snap his phrasing. Earlier singles ‘Chill’ and ‘Streets’ leaned into a cooler glide. ‘Snap Shot’ is sharper. You can hear traces of jazz poetry and Nuyorican traditions in the background, but he’s not preserving them. He’s compressing them, running them through a stripped, modern frame.
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