Kevin Garrett is a Grammy-nominated pop artist and producer, signed to Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, and picking up the mentioned nomination for his work on Beyoncé’s album, Lemonade. We chat to him about how creative he’s been keeping during the quarantine period.
“There’s all sorts of names [for lockdown] here in the States: ‘Shelter In Place’, ‘Quarantine’, ‘Isolation Pod’, whatever makes people try and embrace it a bit more,” opens Garrett.
Usually based in Los Angeles (as you’d probably expect), Garrett is curently at home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: “I was quarantining out in LA until late March working on my new record. But then we hit this ‘shut the world down’ situation and I made a mad dash home to be closer to my family. I do have a home studio set up here, so fortunately I have been able to continue working.”
There is a joke in the music community that producers choose to self-isolate anyway all day in their studios, so what’s new?
“Yeah, I’m looking at it with a ‘glass half full’ mentality,” Garrett smiles. “I don’t like going out that much anyway! And because I travel so much for work, I don’t get to spend much time at my apartment, so it’s actually kind of nice.”
Juggling the two hats of being a producer and an artist in his own right has paid dividends in Garrett’s case. Having released his debut EP, Mellow Drama, in 2015, it was only a year later when he found himself in a situation where a song he had written was to be used for the Beyoncé album, Lemonade.
Indeed, Pray You Catch Me became the opening song on the album, which Metacritic lists as the eighteenth most critically- acclaimed album of all time.