ON THE RISE
VICTORIA, BC — Mr. Esq grew up in a small port town on Canada’s southwest coast named Esquimalt, and that community gave him his stage name.
Now he’s working to help young people avoid the problems he had and mistakes he made while as a youngster in Esquimalt with his latest album, ‘Esquire’ coming out July 14.
“This is my first album with the label Predominate Studios, this will be my 18th album in the last three and a half years,” Mr. Esq said. “This album, 20 tracks for the label, it’s my reintroduction to the hip hop scene with this label backing me and I wanted to do something a little more creative and different.
“The topics of this, there’s a bunch. It goes from ‘Rich Problems,’ I wrote a song about my mother, ‘A Mother’s Day.’ There are songs about abusive relationships, COVID, Black Lives Matter, the indigenous people and the babies that were found, and there’s a whole spectrum about content songs. Songs about the youth and the direction they’re going. I’ve got something for everybody. Then there are some clubby, banging songs, songs for the ladies, I talk about sexual abuse, I talk about all kinds of things.”
Mr. Esq said his time in prison and a child he lost more than 20 years ago are helping feed his music today and helping him mold his message.
“I spent 10 years in prison,” he said. “I was 18 years old, I was part of an escort agency, selling drugs for certain people. I got a girl pregnant, she moved away and I went with her, then she lost all the amniotic fluid six and a half or seven months into the pregnancy and it forced her to go into labor. My son passed away at birth. That sent me down an even darker path at that point, just drinking more and being more violent, hurting people. It’s ultimately what led to my incarceration.”
After he got out of prison, he worked hard to change his life and a happy coincidence helped along the way.
“I met a girl and I had a daughter with her,” Mr. Esq said. “The doctor told me the due date and it was the exact same date my son passed away. Ten years to the day my daughter was born on the same day my son died 10 years apart. So we celebrate both their birthdays on the same day, she wears his ashes and she knows all about her big brother. The worst day of my life was changed and now it’s the best day of my life
“It’s crazy how the universe works because what kind of father would I have been at 18 years old selling drugs and being a knuckle head, as opposed to now, my daughter is my world, she means everything to me and everything I do every day is to provide her with a life that I never had and make sure she never walks the path that I lived when I was growing up.”
Mr. Esq said his latest single, ‘Rich Problems’ was the result of a fun collaboration with a friend, the rapper and artist Madchild.
“So a buddy of mine Madchild, he's a really really good artist and he’s made some huge new moves in the community of hip hop,” Mr. Esq said. “So I grew up listening to his music and we became good friends and he pulled up to my house in a G-Wagon (a Mercedes G-class SUV) and I said, oh, you’ve got Rich Problems. We Kind of laughed about it and then we ended up going to the studio and that beat came on and I started going through the beat in my head and seeing what comes and Anything you really got is a Rich Problem. That’s the first thing that came to my head and we started writing and we just made magic from there.”
Mr. Esq said “Rich Problems” is about having complaints that really aren’t that serious in the wider scheme of things.
“A lot of people have complaints about their relationships or girls or the pandemic or gas prices, shit like that, it’s like I want to have Rich Problems,” Mr. Esq said. “I’ve got too much money, I need to figure out what to do with it. That’s kind of what the song is about, when you have rich problems, you have no more problems, everything’s just taken care of. Maybe one day I’ll have those kinds of problems, but really it was just a fun song to make with my buddy Madchild, and it turned out to be pretty good. I like how it came together.”
To listen to Mr. Esq’s music, or to follow him on social media, please visit the following links:
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ON THE RISE
Blossoms caught up with NME to discuss competing with The Beatles and Johnny Marr for this week’s Number One album. With ‘Songs From The Wedding Cake’ in the running, the band also explained why making things themselves remains such an important part of their work as AI becomes more common.
The Stockport group put out their sixth album last Friday, October 2. By the midweek update, it was sitting at Number Two, between The Beatles’ expanded edition of ‘Rubber Soul’ and Johnny Marr’s latest solo album, ‘The Age Of Everything’.
“It’s mad, to be honest,” singer Tom Ogden said to NME about the chart race. “Liverpool on one side, Manchester on the other and Stockport in the middle. If you’d told us this 10 years ago, when we were releasing our debut, I wouldn’t have believed you. But I mean, we’re in good company aren’t we?”
Discussing the stories behind the album, Ogden described ‘Songs From The Wedding Cake’ as “about being married and all the everyday stuff that comes with it”. He married Katie Donovan, the sister of Blossoms drummer Joe, in 2021. Married life has since given him a new appreciation for what he describes as “the extraordinary ordinary”.
“Saying the wrong thing in an argument, losing your wife’s no claims bonus, crying at the Kardashians, it’s all in there,” he explained. “The album is named after Stockport Town Hall, which everyone round where we live calls the Wedding Cake, and it’s where I got married, so it couldn’t be much closer to home.
“The last album [‘Gary’, 2024] had a song about a stolen fibreglass gorilla, which everyone loved, and that gave us the confidence to bring the same playfulness to this one, just with more personal subject matter this time.”
Alongside tracks that came out of writing sessions with Declan McKenna in a hot tub, the album reflects the band’s desire to stay involved in every part of the creative process.
“It started with the recording,” Ogden explained. “We made the album with Shawn Lee, playing live straight to tape, and once you’ve done it that way you can’t really go and fake everything else. We sat down as a band and picked the colour palette, and everything visual followed from that. We had body scans taken of ourselves and cake toppers of the five of us 3D printed, put them on a real cake and photographed it. I’ve directed and edited the videos, and the sets are all built by hand, no green screen. For the pop-up shop on launch weekend, a local artist hand-painted the album cover for the sign outside.
“It’s more work, but you end up with a world that’s yours, and I think people can tell when a band’s had its hands on everything.”
With AI tools and digital effects becoming increasingly widespread, that approach feels particularly relevant. For Blossoms, though, the motivation is simple: “the fun is in the making”.
“Tape doesn’t let you cheat and neither does a real cake,” Ogden said. “If a set’s a bit wonky, it’s because one of us or our mates built it. I think the more stuff gets generated, the more people want to know a human being actually did it. We’ve been in this band together for over 10 years, five lads from Stockport, and that isn’t something you can ‘prompt’.”
Maya Jama also appeared in the video for the album’s first single, ‘Meet Me In Love’. Her appearance came shortly before the UK launch of Celebrity Traitors, where she took on the role of a traitor alongside a cast that included Richard E Grant and James Acaster.
“She was brilliant,” Ogden recalled of working with Jama. “We’d met her at the MTV EMAs in Manchester a couple of years ago, so we took a chance and sent her a DM …and she said yes. Next thing she’s in a theatre in Cheadle miming my vocals while a load of people dressed as me serenade her. She got the idea straight away and was a proper laugh about it.”
The conversation then turned to whether he thought Jama could take home the win on Celebrity Traitors.
Ogden joked: “As for Traitors, she spent a whole day pretending to sing my song and I almost believed her, so I’d say she’s got every chance.”
Fans can listen to ‘Songs From The Wedding Cake’ now. In November, Blossoms head out on a UK arena tour with The Royston Club. Tickets and further details are available here.
Before the tour begins, the group is also scheduled to appear on SNL UK on Saturday, October 24.
