On the eve of his release party for his major LP debut, a rattled yet passionate rapper, Reg Mason, busts it on the freeway after a morning waiting shift to chat with EARMILK alongside fellow Jersey native and collaborator CURT to discuss Dairy Queen essentials, jazz and his new album TESTDRIVE'.

The Spirit of Jersey and its creative force can best be defined as “being left to your own devices”, and according to Jersey legend in the making, Reg Mason, it’s all about “creating something very human and something very cool.”

Mason is nearing a pivotal moment in his creative career; the arrival of a major LP and a departure from the mixtape era. TESTDRIVE' is the fourth LP in the rapper's catalog but serves as a great introduction to a storyteller that is the culmination of the love and support that can come from a community of creatives.

Mason loves his city, but it’s the love that he gets from his colleagues and fellow artists that brings out the best of his art to life. This is best exemplified by the presence of CURT, a fellow Jersey creative and one of the main producers forefronting the project.

TESTDRIVE' is a strong introduction to Mason on all fronts of rap, showcasing a jack of all trades. The LP brings out multiple faucets in Mason’s arsenal from a ferocious attitude over hard-hitting drums in the album intro “marah’” to a deeply vulnerable side that hits over a soul sample showcased on “fearful’/ MA’”.

This feels like a formal greeting to the rapper because of the many moments where Mason’s personality is on full display. Moments like the Turnstile reference on the title track to quoting the “It’s time for jazz” viral tweet, make the listener build a closer relationship with Mason through sound and the end result is wanting to root for him.

TESTDRIVE' is the collaborative efforts of lyrical maestro Reg Mason and long-time colleague and producer CURT. The two's friendship reflects throughout the project with moments of tender conversation and encouragement and CURT's production style perfectly accompanies Mason’s humorous raps and assertive hooks.

Reg Mason and CURT sat with EARMILK to discuss the community efforts of raising TESTDRIVE' and “linking the chain” in the process.

“It felt very normal, it felt meant to be”

EARMILK: How are you doing today? TESTDRIVE' is your debut so I imagine you’re excited for the drop.

Reg: “Oh yeah, my emotions kinda change from day to day and I’ll go from oh I’m super excited but then the next day I’ll be like jaded. But that has less to do with the album, but this is something more important to me, Curt, and everybody so it’s been getting me through a lot of the weird stuff that’s been going on this past summer.”

How long has this album been in the works?

Reg: “Since last June?”

Curt: “We started recording last June, we spent the entire summer recording, and then from September to November, we got all the arranging to fit the album and then the last month of December we spent it mixing.”

Curt, I’m super excited to have you here, the whole album is produced by you correct?

Curt: “Well for the album, about 85%-90%.”

So you take the main lead on production?

Curt: “Yeah.”

So how did the collaboration with Reg start?

Curt: “Reg and I went to high school actually, and around the time that I met him I didn’t know he was doing music until a year of us being friends and I wasn’t doing music at the time, but I was very inspired by how he was creating at that early age and I had already been playing keys for some years, I was playing at my church and Reg and some of the other homies were like ‘oh you should make beats’ and I would brush it off, but uh some years went by and Reg and some other homies performed at Afropunks Battle of The Bands and they won and I was really inspired. That lit a fire in me.”

Curt: “About 2019, into the pandemic I started making beats and I would send them to Reg and he would be like ‘Oh this is fire’ or whatever, and one day he sent back a verse and I was like okay this is different. So the last few years it’s been different demos being sent back and forth and last June is when he was like ‘I really want to rap’, and we locked in and made a bunch of songs over the summer.”

Bouncing off that, Reg, how did it feel working with a producer for a majority of a project versus jumping in between a group of producers?

Reg: “It felt pretty normal, honestly, me and Curtis, we come from different worlds as far as musical background but we have similar taste and I trust his ear and I trust his eye. There’s not many people around here who get it whatever is swirling around in my head and Curtis can see whatever is going on and he can throw his interpretation on it and make it feel multi-dimensional."

Putting multi-dimensional and normal next to each other sounds like an oxymoron, but I like that.

Reg: “Yeah that’s funny,” he chuckled.

“By design, it’s in my nature to overthink like crazy, which is funny when it comes to how we approached to the visual language of the album because it’s very simple and human is what we were aiming for.”

Curt: “Really a lot of like, long takes and cutting those in between. It’s not a whole lot of camera movement."

So you both had a lot of input for the direction in the music videos?

Curt: “Yeah we both were figuring out the video work as we went”

There is so much more jazz presented on this album than I thought there’d be, tell me more about the jazz influence

Curt: “As far as the jazz, it’s a couple of things. Soundwise, one of my favorite albums in high school was Kendricks To Pimp a Butterfly. Growing up playing piano, my dad always wanted me to get into jazz and jazz seemed like upper echelon and academic, but hearing that album with artists like Terrace Martin, Thundercat, and Robert Glasper, and hearing how they made jazz in a very current world and understandable for someone like me, that was the jumping point to study jazz."

"Looking back and looking forward so when it came to sampling and making jazz to a degree, I looked at one of my favorite producers Madlib. He would make samples that sound live or make live sounds that sounded sampled. And ironically my family nickname is “jazz” so on “Handshakes” there’s a whole entendre about the nickname.”

Reg: “Yeah there’s a triple entendre where in the first line of “TESTDRIVE” the title track, I go “You’re 23, it’s time for jazz!”

Going back to the album itself, Reg, tell me more about the concept behind the name. There’s a lot of raceway imagery sprinkled throughout the project.

Reg: “Well the last project was called SPEEDWAY and I really like taking things and running with it. A lot of my favorite artists have projects that are interconnected so with SPEEDWAY, at least to me, I think of something really fast and forceful so I’m going to make five tracks that feel like a complete breeze so with TESTDRIVE' I knew it was going to be a full LP, but I didn’t want it to be a slow burner. While SPEEDWAY was fast, TESTDRIVE' is a lot more moderate-paced. So I wanted to keep that motion-based concept and it took its own form over a while.”

Curt: “One thing that I noticed when showing friends of ours and was pretty consistent was that the minute they heard the first track, they were invested the entire way through. At no point did it feel like it slowed down in any way. It was one continuous piece.”

“Time is very limited. I always say time is the only currency you can spend and never get back"

That’s what I thought. “Marah’”(the track opener) goes unexpectedly hard.

Reg: “That’s the track for why the album exists.”

Curt: "Actually it’s the first track we recorded for the project.”

Does that mean “Sequel/ Cute” are the last tracks you recorded for the project?

Reg: “Yeah, actually!”

You have such a strong start and then your dad gets his own interlude, but then, later on, your mom shows up too! What influence did your parents carry on this project?

Reg: “I think it was more of I wanted my parents immortalized in my art."

“Time is very limited. I always say time is the only currency you can spend and never get back so I thought it was cool to picture my parents being a part of my life and having something that lives forever to show to future generations.”

“It was a mixture of immortalizing my parents and pulling the curtain back on my personal life and letting people fill in the gaps of what my father's presence means to me or what my mom means to me."

Your uncle is there too, no?

Reg: “Yes!”

“My uncle is a huge reason for me doing all this, he’s like the first adult who told me I can do this and was really supportive from the start.”

How can the spirit of Jersey be defined and how does it influence you on this album?

Reg: “I think there’s a level of hunger and adversity and necessity.”

Curt: “Any strives from people from Jersey comes from a chip on our shoulder. We’re in an area nobody really looks for cause we’re next to some of the most well-known cities in the world and being that close to there but also not having the infrastructure in music or art to make something in Jersey, people either have to go to New York or Philadelphia or even as far as moving to LA to get something going and I think the lack of that leaves people from Jersey with a certain attitude.”

Reg: “It’s like being so close yet so far and it leaves people to carry to their own devices and that’s when you get something really human and cool and within your reach. I think that’s what defines the spirit of Jersey, the spirit of this project.”

Curt: “It’s very D.I.Y. A lot of artists, especially artists in Jersey have had to make something of a career in Jersey. If you’re a singer, you’re not just a singer. You gotta be an engineer, sometimes you gotta be your own producer to get anything. Those outlets aren't naturally there, they aren't readily available where we’re from.”

With all the tribulations that come from crafting your art in such a specific space, I wanted to ask you, what headspace were you in when crafting “fearful”? (a stand out from the project).

Reg: “A bad one.”

Reg: “I was in a very weird, spotty place. I recorded that the night before I had a job interview and after that was done, when Covid was done, stimmy money was dried up, I had to make something work. I think the headspace I was in was that of intrusive thoughts. I let those intrusive thoughts write the song for me. It didn’t take much writing on my end since it was just letting those thoughts out on paper so it was a very grey space I was writing in.”

“Fearful’/ MA’” is a really sincere and vulnerable song on the album and up to that point, you show how passionate you are about your city. So much so that at the end of TESTDRIVE' you make a comment about seeing dudes claiming they're from New York at the Dairy Queen on Moris Avenue. So I have to ask you: what’s your go-to order for Dairy Queen on Moris Avenue?

Reg: “I’m so damn basic..”

Curt: “Oreo blizzard with the chicken fingers and fries.”

Reg: “Literally!”

Curt: “I’m not that experimental with my ice creams.”

Reg: “Yeah but Dairy Queen’s hot food is absolutely delicious. It's nothing crazy, maybe I'll get a side of buffalo sauce to spice things up."

“I want this album to inspire people to do something they’ve been putting off for a really long time. You want to be a master crocheter? Fuck it, make a sweater.”

What impression do you want fans to walk away with after listening to this album?

Reg: “I want people to consider this as a positive influence on them the way I have that relationship with other records. There’s one record that’s been getting me through everything and it’s this record called Life Under the Gun by Militarie Gun. They’re this alternative rock band but they have this one song on there called “Big Disappointment” and I have a borderline religious experience with that song so it made me sit back and wonder if anyone’s feeling the same way with our album. Because music and literature is really powerful to me and I want to make sure I don’t consume bullshit so my only hope is that people find my shit as powerful as a lot of the people that are my predecessors.”

Curt: “I feel the same. I forgot which producer said it, but there’s this concept of linking the chain. Taking all the stuff that’s inspired you and using that to hopefully inspire someone else in the same light. So hopefully I can make music that somebody can see what I saw in my favorite artists.”

Reg: “I want this album to inspire people to do something they’ve been putting off for a really long time. You want to be a master crocheter? Fuck it, make a sweater.”