MC Lars’s brand new record, Lars Attacks!, is officially out on Horris Records. PropertyOfZack is a big fan of Lars, and he was kind enough to write up a detailed Track-By-Track guide behind each of the songs on his new record for fans. Read up and make sure to pick up a copy of the record!

Going Back to Brooklyn
In 2009 I was liiving in the Bay Area and was tired of the hip-hop game.  I was figuring out if it were time to go to keep following my music path or if it were time to apply to graduate school and start my second career as a teacher and academic.  Right when I was in this creative lull and about to call it quits, I met a girl who inspired me again and we decided it would be romantic to run off to New York together.  The year was amazing - this song is about that, finding my heart and passion again when I was just about to stop doing MC Lars.  ”Everything was back on track and everything was fine.”

The Gospel of Hip-Hop (featuring KRS-One)
My last album had a track with “Weird Al” Yankovic, this album has a song with KRS-One…. two of my biggest heroes in music.  I read KRS’s book The Gospel of Hip-Hop in 2009 - an amazing spiritual manifesto on how hip-hop has the power to change lives and divinely reinvent culture and society.  This is a theme throughout my album , rebirth and divine order in the beauty of music. KRS sees hip-hop culture as a blessing through which God speaks and gives people hope, life, inspiration and focus.  On this track he rhymes about the current state of hip-hop and I rhyme about my relationship to it as a kid who discovered it after it was already a gigantic presence on this planet.  This song inspires me going back to listen to it and of course KRS killed it on his verses.  

Lars Attacks!
This was one of the first songs I wrote for the record.  One of my West Coast producer friends, Brandon of the Rondo Brothers, said it would be a cool name for an album when we were hanging out one day… and he was right.  ”Mars Attacks!” is one of my favorite Burton films, even though it wasn’t a huge commercial success and it’s pretty dark… I ripped off the logo for the album cover and all of my merch this year.  I have a song called “Space Game” on my record “the Graduate”, and this track continues the sci-fi battle rhyme motif.  We did a video for this song where I roll through a city as a creepy alien, destroying everything in my path.  That’s a metaphor for my presence in the hip-hop community.

History’s Greatest Assholes
I asked my Facebook fans who they thought should be included in a song of this title and everyone who got more than three votes makes an appearance in this song.  Also, I had a Kickstarter donor option where people could “perform” on the album and I layered their instruments and they became part of the chorus…. so yes, this track was extremely “crowdsourced”.  Also, the villains on this track are listed more-or-less chronologically.

Summer Camp Love (Is So in Tents)
Like many people, I have fallen in love at summer camp.  This song was originally co-written with a British friend named Richard Barham in 2007 and took on many different levels of evolution since its original demo.  My ex-girlfriend sings on the chorus  of track and I coincidentally met her at the summer camp I went to as a kid.  

Venomous Box Jellyfish 
A venomous box jellyfish is one of the world’s most poisonous animals.  When I opened for Snoop Dogg in the spring and played this song, the crowd was both confused and annoyed.  I wrote the stream-of-consciousness raps about Brooklyn… the story about what happened at the New York Public Library was true.  

Judas Priest
There’s a lost gospel that says that Judas didn’t sell out Jesus - rather Jesus asked him to turn him in so he could be crucified and save humanity.  This is a dark track about everything Judas must have gone through in realizing he had to be part in his friend’s death.  My friend Krztoff from the industrial New York band Bile sings on the chorus and this one of my favorite songs I’ve ever recorded, even though it’s super scary.   

How to be an Indie Rapper (featuring Weerd Science)
I was a fan of Weerd Science’s for years and in 2011 my label Horris Records was able to put out his album “Sick Kids”… he’s the only other artist on my roster.  We just did Warped Tour together. We got together and wrote an instructional song about what it takes to be a DIY rapper, listing the steps and the ABCs of it.  One day I want to make a whole album with him.

Mike Russo Cut Your Hair
Our guitarist and tour manager Mike is a very hardworking man.  Sometimes I feel like he needs to relax more.  One night we had to get from Florida to New Jersey for a college tour and he drove the whole way, shaking because the drive was so ridiculously long.  He used to have really long metal looking hair and he’d wave it around when he played on stage with us….  it didn’t really fit the MC Lars laptop rap vibe so we wrote this song about how he needed to update his style.  Guess what!  He did.  You can see him on stage with us this fall on the mc chris tour, clean-cut and handsome.

Francis Bacon Slashed the Canvas (featuring John Reuben)
From 2007 to 2009 I was dating a Suicide Girl from Olympia that ended up not being too good for me.  She didn’t believe in God and I definitely did and we fought about it constantly.  This song is about our breakup and how good it felt to claim my own space.  Tina Minero from Switchblade Symphony sings on this song, she’s the creepy-sounding industrial vocalist on the pre-chorus.  Also, Christian rapper John Reuben steals the show as God in the third verse reminding me that everything would be okay and I needed to date women with less tattoos and piercings.

Super Scope
The Super Scope was an old SNES controller that you would use to shoot aliens and spaceships back in the 90s.  Anything that was negative or impeding me I decided I’d look at through my “Super Scope” and evaporate.  The metaphor is about being positive and how understanding hip-hop in a new and spiritual way really helped me keep going for so freaking long.  ”This is how I’ll always be with G-O-D inside of me,” I rhyme on the second verse.

Art of Darkness (featuring Sage Francis)
I had been a fan of Sage’s for years and met him at SXSW in 2007 when I interviewed him for Current TV.  We kept in touch and I asked him to do a song with me.  ”Art of Darkness” a track about being addicted to making art and not being able to stop to the detriment of everything else.  The two characters are letting go of reality and slipping into their own worlds, for better or for verse.  I love how Sage flows on this track, the emotion and power of his words chokes me up because he’s such and artist and his been through everything he rhymes about.  I spent a really long time on my parts because I wanted to match one of the masters of indie rap.  To rhyme with him was truly an honor.

Make a Friend on 27th Street
I draw a webcomic called “27th Street” and this song is about the characters in it… it follows the theme of the previous track, about how your art can eat you up and consume you if you’re not careful.  You can read my comics at http://comics.mclars.com.  

The Giving Tree (featuring Mac Lethal)
I saw Mac Lethal open for Twiztid in San Francisco in 2002 and was a fun ever since.  I got in touch with him on Myspace back when people used Myspace and we kept in touch and decided to work together on a track.  This song is based on a classic Shel Silverstein book about a tree that gives and gives unconditionally to a young boy.  It’s a touching story and I see hip-hop as the tree that never stops giving… a theme throughout the album.

Annabel Lee R.I.P.
I love writing hip-hop songs about literature, I call the genre “lit-hop”.  This track is based on one of my favorite poems of all time “Annabel Lee”, a poem Poe wrote about his wife after she died.  This song is about dealing with the pain and the loss of losing someone important to you.  As I was finishing “Lars Attacks!”, my girlfriend and I started growing further and further away from each other and I empathized with Poe’s sense of loss.  The raps follow Poe’s iambic tetrameter, the same poetic form as hip-hop, which is why his meter flows beautifully over the beat.  My next album is going to be all literature songs.