MoMoney Studios · The founder's statement
I always heard aSong Within a Song
I didn't learn chop-and-screw, DJing, and remixes the typical path. Music is like math to me — I played with pitch and timing because I could hear another record hiding inside the one that was playing. This label is what happened when I finally caught it.
The root
Edgefield, since 1825
Patrick and Fanny were sold out of Virginia and purchased for $400 — I believe in 1825. We've been in Edgefield District ever since.
We're lucky our courthouse never burned, so I can trace all of it — the white owners back to their immigration into the Carolina colony, my family through the slave rolls, probate, sales, and census.
The church is built on land my family worked on — and then owned. The record, unbroken
The inheritance
Hard work and a saxophone
My father came out of racism the hard way — on work, and on his saxophone. In our house, music, academics, and athletics weren't extracurriculars. They were instilled from birth.
It ran the whole house. My grandfather sang in the men's choir — a beautiful lyrical bass — and so did my cousin Tammy. My aunt and uncle played saxophone too: Dad on alto, my younger brother tenor, my oldest brother bass.
Me? Gifted program two years early, music- and science-focused. Piano until junior high, then brass — a tutor flying in from LA every week, the trombonist from the Johnny Carson Show. F-attachment early, valve trombone by 8th grade. First and second chair, a shelf of UIL awards.
Tammy would make the pews vibrate. Sunday · Edgefield District
The method
Two years of the sixteenth take
I spent two years making really bad mixes. Fifteen takes that sound crazy — then five minutes of the sixteenth where it clicks: the groove reveals itself, and a whole new song is playing where the old one used to be.
That's the ear the personas inherit. Funk-precise timing over a ghetto beat, country storytelling, gospel melisma — real-life stories, rendered predictably, take after take.
15 takes that sound crazy · 5 good minutes on the 16th
One groove, verbatim
Where the click lives
Why the personas
I bake my life into the roster. The songs are real.
Personal, shared, observed — or all three at once. The virtual employees carry the stories: Magnolia's testimony, Harry's juke joint, Bunny's survival documentation. Tuned voices that render predictably — same character, same history, same agenda, every take — while I stay behind the boards.
Magnolia Divine is my Aunt Ida. Charlie Strait is my cousin Tammy — the bass that made the pews vibrate. Brother Johnson is my grandfather. And the horn sections are what it would sound like if me and my brothers were writing to play with Dad.
I wasn't raised to share, so the records do the talking. AI is the instrument. The life is mine.
Where it goes next: Strippin' and Sippin' — Magnolia Divine, out August 7.