Music:

Member Since: 18/09/2007
Band Website: pilotrai.com
Band Members:

Influences: Pilot Rai in the Press Promoting Dressed To Kill Time.
City Link Article dated 12/26/07

People always advise against running away from problems. But Pilot Rai’s “InnerState Love Song” could prompt listeners to abandon that tired way of thinking. “‘Why not stay,’ I heard you say,” he sings while strumming guitar amid bubbling hookahs at Funky Buddha Lounge. “Why not go away, that’s all I’ve got to say, there’s people who live their life without a care inside to see … why not you and why not me?” By the time the Dylan-esque Coral Springs guitarist questions why work has to be “such a dog damn living hell” people may wonder, “Why not leave?”
But the 30-year-old Pilot Rai, better known as PR, remains in South Florida, where he runs his father’s Fort Lauderdale junkyard and records folk and hip-hop in his Margate recording studio. While growing up on hip-hop and his father’s favorites, such as Dylan and John Lennon, PR started writing stories and rhymes, which he eventually brought into the studio of his beatmaker friend, DJ Immortal. “I. went in there and started recording with him,” PR says, “basically being an MC on top of his tracks.”
Then, he decided to make his own music. “So I grabbed the guitar and started playing,” he explains. “That wasn’t enough, so I grabbed the keyboards and learned to play, and then a set of drums.” Last year, these musical endeavors culminated in The Odd Results of Inner Conflicts, an acoustic and hip-hop CD that he worked on with DJ Immortal. PR now divides his time between his solo acoustic stuff and the hip-hop outfit The 7D. “I chose folk music and hip-hop because they’re very lyrically oriented and I want to speak to the people,” PR says. “I want people to be able to grab that song and relate to it, not just today or tomorrow, but two years from now, 210 years from now. … I want something that people would actually say, ‘I coulda wrote that. … I feel exactly the same way.’.”

Dressed To Kill Time, the CD he’ll release in January, contains such songs, including the title track about how people kill time doing what they don’t want to do, and the aforementioned “InnerState Love Song.” The 7D, which includes The Architect, DJ Immortal and MC and producer Chopp Devize, also plans to release a CD next year.
“It’s real deep stuff. A lot of it’s about freedom or just breaking free from your limitations and bringing out your true inner self … your true strength,” Devize says. That release will include “Another Way,” a song for which the group recently made a video that was filmed in several locations including a forest, the beach, a library and atop wrecked cars at the junkyard where PR survives his own dog-damn-living-hell days.
When not at the salvage yard or performing, PR paints, draws or works on film projects such as “Already Gone,” a stop-motion and 3-D animation video he released on DVD with last year’s album. He’s also working on a series in which characters made from soda cans provide entertaining commentary on the news, and playing the mad-scientist role in Self: Direction 7, Devize’s indie film that’s billed as an avant-garde mix of adventure, martial arts, 1sci-fi, hip-hop and comedy.
Despite the challenges of engaging in all these projects while working full-time, PR says he wouldn’t be happy if he weren’t writing songs and making art. “If I could stop, I would,” he says. “My life would be simple if I wasn’t a starving artist.”
— Colleen Dougher

The 7D will perform 9.p.m. Friday at Players, 5280 N. State Road.7, in North Lauderdale. Xavier Hawk, Mike Mineo and The J..Hexx Project will also perform. Admission is $10. Call 954/733-0990 or visit Playerssportsbar441.com. Pilot Rai will perform 8.p.m. Saturday at The Funky Buddha Lounge, 2621 N. Federal Highway, in Boca Raton. The 7D will also play. Admission is $5. Call 561/368-4643 or visit Myspace.com/thefunkybuddhalounge. A free CD featuring a Christmas tune and songs from Pilot Rai and The 7D will be given out to the first 50 fans at both shows, and advance copies of both acts’ albums will be sold.

Q&A with PR

CD: Could you tell me a little about your background, and how your interest in music developed?

PR: Well, I would say my whole interest in music started with my dad, and he never really played music but he was really into old music and he was a real guitar kind of guy and I mean, I just grew up listening to John Lennon, Bob Dylan and you know, everybody, who he called with talent. He was never really into the pop scene and he just grew me up on like that type of music, and that’s really how I just was always into it. And then one day I had a friend, DJ Immortal and he said he opened up a studio and I said "Let me take some of the stuff that I’ve been writing down and come into the studio." And I went in there and I started recording with him, basically being an MC on top of his tracks. He had beats that he made.

CD: How old were you?

PR: That was in 2000. So I really started recording around, I think I was 23. And I just recorded with him. I put out that one album ... and that was strictly just over his songs that he had already done. And then for the next one, then I started playing the guitar. I grabbed the guitar and I said I want to be able to make my own music with this. So I just grabbed the guitar and I bought myself a chord book and I started playing.

CD: What was the first guitar song that you wrote?

PR: The first guitar song that I wrote, it was actually a funny song, it’s called “Lazy Puke.” And I do it pretty much every show that I ever do, because it’s on the more comedy side.

CD: Yeah, I think I saw a video online.

PR: Did you see the cartoon?

CD: The Already Gone cartoon?

PR: No, I have a cartoon for "Lazy Puke."

CD: I didn't see that.

PR: Yeah, I have a cartoon for that also. That was actually the very first song, and I didn’t really take myself all too serious, so I couldn’t see myself writing a serious song, and then from there I just kept on playing the guitar and I couldn’t help but write songs to what I was playing. And it ended up becoming what it is now. And I mean, I would call myself more of a folk artist than anything else at the moment.

CD: There was also a video of a Funky Buddha party, where you played a song you had written just the day before ... Inner State Love Song?

PR: Yeah.

CD: That’s a great song.

PR: You like that song?

CD: Yeah.

PR: Thank you very much.

CD: I can’t believe you just wrote that just the day before.

PR: Yeah, I like to do that when I write a song. I like to do the open mikes right after I just write them, because you just made this baby and you just have to show everybody. And you can’t wait, so I’ll go out and I’ll like, you know, I’m not afraid to go and play a song that I just wrote, and have a good time with it, and hope that people will relate to it and like it. If I get a good response, I’ll go ahead and record it and if it’s something I don’t feel happy playing in front of people, then I won’t record it.

CD: Is Pilot Rai your recording name?

PR: Yeah, that’s my recording name.

CD: What’s your real name?

PR: My real name is Paul Raimondo.

CD: So you started out doing the hip-hop spoken word thing, and then started picking up the guitar?

PR: Yeah, I was always an MC because I was always a writer. I always wrote little stories and rhymes and stuff and then yeah, I decided I wanted to be able to make my own music, so I grabbed the guitar and started playing. That wasn’t enough, so I grabbed the keyboards and learned to play and then a set of drums.

CD: Your next CD, the one coming out in January, will that be more of the type of music you’ve been doing?

PR: Yeah, that’s gonna be more that type of music and it has a couple of I would say folk-influenced hip hop songs more then hip-hop influenced folk songs on it. I play all the instruments on this next album that I do.

CD: Is "Inner State Love Song," going to be on the CD as well?

PR: Yeah, that one and one called "Dressed to Kill Time" are gonna be the two like singles that I’m gonna try to put out.

CD: That will be the name of the CD?

PR: Yes, that’s gonna be the name of the album, Dressed to Kill Time.

CD: So are you still doing the hip hop too?

PR: Yeah. I’m actually in a hip-hop band right now. It’s called The 7D, which also has a couple of those songs on [The CD]. Those were the rap songs you heard, like “Another Way.” Those are with 7D, and what we have now is we have a full live band that we do it with.

CD: I saw one of the performances online.

PR: “Lock It Up” or something like that? The guy with the saxophone?

CD: Yeah, that’s the one.

PR: You know, he had never ever played with us, ever. That was actually the day that we decided to put a full band with the 7D because it was just my production. I was doing my own production and then we got him there, the guys name is Burny.

CD: What’s his last name?

PR: I forget his last name at the moment.

CD: Just Burny then?

PR: Yeah, Burny. Burny P. Wait, Pelsmajer. Burny Pelsmajer

CD: That was his first time, huh?

PR: Yeah, that was his first time playing with us. He just has the greatest ear for music and so now we’re doing a whole album together.

CD: Great fit.

PR: Yeah, it’s gonna be really good. I’m looking forward to that.

CD: What is your day job?

PR: My day job? I have a salvage yard in Fort Lauderdale, a junkyard.

CD: What do you do there?

PR: I run the place. It’s my dad’s place, and he comes in and works maybe two days a week, and I basically run the show over there.

CD: So that’s been the family business for a long time?

PR: Yeah, the family business.

CD: Did you grow up here?

PR: I grew up in Coral Springs.

CD: The video profile of you that Underlab Studios put online was really well-done.

PR: Yeah, he did it really good. That’s Jon.

CD: I was impressed with the way that was put together. It was compelling and entertaining, and got to the heart of things.

PR: Yeah, and it really showed a lot of aspects of what I do, and I mean he showed it to me one day and I was just like "Jon, wow. Thanks a lot man." And I mean, I gotta be the luckiest artist that I know, because ULS Media like they use me to test out their stuff, like he never put together an artist profile so they used me as their test. You know, I’m like their guinea pig for all their little things.

CD: You couldn't ask for better than that.

PR: No, I really couldn’t. I’m really lucky to have them and I mean they put together my whole last album … I had an eight page foldout and everything that I did for the last one. They put together a DVD with it. They’re just like great for me.

CD: Are you using the profile to try to further your musical career now?

PR: Yeah, that’s what I do now to try to get myself shows.

CD: How’s it working?

PR: It's working great for me actually, to be honest with you. It’s really only been up there maybe three weeks, and I had [Bar Maniacs] in Hollywood book me, and I played in West Palm Beach.

CD: There’s a video online where Renda Writer was introducing you and someone else and talking about all the different things you guys do, I’m not sure which one of you he was talking about but he mentioned martial arts, is that your thing?

PR: No that’s Derek [Chopp Devize]. He’s really into the martial arts. I’m a lazy guy. (Laughs)

CD: You’re also a visual artist?

PR: I do a lot of painting and drawing.

CD: What kind of paintings and drawings you do?

PR: I like to do stencil work on canvas, and I have a whole series of … I really haven’t even named the series that I did, but I have them hanging in the studio …. I like to do very simplistic and what’s the word I'm looking for? .... more intimate type of art where as it’s not so extreme and out there – like very minimalist, like lines and stuff. I have a whole series of outlines that I just did …

CD: Where’s the studio?

PR: It’s in Margate. I have a recording studio there.

CD: I saw your "Already Gone" animation. That was bizarre and unusual and I really liked it.

PR: Yeah, it was very strange.

CD: How long have you been doing the little animation type films?

PR: Actually that was the very first one that we did. Yeah, it was a story that I had written and I was just gonna put it on the inside of my album so that when you opened it up, it was just a story there … and Jon was like ‘Aw man, you've got to use this, we got to make some kind of like story out of it,’ and I had this whole big like 12-minute sound thing that I had and it was weird because it like matched the story so well, and that’s all the guitars and stuff that you hear in the background. We actually put the story to the guitars. We never like put the guitars on top of the story, or anything like that. It was actually just like a live recording where me and my friend were in the studio ….

CD: How long did it take to put that together, because it's like eight minutes, right?

PR: Yeah, it’s nine minutes long. I took us about two weeks to put it together. I actually got poison ivy filming that. If you watch it there’s a part where the weeds are all wrapped around my arm and I’m reaching up towards the sky … That’s poison ivy wrapped around my arm and I ended up getting burnt up. My whole body was all blistered for months. You wanna talk about horrible, I don’t know if you’ve ever had poison ivy, but …

CD: I’m not allergic to it but my brother used to get it pretty bad.

PR: It’s like a burn, it turns into big blisters and stuff and then you scratch that and you get it somewhere else.

CD: That was the poison ivy scene, huh? What other unusual things did you have to do in the course of making it? I’ve never done animation, and so I can’t imagine how you make it look like that?

PR: Well, it’s actually still photography, all the movement in it of myself and all the people are still photography, still photos that we took and cut the people out of the still photos, and put the animation behind it so it’s sort of a mix between stop-motion animation and 3-D animation.

CD: That must have been fun to make.

PR: It was great. It’s really great to like have an idea and actually bring it to fruition.

CD: You must have felt so happy and proud when you were finished with that, right?

PR: Definitely, you feel great. Like I said before, you just made this baby and you want everybody to see it.

CD: Did you have a big viewing party?

PR: Actually we did a show in Miami at Sweat Records. We put it up n the big screen in the back and did a little concert there.

CD: Did you do anything else with it, like enter it into any competitions or anything?

PR: That movie is actually on the DVD section of The Odd Results of Inner Conflict, the CD/DVD that came out in 2006.

CD: Are you going to do more films?

PR: Yeah … we‘re working on a stop-motion animation film using aluminum cans.

CD: Aluminum cans?

PR: Yeah, as people (laughs). If you ever notice next time you open up your soda, you flip the top. Sometimes they have two little dots right there, like eyeballs and it and the top part where you drink out of it sort of look like a mouth so I use the top as the face.

CD: That’s funny because I was just today looking at this weird Web site called Facesinplaces.blogspot.com, where People take photographs of things that look like faces, and submit them to this site.

PR: Really? Like faces that are in other things?

CD: Yeah, just like places where you’re not expecting to see a face and then you just look at it and go “Oh my God, it’s a face." Like it might be a piece of machinery or something like that, but it looks like a face.

PR: Yeah, like Jesus in a grill cheese sandwich.

CD: Exactly.

PR: Yeah, I always see a little face in the cans, and we’re doing a little thing now with animation. It's gonna be a little short, like a little skit type of show and we’re gonna try to put it out on the Internet.

CD: Do you have a theme going with the cans?

PR: Well, generally were just gonna do it about social commentary and try to add humor in there. What I really wanna do is I want to really try to tell the news in a more entertaining way and not so like, “This is what happened and this and that.” More like telling about the stories and having fun with it.

CD: Interesting.

PR: Yeah, I think it’ll be really cool and pretty original and I have characters like Certainly Can, Ameri-Can.

CD: What was the first one?

PR: Certainly Can, like Certainly Can … he can do anything.

CD: That’s great.

PR: I think it’s gonna be great, and right now I’m just working on putting together the stories and building my cans … I have a great time when I’m creating.

CD: How much feedback did you get on the Free Pizza CD?

PR: I’ve had nothing but great feedback on Free Pizza.

CD: That was a great presentation, with the pizza box.

PR: Yeah, it was a great idea. And Renda really put the finishing touches on it for live shows, giving it out in the pizza box. ….The thing for me, it’s like, who am I? I’m not really well-known yet, I just wanna get my music out there so people can hear it ….

CD: How many nights a week do you typically play?

PR: I tend to play about two nights a week. I play a lot of open mikes with Renda.

CD: In an interview, you were talking about being a kid from the suburbs and how some people thought it was out of place that you had hip-hop and rap influences. Do people actually say that to you?

PR: Absolutely. Actually I played a show one time in Oakland Park and it was at I think it was called Club 54, are you familiar with it?

CD: Yeah, I know the place you’re talking about.

PR: It was an all hip-hop night and I mean I went there and I poured my heart out and even the guy who was throwing the show, he was like “Aw man, there ain’t no place in hip hop for guys like that.”

CD: Serious?

PR: Yeah, absolutely.

CD: I’m surprised that it would be seen that way, you know what I mean?

PR: Yeah, I’m shocked too. I mean I never grew up on anything other than hip hop – hip hop was my musical choice and my dad made me listen to guitar music.

CD: Does your dad ever come to see you play?

PR: My dad, no, he doesn’t come out to my shows. He’s more of a homebody, yeah, he likes to stay at home and listen to his music …

CD: So he wants you to play at his house?

PR: Oh yeah, I go and play at his house all the time. I always play him my new songs.

CD: What are some of the newer songs that you’re feeling particularly attached to at the moment?

PR: That song, the "Inner State Love Song," is one I’m more proud of than a lot of my stuff. I love playing that song live now. That actually came about … .in the middle part you hear the part where I say "It must be the chemicals I’m on," and how the doctor said it will let you live free. Well, I’ve been working at the junkyard now for about 10 years and I took over at the studio and I had really just had it with everything. I was ready to drop the studio. I was ready to quit work; I was ready to drop out. My sister’s a nurse and she told me that I should get on an anti-anxiety type pill or something like that. I call her the doctor, so that’s actually where that line comes from … “The doctor says they’ll let you live free.” She says, “You’ll be free of all that stuff, just let it go,” and it sparked like a conversation in my head with my girlfriend Lisa, and that’s really what it was … it was all really just a conversation about me and her, the problems that we have, how you can always just drop out and run away. That was really where that song came about.

CD: Great song.

PR: I have another song called "Dressed to Kill Time." That I didn’t write actually until after I had titled the album. I kept having that saying in my head like "dressed to kill time, dressed to kill time." What does it mean? What does it really mean? I thought to myself that I guess it really means that no matter what you’re in, no matter where you’re at, you’re gonna be wasting your time if you’re not doing what you love. … If you don’t love what you’re doing, it’s gonna show and you’re gonna wear that and people are gonna see it, so you better just take that time. Some people might say that you’re not doing anything with your life, they might say that you’re just killing time but in reality you’re actually making time for yourself. Because I have a lot of people that, like well let’s take my dad for instance. [He’ll say] to quit wasting your time, you need to make a choice with your life, you need to do something, you know. It’s like sometimes what I’m doing to advance myself may not seem like that to him but then when he sees the product and the fruition … I mean a lot of people have great ideas, but a great idea is really nothing until you come through with it. It’s nothing but an idea.

CD: That’s right, and many people are so busy doing what others think they should do – that even though they have great ideas, they can't bring them to fruition

PR: Exactly, they’re so content where they’re at, or scared to change.
CD: Right.

PR: That’s really where that song came from. It was really more of a need to use the namesake in the song and what it meant.

CD: So the CD will be officially released in January.

PR: Yeah, I think like January I’m gonna bring it out. I’m gonna be putting out like a Free Pizza-ish type of thing in December with like a little Christmas single on it to sort of promote the album itself.

CD: Can’t wait to hear it.

PR: I appreciate that and I’m glad you enjoyed it.

CD: Did you have anything else to say about your songs or anything you are working on?

PR: I guess all I really want to say and what I want people to know is really why I make the music and what it’s about for me, and if I could stop I would. If I could stop I would. It would be a lot easier for me. My life would be simple if I wasn’t a starving artist.

CD: But you wouldn’t be happy – right?

PR: I don’t think I would be happy at all. I don’t think I could be happy. That’s the weird thing about being a musician. Every musician will tell you it, it’s the weirdest thing. It’s the easiest yet the hardest thing in my life, and how something could be so easy and so hard at the same time, I have no idea. … I mean I use [the term] my babies a lot [for songs]. I call them my babies because they’re my babies! I made them. And I want to create and I want to leave this stuff long after I’m gone. I want people to be able to grab that song and relate to it – not today, not tomorrow, but two years from now, but 210 years from now. I don’t want something that people are gonna listen to, enjoy one time, laugh at it and then let it go. I want something that people would actually say, “Hey, I coulda wrote that – those are the feelings that I have. I feel exactly the same way … That’s my goal. That’s how I want to connect with people.

CD: So that’s what you want people to take away from your music when they come and listen – that’s what you want them to feel when they leave?

PR: Yeah I want them to feel a connection and I want them to be moved by it.

Record Label: Unsigned