BdotJeff wants you to know he loves you

A few years back, BdotJeff began making a series of beats he anticipated would appear on the debut album from his childhood friend, Cean “Maliqe” Brooks. But these plans changed when Brooks died in August 2023, sending BdotJeff into an emotional spiral that completely sapped his interest in making music for the better part of a year.

“I just went into this deep depressive state where I wasn’t talking to nobody,” said BdotJeff, born Wade Blair II, who met Brooks in second grade, the two having been seated alphabetically next to one another. “And I became numb for a while. … And I was smoking weed to the point where it literally wasn’t doing anything, and I was just doing it to do it.”

Gradually, though, the rapper began to hear the voice of his late friend speaking to him and telling him he needed to return to making music. “And this dude was like, ‘Hey, bro, you gotta do it. And if you don’t do it, I’ma do it. And I don’t know how, but I’ll figure it out,’” said BdotJeff, who then logged on to his computer and queued up the beats he’d once intended for Brooks, describing the experience as akin to stepping into the bedroom of a loved one who had died. “After he passed away, we got everything moved out [of the apartment], and opening those files again was just like walking back into that room. … And most of the tracks were shells, and they weren’t completely finished, but it was like, I gotta finish this somehow, and I have to honor him in some way.”

The album that emerged from this process, “ily. stay safe.”, released earlier this week, serves as a raw-nerved exploration of grief and healing, BdotJeff approaching the recording as a chance to express things left unsaid, to disrupt the “cycle of hate and death” in which he found himself ensnared, and to begin to chart a course into calmer waters. 

Opener “This One’s For You” sets the tone, with BdotJeff placing a phone call to Brooks and leaving what amounts to an extended voice message. “I’ve been thinking ’bout you every day,” he recites. “At night I lay awake/When I close my eyes, I see your face.”

In the tracks that follow, the musician, joined by a host of collaborators that serve as emotional buoys, recounts the nightmares that routinely overtook his days (“Ambitionz”), wrestles with the seeming impossibility of a future without his running mate (“301, 614, 777”), and eventually finds a semblance of peace, the weather breaking near the end of the album with “Music on My Sleeve.”

Even the album title resonates with meaning, taken from a sign-off that BdotJeff has taken to using in more recent years (“I love you, stay safe”), which he said is rooted partially in the regret he felt in not expressing these sentiments to Brooks the last time the two spoke.

“The night before he passed, he came home kind of late, and … he just happened to walk in the door, and it scared the shit out of me,” said BdotJeff, who will celebrate the release of “ily. stay safe.” in concert at ComFest on Saturday, June 27, performing on the Mendelsonic Live Arts Stage at 9:05 p.m. (Click here to see a full lineup of ComFest performers and set times.) “And he was just like, ‘Hey, man. What’s good?’ And I screamed, like, what the fuck?! … It was like, ‘You can’t be running up on people in the middle of the night, dog.’ And we said goodnight. And hindsight is 20-20, but it was probably one of the only times I didn’t tell him, ‘Hey, yo, I love you, good night.’ And by the time I got home from work the next day, he was gone.”

In therapy, there’s a practice that involves sitting across from an empty chair, imagining the person you need to unburden yourself seated in it, and then speaking into the air, releasing everything inside of you that needs to be said. There are numerous songs on “ily. stay safe.” that feel born of this process, perhaps none more so than “301, 614, 777,” recorded in collaboration with the rapper Happy Tooth. 

As the track unfolds, BDotJeff’s compact, emotionally knotted verses give way to an extended spoken word passage from Happy Tooth that feels like the start of a larger untangling, his words resonating with a clarity that cuts through the haze of anger and sadness. “I don’t know if there’s an afterlife,” he says, “but I want to believe in something if we’ll meet again.”

“I remember when he sent [the track] back to me, I cried on that first listen,” BdotJeff said. “And for a while I couldn’t even listen to that song without tearing up when I got to his part, because it was like, ‘This is everything I’m feeling inside.’”

At multiple points in our conversation, BdotJeff reiterated that he wouldn’t be making music were it not for Brooks’ influence. As teenagers, the two formed their first hip-hop duo together, Music on My Sleeve, or MOMS, and Brooks constantly needled his friend to write, to rap, to create – a dynamic BdotJeff captures within “Music on My Sleeve,” which emerges as an ode to their relationship and a commitment to continue grinding through the hurt.

“It’s an homage to the entirety of our friendship, and it’s knowing that you’re gone but a piece of you is still here,” BdotJeff said. “And as long as that exists, and as long as I know you visit me in my dreams, then you’re still here, and there’s a reason to still be here, doing this.”