Late one January morning, it feels more like dusk as a cold drizzle chases people off the street and into a Hillsboro Village coffee shop. Regardless of the dreary weather, Aly Lakhani’s eyes are bright and his voice is spirited as he fields my questions about his creative process.
“I think in the moment of creativity, you just have to be unbridled and pursue whatever idea is on the table,” says the 21-year-old MC, setting down his mug. “And then I think the day-after listen is really key. That’s when you go back in and say, ‘OK, what does this really sound like? I tried this weird thing — I tried whispering on this song, is that cool?’ Different things like that. [On] a lot of those day-after things, I’ll be like, ‘Nah, it’s not happening.’ ”
Lakhani, who records and performs as Lackhoney, is kicking off his final semester as an undergrad at Vanderbilt. He’s been making music only since the end of high school, but he’s been steadily ramping up his activity: 2019 was his busiest year yet, in which he released 18 solo singles and a collaborative EP called Sticky with fellow local rapper Count Draco. Lakhani does all the production work on his tracks himself, though he has a close relationship with his band The Hive. You’ll be able to see that in action when they play together at The High Watt on Thursday, their first time at the top of a bill after three years of playing shows together.
“The most straightforward way I can describe our musical relationship is like Anderson .Paak and The Free Nationals,” Lakhani says of the pop star and rap ace and his backing band. “They both function as independent entities, but when they come together, it’s a different thing. So Anderson .Paak can work with other producers, do his own thing, whatever, but when he works with The Free Nationals, it’s a certain creative energy that comes out.”
The sound that Lakhani and his bandmates have brewed up is easy to love. While there’s plenty of bass in the beats, it’s rarely the biggest feature. The emphasis is on the rhythm playing a role in telling the story presented by the rhymes, whether that means pressing forward or circling around uneasily, as in the standout track “Skeletons.” That song looks at the damage that can be done to all kinds of relationships by the things we don’t want to talk about.
Conversations about race and culture inform Lakhani’s work in subtle but important ways. His mother is from Pakistan and his father is from India. Though his father’s job as an airline pilot meant that Lakhani and his family moved around quite a bit, Miami is the place he’s lived the longest, and he says that city feels like home. Though hip-hop is by far the biggest influence you hear in his tracks, you can detect traces of the Muslim spiritual music and Indian film music he grew up with. It’s important to Lakhani to be intentional with how he explores and expresses his heritage.
“I’m not always like, ‘I’m an Indian kid, here’s an Indian melody,’ ” he says. “But when it does come out, I think it’s trying to honor those roots and treat them with the nobility they deserve. It’s the immigrant story, right? It’s the people who come from a place to a new place and build roots where there was nothing. That deserves to be honored and respected.”
Album art: Lackhoney, 'Sweets'
On Valentine’s Day, Lakhani & Co. will release their most ambitious project yet, an EP called Sweets and a companion short film of the same name. Sweets was inspired by Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack’s Whack World, a collection of 15 outstanding one-minute tracks paired with a fantastically inventive narrative film released in 2018. Lakhani and filmmaker Trent Millspaugh wanted to see if they could condense the format even further.
Lakhani achieved his original goal of writing and recording a dozen 30-second songs that both stand alone and fit together as a cohesive whole. When Millspaugh encountered production difficulties, the film side of the project changed course. The end result is an 11-minute documentary about Lackhoney and the Hive that punctuates candid interview segments with set pieces featuring tracks from the EP.
The doc is a brief but fascinating look into Lakhani’s life and his view of building a hip-hop career in Nashville, a city that lacks the infrastructure to support its diverse array of rap talent. Once he graduates in May, he plans to move back to Miami for a few months and obtain his commercial pilot certifications, then return to Nashville and pick back up with The Hive. While he appreciates the collaborative sensibility he’s found here, Lakhani hasn’t yet decided whether Music City will be his home base permanently.
“Nashville is one of the places where I have found a community, [with people like] Tim Gent, Daisha McBride, Mike Floss,” he says. “I think my general take on it is, everybody should do what’s best for them. And for some people, that’s to live in Nashville and try to build a scene, and some people aren’t built for that.”
