Photo: John Hill
On “Decorum,” the opening salvo of R.A.P. Ferreira’s 2020 LP Purple Moonlight Pages, the artist born Rory Allen Ferreira introduces himself as a “poet from nowhere.” It’s not an exaggeration.
“I moved almost every six months of my life until I was an adult,” Ferreira tells the Scene.
Places he stayed for longer periods include Chicago and Milwaukee. He also had an extended stint in Los Angeles, specifically its Black middle-class bastion Leimert Park. Most curious, though, is the recent span of time Ferreira spent operating a Black-music-centric record store in the unlikely location of Biddeford, Maine, where he’d also lived with his mom when he was a teenager. The coastal town of about 23,000 people is a few clicks south of Portland, America’s northeasternmost major city. Ferreira describes the shop, called Soulfolks, as an exercise in tracing the wide-ranging history of Black music, while engaging crowds with new music and live happenings.
“We had events where people literally from across the world — from Chile to Australia — would fly out to do 30-minute beat sets,” he recalls. “We’d do 13 hours straight of music, and livestream it all.”
The store was well-received, something that might have been easier to achieve in a bigger city. The challenge was not a bad thing in Ferreira’s mind. “For me, it was an experiment,” he says. “If it could work [in Biddeford], it’d work anywhere.”
Now the well-traveled 30-year-old has brought his talents to Nashville — the East Side, specifically. In the long term, he’s got designs on a Southern outpost of Soulfolks. More urgently, he wants to integrate himself into and carve out a niche of his own within Music City’s burgeoning hip-hop community.
“I’m trying to root my presence here,” says Ferreira, who has lived in East Nashville since autumn 2019. “It’s where my travels have brought me … where they’ve coalesced into an identity.” His current tour will bring him to his adopted hometown on April 20, when he’ll play a headlining gig that local fans have been waiting for at Drkmttr.
“I go a little bit deeper than the average MC,” Ferreira declares on “Blackmissionfigs,” a track from his most recent album The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures. Released in the fall, it was tracked here in town with producer Vast Ness. The line is delivered less as a boast than a statement of intent. Ferreira has a natural gift for connecting wildly varied pop-cultural references based on the sounds of the words, in a way that cracks up the listener while wowing with its dexterity.
“Lil Wayne was a huge influence on me, especially when I was in high school,” Ferreira explains. “He’s an ethnolinguist. I don’t listen to him so much nowadays, but I was captivated by the sheer breadth of his mind, and the ferociousness with which he delivered that data to us.”
The crown jewel of Ferreira’s repertoire so far, Light Emitting contains a Wayne-worthy range of lyrical nods to musicians, historical figures, cities and food — such a dazzling array that to keep a log quickly becomes a fool’s errand. Before I aborted that project, names I’d recorded included indie rockers Band of Horses and Soul Coughing, MCs Del the Funky Homosapien and El-P, photographer Ansel Adams, actor Forest Whitaker and ballplayer Barry Bonds. While he’s at it, Ferreira rhymes “Morongo” (a casino outside L.A.) with “mofongo” (a plantain-based Puerto Rican dish).
Then there’s “East Nashville,” a tour song with an accompanying video clip that features Ferreira lazily sauntering along the Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge downtown. It’s not so much an ode to the East Side as to the whirlwind road trips that led him here. “From the coast of Maine to Leimert Park, Aquarius all down my birth chart,” he raps. “I like spare parts and a long time / I did it without the cosign / On the East Side of Atlanta and Nashville / We was up and down the Catskills, stackin’ up the rap skill.” Eat your heart out, Johnny Cash: Asheville, N.C., NYC’s Tribeca neighborhood, Houston, Sacramento, Minneapolis and Montreal are among the other locations woven into Ferreira’s travelog flow.
In addition to making his own music and planning a new iteration of Soulfolks, Ferreira also operates a label and collective dubbed Ruby Yacht, of which Vast Ness is a member. At the moment the Scene catches Ferreira via phone, he and his crew are on the road, somewhere in New Mexico — having fun and wilding out, but with home base in their sights.
“I have to be home to work on music. I’ll bring a notebook on the road, but rarely even write in it. When I get home to reflect, that’s when I’m able to write. I’ve been blessed to be living off my art since I was 19, and just want to keep being creative. Right now that’s rap, but as time’s gone on … I’m finding a lot of joy in playing guitar and singing blues songs right now. Maybe that’s the Nashville influence on me.”
