- Courtesy of Frank Leone
- Frank Leone
Last night 19-year-old rapper Frank Leone released his debut full-length, Enter Wild; it’s free, like most mixtapes today (except Drake’s latest), and it’s got the same lush, immersive quality that makes the best mixtapes resemble studio albums. But Leone calls Enter Wild an album, and the spirit and dynamics fit the definition. Leone produced all of Enter Wild on a laptop, recorded his vocals with a cheap microphone, and sought vocal contributions from artists overseas and in Chicago—local MCs Monster Mike and Saba show up, as does poet and activist Malcolm London.
Frank Leone: I want to set that tone for the listener. It’s more of an album because it’s all original production; it’s a full-length. And I want people to experience some wild things that they’ve never heard before.
What’s the name of the town you grew up in?
That was Kanye. I was working at a summer camp the year of 2010 and I had asked my friend to put me on some rap because I was interested in it. He told me, “The College Dropout“, and I kind of fell in love with it that summer. It just so happened that Kanye’s first GOOD Friday series happened after that, which is my favorite Kanye of all time. Then My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy dropped, which is one of the biggest influences on my sound ever. It was like, a month after that that I started rapping.
I was like, very excited to see him because I had just been listening to their music all summer. And I went up to him. I had actually rapped over one of their songs, “Be,” and sort of remixed it. I got his e-mail, I sent it to him, and he hit me back pretty quickly. He said like, “This is cool, you’ve got a lot of skill.” That was the moment when I started thinking, “Maybe I should try this for real.”
