Cody ChesnuTT, Death Row Records artist

[aerroc]

Cody ChesnuTT was a musician and songwriter minding his business in Atlanta, until his cousin's singing group was called out to California to be courted by none other than Suge Knight of Death Row Records. Suge called ChesnuTT late one night wanting to hear one of his songs, and soon ChesnuTT was being flown to Los Angeles to write for his cousin's group (not to mention singing on the Gridlock'd soundtrack and 2Pac's "Tattoo Tears"). That group ended up being shelved, but the engineer of Death Row's Can-Am Studios introduced ChesnuTT to the men who would be his future bandmates in a group called the Crosswalk. The Crosswalk got signed to Hollywood Records—but then in turn were suddenly shelved before they could release their debut album, Venus Loves a Melody. The band split, and a crushed ChesnuTT was left with all the equipment, resulting in Masterpiece—a totally, charmingly indie record with an MS Paint–esque cover (well before that was cool)—which received a huge word-of-mouth boost from in-the-know hiphop heads of taste. In Los Angeles, ChesnuTT started getting work as a writer/producer for other artists. He wrote and produced five songs for Six Feet Deep, a R&B male group signed to Death Row Records.




In the '90s I understand that you came out to L.A. from Atlanta to do some songwriting and ended up working for Death Row Records. How did that happen?

At that point, for me being an artist was always my main focal point. But the career as a song writer for Death Row actually happened by accident. It started with me doing a couple tracks for a guy named Travis Payne, who was a choreographer for Michael Jackson, believe it or not. He was close with my cousin who was in the record industry. My cousin told [Payne] that I was a songwriter and he had me fly out to L.A. out to L.A. to work on some song ideas with him for a couple weeks. Then a couple weeks turned into a month and during that time my other cousin, who was in this BoyzIIMen-style singing group [Sixx Feet Deep] and they somehow landed on Death Row Records. So they told Suge Knight that they wanted me to do some writing for them. Suge agreed to bring me out and I write about seven tracks with the group that never got released.

But Suge really liked what I did so he pitched a project for a tribute album after Tupac after he was killed and also wanted to put out the Gridlock soundtrack, the last movie he made before he was killed. So I worked on that for a little while. The tribute album never happened but they did wind up putting one of the songs I worked on as part of the Gridlock soundtrack, the last song on that album. That was the extent of my writing for other people

The songwriting then led me to form the band The Crosswalk because the guy who was engineering the sessions for me when I was writing for Death Row, he knew that I was looking for band members and he knew a guys that played bass and drums. And then that band became a thing that played up until about 1999 when Hollywood Records, our record label, dropped us. After that, I started focused on writing a lot of music in my bedroom and that eventually turned into The Headphone Masterpiece"

[BIGWORM]

he killis the chorus on this!!!

[donfathaimmortal]