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Social Club Misfits On Staying Rooted in the Truth

Social Club Misfits On Staying Rooted in the Truth

Social Club Misfits are back and better than ever.

Marty and Fern have just released their latest album, Everybody Loves a Comeback Story, that tells their story— the one they’ve been on for years and years. Though Social Club Misfits has never shied away from speaking the truth, there’s something about this new album that feels fresh and new. It’s still them, but it’s the most them they’ve ever been.

We sat down with the duo to dig deeper into their new music, how they stay true to themselves and why exactly everybody loves a comeback story.

Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What makes Everybody Loves a Comeback Story different from your previous albums?

Marty: Nothing has changed. Just more music. 

I’m just kidding. No. I always wanted to say that. But no, I feel like I had a lot to prove on this new album.

I think this was 10 years of us making music. Me and Fern made music for 10 years and we made a lot of great stuff. I think our secret power is the fact that we cross genres so much — we’ll make Latin, dance, rap — and I love that. I love that artists are starting to do that more than ever too. But for this album, I feel like I definitely had a lot to prove. 

We released an album during the pandemic but me and Fern didn’t see each other for a whole year because of the pandemic. It’s kind of hard to make an album where you’re not seeing the guy that you make your album with. For this album, we had so many conversations leading to this of what do we want to be known for? We wanted to create an album that was a legacy album. So we thought of this title, Everyone Loves a Comeback Story. Because really, who doesn’t? Who doesn’t love this story because it just instills hope in everyone else. It’s like, if I could do it, you could do it. And that makes it a little bit easier in our minds. Hey, I could do it. It’s achievable. 

That tied with this one scripture we’ve been talking about, which always just perplexed me cause I always gloss over it. It was a scripture in John about how the Pharisees wanted to kill Lazarus. And I’d always had this idea about why would they want to kill him? But I realized it’s because he’s a walking testimony. And I think when me and Fern first met, Fern was getting out of prison, I was getting out of a Latin toxic church situation. And felt like I was in my own thing and Fern was, and we came together and that’s how Social Club kind of was birthed.

Now, for 10 years we’ve been making music. So this was our legacy album. All the ideas we wanted to do. I think that it was time for us to show a little bit more of our culture, a little bit more of what makes us who we are. And I feel like this album was the perfect combination of sweet and spice and everything nice. Everything we’ve wanted to do, we got to accomplish.

You mentioned that you felt like you needed to prove something. What do you mean by that?

Marty: I feel like as an artist, I’ve grown a lot. Me and Fern have grown a lot. I mean, when I first started making music, I didn’t know what I was doing. My first hip hop song was made and released. I didn’t really have time to practice and say, “Hey, let’s not release it. It’s not good.” So I kind of had to grow up through music. The last 10 years I was just releasing things because demand was there and I didn’t produce back then. And now I produce. I produced about eight songs on this album. I went from three, four years ago not producing to producing eight songs.

This album is kind of like a rebirth album for us. I think it’s like we’re at our best. We’re on our A game here.

Have you ever felt that pressure to maybe change your style or change something about you in order to get more fans? Or do you feel very comfortable just being who you are?

Fern: I mean personally, it just is what it is. I feel like we’ve been doing music for so long and been able to do it for so long. Being who we are, giving the people the same person, but just giving the growth as well. You know what I’m saying? So I think that’s the beautiful part that we haven’t really— we’ve stood on what we believe, showed what we loved, painted pictures about things we’ve gone through. But at the end of the day, we’ve always just stayed with the same basic values of keeping God in the center. Social Club is just firm believers in that. So that’s pretty much how we continue to move. Even though people and the trends dictate a lot of the stuff, music is always subjective. I see people following trends, doing them and all. It doesn’t work out all the time either.

It’s just a beautiful game like that. If you give them authenticity and they love you anyway. So just give them you, you can’t go wrong if you give them your life. And that’s why we’ve been around for 10 years I think. We just gave them our life. Literally Marty, if you look at the growth from his first mixtape to where we are now, you could literally see all the struggles he went through, being single from dating to breakups and then to marriage and all that to where he is now. You can literally see the growth, but you’ve always gotten the same. You’ve seen the growth obviously, but you always gotten the same Marty. You always know, you know what he’s going to bring to the table to you. You know the type of love that he brings, you know the type of antics or gimmicks that he’s bringing in his music.

We’ve been doing the same thing. We all got different antics and things that we do, but we’ve shown growth. I feel that we’ve been able to paint pictures and tell stories about ourselves and be vulnerable and be transparent. I feel one thing about Social Club is that we opened up the doors. If you were to talk, we were talking about legacy albums. If you asked me right now, what do you think you guys brought to the table? What did you guys do for the culture? I think you could safely say that we were one of the main groups or artists ever to say, you could be yourself and should do it yourself now, where you could just record in the comfort of your home. We let it be known. We gave that gas out, we gave that juice out. We would always give that advice to anybody like, yo, you could do it yourself. If you think about it now, a lot of the artists that are out are independent. Nobody’s really signed to major labels and CHH is flourishing and it’s full of independent artists. So shout out to all of them.

How do you engage with topics that can be really heavy, but still you bring this lightness to it?

Fern: I’m going to tell you right now, me and Marty are both fun thinkers, deep thinkers, left, right, center. We like to dive into all trains of thoughts. We don’t just want to stand on it. We’re just going to close ourselves to just one train of thought. We like to think about things thoroughly and that’s the beautiful thing about it. So when we’re writing, we could veer off in any direction and then add our story and our experiences as well. But being willing to think about it many different ways and not just stagnantly on one. I think that that helps us be in a group as well because there’s so many different people that listen to us. There’s so many different points of view. There’s so many different theories, there’s so many different ways, but there’s only one way to God, you know what I’m saying? So we always stay rooted on that.

So that always stays permanent. But as far as other things like dealing with depression, even on “Rendezvous,” I actually let it be known that I solely battled depression. I never said it before, but I found that that was a good time to say it. And it was so beautiful to be transparent through the music that helped me start healing as well. Even just coming out, even being at the Dove Awards again, I wasn’t really hanging out like that. 

Even the music helps, not only those people, because they come to us and they tell us, but it even helps us cause we have to memorize these songs. We continuously say them. And as we’re memorizing them, it’s almost like daily affirmations, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, and they’re Godly words. We’re providing these daily affirmations of Godly words into ourselves, but to our fans and family as well. So that’s been a beautiful thing about it. So I just feel blessed to be able to do it.

Marty: Yeah, I feel like that’s a part of our personality. I don’t know if people know this, but Fern is a very, very funny person. Really witty, really smart. And that’s like when we’re talking most of the time we’re making jokes, we’re laughing. I think that hip hop has such a serious tone to it. It’s like I’m from the streets, I’m from the struggle and from this and hear what I have to say. And that’s not, I guess, how we approach it. We approach it with our personality involved. 

I hate church culture where the pastor’s above you, and he acts like he knows more than us and really he doesn’t know anything more than us. He’s just a really gifted speaker or something like that. So I think if we can connect the fans in a deeper way, that helps, for me at least the listener, listener experience. 

Fern wrote a song called “Human” on the album. It talks about him being humanized and knowing that people might see him with a platform, but “I’m still a human.” I think people forget sometimes because they see us maybe on Instagram and there’s a lot of likes, a lot of views and stuff and they’re like, they’re doing something special. I don’t really think that we’re doing it special. We serve God, we love him. We’re local church guys. We make good music. And I think over time the consistency, the marketing, it just brought out the music even bigger.

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