CourtesyTim Gent

This is the 3rd story in the series on growing the business around hip-hop in Nashville. Here’s where you can find parts one and two.

The collaboration between an artist and producer frequently begins with an introductory period, when they get to know each other’s personalities and processes so that they can enter into a productive partnership. Tim Gent and A.B. Eastwood, though, are long past finding their comfort zone.

A decade working together. And a decade as a friends, Eastwood notes.

“We were groomsmen in each other’s wedding, you know? So it’s a lot of trust.”

The producer and instrumentalist sits across from Gent, a rapper who’s eased into singing over time, in an intimate upstairs studio space at their publishing company, Prescription Songs.

The trust between them proved essential during their sometimes onerous, four-year journey to positioning a little, laidback bop called “MLB” for national release this week.

“You can’t play with things like this”

Back in the 2000s, there were a couple of major label rap signings out of Nashville: Young Buck went with 50 Cent’s imprint G-Unit and Starlito landed on Cash Money (at the time, he was still going by All Star Nashville Prince). But in recent years, Daisha McBride has worked all the angles as an independent artist, securing song placements, tour opening slots and viral success, and becoming the subject of a Queen Latifah-backed documentary. Self-sufficient hustle has been the dominant mode, including for Gent and Eastwood.

Now “MLB” has the type of industry muscle behind it that Nashville hip-hop has rarely seen in the last two decades. And Eastwood knows it. “You can’t play with things like this, because they don’t happen often,” he says.

Not that he gave it that sort of importance at the beginning. The track originated in 2022 with a game that he calls “beat roulette.” During a casual hang at his apartment, he and some musician friends took turns throwing beats together within a short time limit: 20 minutes.

Eastwood turns to his laptop to try and reconstruct what he’d made while he was messing around that day. He’d started with a loop created by Case Arnold — a fixture in their Nashville hip-hop circle — and slowed the tempo down so that it moves in pensive, undulating waves. Then he’d layered on a rhythmic suctioning effect that, as he rediscovers now, he got from reversing a drum kit groove, and a few other elements.

That was one in a pile of instrumentals that Eastwood sent to Gent, who listened late one night in the kitchen and decided to weave melodic lines around that particular laidback rhythm pattern.

“When I said the first line, ‘We can keep it on a need-to-know basis,’ I was like, ‘It’d be cool if I said ‘basis’ again,’” Gent recalls.

Then he took off into wordplay: “‘Oh, like bases, like, swing it out the park.’ After that, it was subconscious almost.”

At the time, Gent didn’t even realize that his hook — which repeats the invitation “Let’s make love, baby” and caps it off with the abbreviation “MLB” — doubled as the acronym for Major League Baseball. He was just trying on a role — smooth, R&B loverman — that he felt had receded from hip-hop

“Even the R&B singers want to talk like rappers, and nobody is really talking about love anymore,” he reflects. “So all those underlying sentiments came out through, ‘Let’s make love, baby.’”

“All I did was upload it”

Gent posted the demo on Soundcloud, and didn’t give it another thought — until his friends and fellow artists started telling him they had it on repeat. “I go to SoundCloud just to look,” he says, “and it had, like, 40,000 plays, and all I did was upload it.”

But the song was frozen in an unfinished state. It had only one verse, and he’d lost the original file when his hard drive crashed.

“We tried to recut it, and it was sad,” says Gent, eliciting hearty laughter from Eastwood. “It was so sad attempting to recreate that moment. When we realized that that’s a no-go, then we put our scrubs on and we became doctors.”

Doctors of digital audio, that is. Eastwood used AI tools to grab the vocals from the uploaded demo.

Still, Gent thought there was more they could do to enhance the hook, “something that just kind of made it musically different.” But Eastwood was resistant.

A producer friend whose professional accomplishments they both admire, Ron Gilmore, Jr., happened to be with them in the studio that day, and he was more blunt, says Gent: “Ron cussed him out and was like, ‘Just do it!’”

Eastwood let himself be convinced. But it was while they were adding harmonies and keyboard pads that he really came around to the idea of sculpting what they had.

“That’s way more interesting of a hook,” he admits.

That process paralleled the two friends’ musical growth. They’d both signed to Prescription, and the more sessions they did with established pros, the more they expanded their skills and mindsets. And “MLB” benefited, says Eastwood: “I was stubborn, man. Whatever beat I made was the beat. There wasn’t really going back [to change it]. And ‘MLB’ is a Olympic gold medal for me of, ‘Go back to the song. Go back to the song.’ And now I love going back.”

He and Gent added a second verse — partially written by Atlanta rapper Ben Reilly — more ad-libs and synth pads, and Eastwood fretted over whether the bass was booming enough and kept tweaking the mix until they had at least 15 versions.

 

“This is the first time that people are asking”

Gent performed MLB in his live sets and posted clips of it, and the buzz around it grew to the point that the hashtag #freeMLB appeared on social media. He even talked back to them, in blustery Bernie Mac style, in a skit.

“My whole tenure being an artist,” Gent observes, “I’ve asked people to go listen, check something out. This is the first time that people are asking me for something, and have been asking.”

It was also the first time that his managers, Eric Holt and Zack Cobb, received inquiries about Gent from record labels. They turned down offers that weren’t a good fit — a process that drug on long enough to severely test Gent’s patience. Finally, last year, they signed a distribution deal with a new company, called gamma. It’s handled either new work or catalog classics from the likes of Usher, Rick Ross, Snoop Dogg and Sexyy Red. And its founder, Larry Jackson, was the global creative director of Apple Music.

“One really cool thing that we picked up on,” says Cobb, “is that we have a similar mission. What we’re trying to do is shed a light on Black music here in Nashville, and [Jackson is] ultimately trying to do that across the world — so much so that he was able to raise, you know, $1 billion into this company, to support them.”

Eastwood picked up and moved to L.A. last year, which meant that he and Gent had to wrap up “MLB” (and more new music that Gent’s been teasing in that vein) long-distance. Dropping the single through gamma — which has the resources to properly market and promote it — is their chance to take the collaboration they cultivated in Nashville a whole lot further.

“It’s certain ties that can’t ever be severed,” says Eastwood. “It’s exciting to know that this is going to be nationwide.”