The Sauce Boys – Producers, Musicians, Artists

“Music is interesting.”

When those words left Ro’Sean Langhum’s mouth, it made me pause. It’s not a complicated statement, nor is it the most revealing. But there’s something profound about those words, something deeper, that ultimately drives the reason for visiting the guys behind Sauce Boys Entertainment. 

The Sauce Boys are a group of musicians, producers, singers, and songwriters who have begun to establish a Houston base. Hailing from Milwaukee, the Sauce Boys – led by CEO Ivan Latimore – have followed their artistic dreams to Houston because of the sweeping strides that Texas is making on a national music scene.

Oh, they also came here for the weather. “Milwaukee is cold,” says Dra-Kkar Wesley, vocal producer. “As you can see, I got a tan down here.” You can almost hear the drum rim shot. We all burst into laughter.

That’s one of the best things about meeting these new Houstonians. You can see in their work ethic and the way they carry themselves that they are deeply driven by their craft, and that music has essentially become them. But in between all of that, you see these young men genuinely enjoying life and art and the people around them. Trevis Romell, singer and songwriter for the group, put it best. “The passion keeps you going. It comes easy because you love it, but it’s always a hunger to learn more.”

As I sip from my glass, I look over at Romell and Wesley, eyes pointed toward their laptops, actively working and promoting. All while they answer my questions. It never stops with these guys. Ivan Latimore points out that this livelihood is 100% commission, and that all of this is only going to get you as far as your passion and hardwork can take you. For the Sauce Boys, it’s brought them here. Almost like a second nature to them, the Sauce Boys take to Twitter while I’m asking these questions to get in direct contacts with fans and friends. It’ll be a far more personal connection on March 17th, the night that the Sauce Boys will be hosting their introduction party at Manor.

The guys have worked together for two years now, but they have a knowledge of the industry far beyond that. As a team of producers and songwriters, the Sauce Boys have a unique insight into just how the modern music industry operates. It’s a conversation that I listen to intently, as the guys make distinctions between the different roles that make up the song playing from your iPod. I’ve learned more about the music industry talking with these men than any issue of any music magazine that I’ve picked up over the years. 

It’s from this experience, Latimore tells me, that the Sauce Boys have earned their “sauce”.

Huh?

“Sauce. Sauce is like swag, on steroids.” The guys drop some knowledge on me in a big way. Sauce is having a one-of-a-kind pair of jeans. Sauce is that feeling you get when the drinks hit you just right, when you haven’t had too much but you know you’re good. Sauce is the way you feel when your song, the song you recorded, plays back and blows you away.

Sauce is me, sitting in a nice apartment, drinking it up and listening to some masters of their craft jam out a little bit.

After our conversation, the boys have a jam session in their makeshift studio. It’s a room in their apartment, but it is filled to the brim with all the tools they need to record and produce. You have keyboards, microphones, drum machines. And…iPads?

“The internet has changed the game” comments Ro’Sean, “people can listen to any song any time they want.” Indeed, the Sauce Boys host some of their recordings on YouTube, which has become something of a launching pad for many up and coming artists. You can find some of their best work online, and know when more becomes available on their individual social feeds. 

These young men will stop at nothing to expand and enhance their talents. With music completely absorbing them, the Sauce Boys have gone all in for their quest to success. 

Lucky for them, music is interesting.

“It’s almost like my drug. I gotta do music. If I’m not doing music, something is missing. We always try to amaze ourselves. We control our destiny.” ~ The Sauce Boys

MHL: So what inspired you guys to do this? How did you know that this is what you all wanted to do?

Ivan Latimore: Well, from birth. [Laughter] I mean, it’s been in my family for a long time. I went down a road where I was stubborn towards music, didn’t wanna deal with music, but it keeps pulling me back in. It just kind of happened. You just have a love and a passion for it, but you don’t always necessarily knows where it comes from. It’s just in you. So I do believe it’s from my bloodline.

Dra-Kkar Wesley: It’s kind of the same thing with me. My father, my whole side of the family, was doing music. I was in church, singing along, not even knowing, it was just a habit that I’d hear the choir sing and I’d sing along. It’s a habit I’ve carried through my entire life, like a second nature to me. It’s kind of hard to explain and articulate ‘why’ when it’s something that just comes naturally to me.

Ro’Sean Langhum: To the people in my family who did music, it was like a secret. I found out after the fact, like my mom would be walking around her house singing and it all sounded right. I was actually going to school to study history and economics, when one day, like in the movies, I was sitting down and staring out a window. The wind was blowing. And I was like, “I’m going to do music.” I had a little Casio beatbox, and I would sit there making little beats, and it just kind of took a life of its own. I started playing gigs around town, and that became serious, and then I started touring. I fell in love making records. Life became inspiration. When a girl pissed me off, I’d make a record. If I saw a girl at a club, I’d thing of what line I would use, I’d make a record. Not having money, or having money, make a record. It became what defined me.

Trevis Romell: I started young, but always shied away from it, trying to do other things. Being hardheaded, being bad, for no apparent reason. It only came out when I was around good talent. I’m a competitor. I like to always compete, like showing people up. Even if I don’t know how to do something, I’m going to try my best. So when it came to my first song, the first song I ever wrote and recorded, I was like, I’m kind of good at this. This was pretty cool. It made me feel good because I was able to express myself. It was my opinions, my words, my thoughts. It felt good, and I was trying to learn how to do better every day.

DW: You gotta do something that’s fun for you, and not just a “job”.

MHL: So, when you listen to your music coming out of a speaker, is the music made for you? Is it more important that you understand the song playing, or that your audience does?

DW: As a producer, as a songwriter, it’s very important that you be considerate of the listeners, because you’re so hard on yourself. You try to impress yourself, not knowing that whatever you’re doing is going over the listener’s ears. There’s some things we might do that we feel can be the sickest ideas ever, but maybe the listener won’t understand it. Once you cater your sound to the listeners, you can relate to them better. I like to let people I don’t know listen to my music, so that I can hear what they have to say. I can’t let my cousin hear it, because no matter what I do, he’ll say “oh yeah, that’s awesome”. That’s not what I like to hear. I like to hear “aw man, that was trash.” I like to hear that.

TR: Hearing somebody spell it out, saying “you could have done this better” or “you could have fixed this right here”, that’s what I look for.

DW: That’s the best motivation. Every opinion is important, no matter if they know about the music or not.

MHL: Is it hard to make music that grabs attention that way? How do you avoid losing creativity?

TR: It’s something that has to be balanced. You got to appeal to the listeners first, grab their attention, and then keep it. Once you have their attention, that’s when you can run wild, because you have their ears and eyes. You have to evolve and change. Like Kanye West, for example. He got everyone’s attention. But every year, he changes it up, from something like 808s & Heartbreak to Watch The Throne. I have no idea what he’s going to do next. No one knows.

DW: Once you have that attention, you have to make them want to continue giving you their attention, make them want to keep looking at you. Make them continue to follow your career, while other artists just keep doing what they were doing last year.

IL: People’s attention spans are very short.

MHL: On that subject, music is very much something that goes through trends, with different sounds creeping in and then going away for other, newer sounds. How do you stay on top of that?

TR: Music does change a lot. As it is, here in the United States, we’re like 3 years behind Europe and the music they produce over there.

IL: Honestly, the thing about the music is that the lyrics aren’t really the challenging part of it. It’s more the melody. You can take a listener that don’t speak English, but if they know the melody and it catches them, they can still enjoy it.

RL: It seems like the music trend now is about stories again, music having a relevance to life. We went through a really bad period of music where it was all just really popcorn, like it didn’t make any real sense. And you should have records like that, because when you’re partying with your homies, or girls, you don’t really want something deep. It doesn’t have to be something that goes over everyone’s head. But thank God for artists like Adele, because she made it cool again to actually write songs. It doesn’t have to be all deep or over people’s head, but it needs to be relevant to people’s lives. That’s what people are missing now, so I’m proud that Adele is making it okay now.

MHL: So as you try to evolve and enhance your sound, what do you do to actually get it out there? How is it trying to break and maintain hold in today’s music industry?

RL: The internet has changed everything. You can get online and check out what new trends are hitting music. Radio is so behind now, because people will hear the music they want to hear, when they want hear it. Even in something like Grand Theft Auto, you can hear the artist you want to hear whenever you want. Screw commercial radio. All the higher up people who were trying to control what you hear, they don’t have control anymore. That’s good.

IL: That’s one of the reasons we were so attracted to Houston. We felt like Houston made so much noise in the music industry, because all the Houston music scene cared about was the music. They didn’t care about mainstream radio, didn’t care about major labels.

RL: The music industry has gotten weird. Other national or international artists try to make it sound like they’re from Cali or New York, even when they’re not. They’re followers, and it gets to a point where they lose sight of their listeners. And then the listeners lose sight of them. It’s hard, because as a working musician as well as a producer, I go home and make some records, or go to a studio and make some records, and then we go perform a live show, and then they’re trying to rush our set to get us off the stage so that the DJ can play the tracks that we recorded. It’s weird. I’m saying to myself that no matter how well we play this song, no matter how many keyboards or drums we have on stage, they want us off. But then we can go play somewhere else down the street, and they want us to play all night.

MHL: You guys have mentioned artists like Adele and Kanye West over this conversation. Who else inspires your music? Do your musical inspirations change every week, or do you have certain artists in mind every single time to you play?

DW: Over the past five years, artists [who’ve inspired me] have come and gone. There hasn’t been a stable artist who keeps inspiring me. To be honest, there’s not many. That’s because everything is just so popcorn now.

TR: It’s more songwriters and producers. You got people like Rico Love, Dr. Luke. It’s more producers. The artist is just a face.

DW: It’s just the production side, the people that actually make this a record.

IL: That’s the thing too, that people who aren’t really affiliated with doing music don’t really understand that when you see an artist, it’s not really them. As producers, we hear a song and we hear a production team. Like when someone hears Chris Brown, they only hear Chris Brown. But we hear Chris Brown, and we hear The Underdogs, because there’s just so much of their influence in that music.

RL: Man, I’m falling in love with country music in a new way. It’s because of the story. I like it from what I’ve seen, where when they have bands, they have bands, and they stay together forever. It’s like a bond that never goes away. The music is all about soul, they tell stories, like how Lady Antebellum [in the song “Need You Now”] talking about it’s a quarter after one, I’m drunk, and I need you now. Everybody does that in real life, get drunk and send out a text with the letters “WYD” [for “What you doing?”] or “Where are you?”. It’s just honest. They write songs that mean something.

MHL: So is producer recognition a problem in the industry? Are they maybe too far behind the scenes to get credit for their work?

DW: No, because the artists don’t get paid until they hit the tour bus. [Laughter] Let’s say I write a record for Usher. It sells however many copies. He might get a small amount on the back end of every sale, but he won’t make the real money until he gets on that tour bus.

RL: Nowadays, though, people aren’t being fooled anymore. You’re starting to see producers become the artists, like Swizz Beatz or Timbaland. If you hear an R. Kelly track, you know that’s ALL R. Kelly. It’s getting back to where you’re starting to see more of the producers, which is cool.

DW: There’s not a lot of “real” artists out there. Most people just want to sing, to be singers, instead of taking the time to work at a track and make the sound right.

MHL: So, in some ways, you could almost see the producers of a track as the “real” artist, the creative visionary behind the music, while the face you see on TV is just the performer, right?

DW: It depends on the artist. Some artists have a lot of creative input in their production. Like Prince. Prince would do everything in the studio, he would say that he wanted to a part of everything, and he did. He did go in and do everything.

TR: Nowadays, I would say that Bruno Mars is the closest we have to someone who does everything.

RL: Yeah, because he plays, he sings, he writes, he does it all.

MHL: Alright. I have to know. What’s with the name “Sauce Boys”?

IL: [Laughter] “Sauce” is just the lingo for “swag” on steroids.

DW: No disrespect to the swag, but we kind of R.I.P’d swag, because sauce is sauce. Like, it’s on it. Everyone can get sauced. It’s like no boundaries, because everyone is welcome to get sauced.

IL: It’s not a “thing”, it’s a movement, it’s a lifestyle.

RL: It’s like when you’re in the studio, and you work on a track, and you got to put that sauce on it.

DW: You see these jeans? [Points to Latimore]  It’s like, you will never ever in your life see another pair of jeans like these. That’s sauce. It’s like going to the store, picking up something fresh, being like “this is sauce“.

You can get sauced with The Sauce Boys on March 17th, when they’re hosting their party at Club Manor. Or, for more direct #sauce, follow the boys on Twitter! @SauceBoys @NYOSPEAKERS @iamRosean @Ivan_Latimore @TrevisRomell