Everyone has a breaking point. This is the general idea behind the Sharkey and C-Rayz Walz collaboration album Monster Maker. Sharkey breaks down the concept further: "I feel like the world is the monster maker and I feel like everyone, no matter how good of a family you've been raised by, or how good of a person you are, is capable of being that person that is sitting in the middle of bumper to bumper traffic for an hour one day and on the verge of going out and blasting people. Everyone has those moments where they feel like they can cross the line, everyone has that seed in them where they're capable of doing something monster-ish." An innovative concept requires inventive execution. ...show more

Everyone has a breaking point. This is the general idea behind the Sharkey and C-Rayz Walz collaboration album Monster Maker. Sharkey breaks down the concept further: "I feel like the world is the monster maker and I feel like everyone, no matter how good of a family you've been raised by, or how good of a person you are, is capable of being that person that is sitting in the middle of bumper to bumper traffic for an hour one day and on the verge of going out and blasting people. Everyone has those moments where they feel like they can cross the line, everyone has that seed in them where they're capable of doing something monster-ish." An innovative concept requires inventive execution.

As such, Sharkey enlisted the help of a monster of a lyrical kind: Stronghold's C-Rayz Walz. C-Rayz describes his work on the album: "Each track is like a different emotion or theory or relation, everything that you go through before you just fuckin' lose your mind." The applicability of the monster analogy cuts even deeper, as Walz notes "we're really monsters of our craft because that's what they turned us into. Doing all this good shit without really getting recognized for it right and we just go in and say yo we're gonna do something that's better than everybody's shit." In this industry, the struggle for recognition has been known to make monsters out of the meek. In fact, such a metaphorical transformation may serve as a precursor to success.

Sharkey points out "it's the frustration that's built up and accumulated in everybody...the want to release it sometimes isn't always a positive release, sometimes it's an evil release." If anyone was due for a release, it's Walz, who describes the two years leading up to Monster Maker as, quite simply, "the makings of a monster." With the odds stacked against him, Monster Maker served as the catharsis for a string of misfortunes. "I had label woes, my project changed up, my album didn't sell as well as I thought it would, I lost all my possessions in my storage shit, all my merchandise, all my music and basically my whole life's possessions. All I've got in my house are basically my clothes and CD's." As if that wasn't enough, Walz continues "I fired my manager, my tour fell through, my brother got killed last summer, I had to go to the wake on my birthday. I'm still going through shit with my son's mother, I ain't seen my son in months. ...show less