SameOldShawn: You do a lot of blends. And I was curious about this -- when you're doing a blend, does there have to be a connection between the verse you use and the beat you use?

J. Period: It's not always between verse and beat, or verse and verse. There just has to be some kind of connection or correlation. Sometimes what I'll do in the more intricate transitions -- like on the Q-Tip mixtape, for example, it's Q-Tip talking about [how] "Award Tour" was inspired by Jade, "Don't Walk Away." And then I take him singing the bassline of Jade, "Don't Walk Away," literally extract that, make that a loop behind what he's saying. And then he talks about the Weldon Irvine sample, and then take the Weldon Irvine sample and lay that over the top of it and make it part of the beat, so I'm constructing what he's talking about while he's talking about it. And then it kind of melts into "Award Tour." So it can be that level of intricacy, or it can just be thematic

My stuff is really thematic. So it might be a sample from one thing flipping into another thing. I like to do that a lot -- really tell the story of where the song came from. So if I'm gonna play such-and-such song...For example, on the tape again, "One Love," I took the original "Smilin Billy Suite" and made a beat out of that, just let it play long-form, which he commented on. He was like, that was dope. And these things kind of make sense, but for some reason, nobody's ever done that before. So really, that's kind of the way I approach it