After the release of Young Thug’s “OUT WEST” in December 2019, Josh Redmond, better known by his stage name JR SPECS, was inspired to record something with a similar instrumental. Titled “OUT EAST” on his laptop, Redmond produced the song himself and later got it mixed and mastered by a friend. The final result was “GETCHA GEEKED,” a braggadocious, bass-heavy and catchy drop.
Set to release on Wednesday, Feb. 24 on all platforms, Redmond said he had been sitting on this song for a long time because it didn’t fit into the narrative themes of his last album, “‘99 DAAYDREAM.” Following “GETCHA GEEKED,” Redmond plans to release a series of singles.
“The next few songs are all gonna be fun tracks with a lot of bounce,” said Redmond, an eighth-semester computer science major. “I kind of took a break from that stuff to tell my story on the last album, so it’s been [time] to just cut loose and make jams again.”
Redmond mentioned that on this track, he wanted to just “get my rhymes off.” For the first verse, he said he wanted to construct a catchy, drawn-out cadence and then write the rest of the lyrics around that. In doing so, Redmond has bars like “Said he got game? Homie, I could get you rained out / She want me to slay (sleigh), homie, I could get you reindeer.”
“College has definitely been a journey of rediscovering my self-confidence as well, so to drop something bold like this as I get ready to graduate I think is really fitting,” Redmond said.
“GETCHA GEEKED” will also have a music video coming soon, which has been teased through some of the promotional materials on his Instagram, @jrspecs. Speaking to the apricot and juice themes associated with the promotional images on social media, Redmond said it’s a reference to an interaction between two of his friends.
“[It] was a sound bite of my friend Sam telling us that he always thought apricots were dried peaches, and my other friend Wyatt arguing with him,” Redmond said. “It was random but I thought the timing worked well with the song, so the original demo I exported [was] ‘GETCHA GEEKED (APRICOTS).’ We shortened the title for release but as an homage to how the song came together we decided to go with a visual theme of apricots and fruit juice.”
Redmond said he’s been trying to branch out and get more help from friends when releasing his music, as opposed to undertaking the entire process of creating promotional materials by himself. Previously, he used to make the graphics for his Instagram, mix and master his songs and handle blog submissions on his own. Now, he has a group chat with other people who help bounce around ideas for art direction and strategy as well as to help produce visuals so he can focus on the music itself.
“I feel like this is the first time I’ve been able to really present a song properly, and that’s very much thanks to Eric [Wang], Maggie [Chafouleas], Jacob Stockman, Jakub Pirog and the rest of my team,” Redmond said. “As a senior who came here almost four years ago hoping to make a name on campus, it’s really satisfying to see how far I and the rest of my creative friends have come.”
