Cleared for takeoff: A pair of seniors prepare to record their first rap album
Fans of the Robertson High School Cardinals have likely heard “Fly with the Birds,” a hip-hop song written and performed by RHS seniors Andres Garcia and Jake Gamel.
It’s been played at several Robertson sporting events, and the duo has even performed the song live for fellow students.
Garcia and Gamel, known as Gx2, have been friends for years and have always shared a love of music. They’ve competed in rap battles since they were freshmen, and about seven months ago, they started writing songs together.
“One day, I just asked (Gamel) to come over to see if we can make something work out of the beats I’ve been making,” Garcia said. “In the first five or 10 minutes, we made our first song. And we kept making songs after that.”
They later wrote “Fly with the Birds” to showcase their Cardinal pride. Writing a song for their school was an idea they both shared, even though they didn’t discuss it beforehand.
“I made this one beat and I showed him,” Garcia said. “That’s what I was thinking: that we could make it a school song. But I didn’t tell him at the time. And then he told me … ‘You know, we should make this about our school.’ … It just kind of clicked.”
But that seemingly fated moment almost never happened. Garcia says he nearly trashed the beat he’d created because he felt he couldn’t make anything good from it. But Gamel wanted to hear it, and moments after hearing it for the first time, he began writing lyrics to go with it. Garcia then wrote some lyrics to add to it, and in about a half hour, they had a complete song.
Once they recorded the song, Garcia mastered the track on his laptop. Gamel then uploaded it to websites like SoundCloud, YouTube and iTunes. Garcia estimates the song has about 20,000 streams on SoundCloud alone now, with well over a thousand more on other services. The song has been shared online by social media accounts with large numbers of followers, and it’s become popular with many of Garcia and Gamel’s peers at RHS.
“Not long ago, we put on our homecoming show,” Garcia said. “That was a pretty cool event. We got everybody to sing our song — they started crowd surfing. It was great.”
Garcia says he and Gamel have put together around 25 songs and have released three so far. In the future, Gx2 would like to schedule more live shows, and they have plans to release an album.
“We’re currently working on an album right now,” Garcia said. “That’s probably next in line. Either that’s going to come first, or a music video.”
“Fly with the Birds” can be heard by visiting bit.ly/gx2birds
