CHEYENNE — Sometimes when we’re just doing our thing, not paying attention to anyone or anything else, the universe has a way of opening itself up to us.
That’s exactly what happened to Angel Maldonado in his Cheyenne barbershop one day in 2015, and it’s how the Cheyenne musician and barber released a new song in April with a never-before-heard track he did with Jelly Roll.
Yes, it’s that Jelly Roll, the rapper turned country music artist who has exploded in popularity and become a household name across America. The same Jelly Roll with all the CMT Music Awards who will also be a featured performer at this year’s Cheyenne Frontier Days.
The tale as Maldonado tells it is a fun one. He and his friend, Irving Mercado — stage name Drop — were messing around in Maldonado’s barbershop, playing a track for a song Maldonado and Irving were working on called “Sinnerman.”
They weren’t paying any attention to who was around them.
“This guy was like, ‘Who’s that?’” Maldonado recalled a regular customer asking them. “He’s like hearing the music, and I had just recorded the verse so we could hear how clean it was, and he’s like, ‘Man, that sounds really good. What if I could get Jelly Roll on that track?’”
Given that it was 2015 or so, Maldonado hadn’t actually heard of Jelly Roll. The artist was a rising star at the time, and he’d done some pretty cool rap albums and things. But Jelly Roll was not yet the household name he is now.
“So, I was like seriously, who’s Jelly Roll?” Maldonado said. “No disrespect, but it was just, I didn’t know.”
Maldonado isn’t a guy who is afraid to take a chance though. So he quickly decided to just go with it.
“I was like cool. Well, if he likes the track, let’s do it,” Maldonado said.
Here We Go To Tennessee — Kind-Of
Pre-internet and electronic media, it was hard for artists who weren’t in the same band or city to make songs together, and it could be expensive. One or both artists would have to travel to a studio to work together and record music with professional sound quality.
But nowadays — and even in 2015 — it’s become about as easy as clicking send on an email. In fact, some artists are even using cellphones these days to make their breakout hits, and then getting record deals and time in a professional studio.
So, Maldonado sent Jelly Roll’s managers what is called a WAV file.
“That is how Drake and DJ Khaled work — like, ‘Hey, send me all the stems,’” Maldonado said, referring to discrete groups of instruments that have been placed in a single stereo file. “Drake, he then goes into his personal studio and listens to what DJ Khaled sent him and puts his verse on it.”
The finished track then goes back to Khaled, and the two are that much closer to finishing their next album — all without actually having been in the same room together.
“So that’s how a lot of artists work now, with networking, because it’s so hard to like, I gotta come to your studio and stuff like that,” Maldonado said.
Later, Maldonado said, artists will typically meet up while they’re touring in the same or a nearby town to perform their songs together and create a video of the performance. That can then go along with the musical track.
Maldonado, who was chosen as Cheyenne’s 2023 Citizen of the Year in a Townsquare Media Poll, said he’s reached out to Jelly Roll’s managers, hoping to arrange something like that while the star is in town for Cheyenne Frontier Days. Maldonado hopes his status as Citizen of the Year will be a selling point.
“He’s touring right now, and when people are on tours it’s kind of hard to do a lot of things,” Maldonado said. “But if we could do that while he’s here, that would be cool for Cheyenne’s music scene.”
Life Through A Streetwise Lens
Maldonado said he was blown away by the powerful track he received back from Jelly Roll.
The beat on the track was done by his friend, Mercado, while the lyrics in the first verse are Maldonado’s.
They speak to one man’s struggle with real life on the streets, and fighting back against a world that tries to get people down.
“Life’s what you make it, so I decided to take it,” part of Maldonado’s rap goes. “They talk about the struggle is tough? I’ll bench press the whole state, show ’em what’s up. Yeah, uh-huh. And if that’s ain’t enough, I’ll put the whole world on my back and just pull ’em up.”
Jelly Roll’s take on Maldonado’s theme echoed the exact cadence and way that Maldonado had started his verse, before shooting off on its own direction.
“I thought It was kind of cool artist to artist,” Maldonado said. “He must have liked the track, liked the verse.”
Jelly Roll’s lyrics also reflect a transformational time in his own life. He was struggling to get away from drugs. Just a year later in 2016 he married his current wife and got custody of his daughter.
“I love my daughter, way more than I love rapping,” part of Jelly Roll’s verse goes. “Way more than I love those strip clubs and drug habits.”
Like Maldonado, Jelly Roll also raps about what he sees on the streets of life, then twists the track up with two lines of unexpected, pure rap poetry: “There’s a difference between light and just hearing some thunder. I told you all the truth, you know where I stand. There’s a difference between a fire and a flash in the pan. Come on.”
Cheyenne’s Hip Hop Scene Is Growing
Jelly Roll may have shifted to country, but Maldonado said he can still hear the influence of hip-hop in the artist’s songs, and he likes that a lot.
Cheyenne has a growing hip-hop music scene, Maldonado told Cowboy State Daily. His barber’s shop has been instrumental in that.
“We have been, for years we’ve done Funeral Fridays in the barber shop,” he said. “We call it that because it’s like burying the week, starting fresh with a haircut.”
As part of that, Maldonado would showcase a new artist each month, giving them free studio time and a video to help showcase their music in Cheyenne.
The effort to build Cheyenne’s hip-hop music scene is part of the reason Maldonado waited so long to finish the song with the Jelly Roll track.
“I wanted to drop this track a while ago, but I also wanted to be a helping hand and helping the creative process with local artists in the community,” Maldonado said. “And a lot of artists have taken it seriously and have put the work into having it respected better.”
That attention has brought some pretty big hip-hop stars to Cheyenne, like Ice Cube, for example, who has now played twice in Cheyenne at the Lincoln.
Now that Maldonado sees so many other people are joining the push to promote and advocate for local hip-hop artists, he feels that he has a little more time to work on his own songs again.
“I’m just gonna start releasing all my music,” Maldonado said. “Every month I’m going to be releasing stuff and doing what Angel — Angel — does.”
Angel is Maldonado’s stage name.
Next up?
It’s a track with Ras Kass and Planet Asia, one of the best rappers of all time, according to Pitchfork Media.
