Sleepy Brown
Pat "Sleepy" Brown's success is no fly by night affair. Meeting up with the other members of the acclaimed production crew Organized Noize, towards the end of high school, Sleepy, who's father incidentally was a member of the oft-sampled funk group Brick, got his first shot in the industry as one of the members of the slept-on Outkast/Dungeon Fam predecessor Society Of Soul. "That group wasn't really anything planned," he says. "It was just the natural evolution of what we were doing at the time." Their '92 LaFace debut failed to resonate with the pop charts, but it did give them the forum to play LA Reid a demo they'd been working on by a young duo named Outkast. Brown, along with partners Rico Wade and Ray Murray, helped to produce the group's first two multi-platinum LPs, Southernplayalisticaddilacmusic and ATLiens, in their entirety, and as a result shaped the sound of southern hip hop as we know it. In addition to production, Brown provided back up vocals on several tracks.
Though Outkast flew from the nest, producing much of their subsequent 3 albums, Brown and co. contributed key tracks to all of them. "You know, everything we do with Outkast is like a family thing," he says. "We just work and keep it organic, it's not about having so many beats on a record or anything." Among Brown's more notable additions are "So Fresh And So Clean", the brilliant second single from "Stankonia," and the absolutely mesmerizing "The Way She Moves" which sat atop the pop charts for several weeks thanks in part to Sleepy's addictive chorus.
Shortly thereafter, in 2004, Brown signed his first solo deal with Interscope records and made most of an album which was to be called "Grown And Sexy" (which, in turn, became a highly popular phrase in the urban scene to this date ). "I just had creative differences with the execs over there," he explains. "It wasn't really no bad blood, but it was just that they wanted more straight-forward commercial R&B, and I wanted to make something that went against the grain."
One year later Brown secured release from the label, and was promptly signed by longtime friend Big Boi, of Outkast fame, to his new Virgin Records distributed label, Purple Ribbon. "With me and Big it's just straight family," he says. "We do business together, but in a lot of ways he's always been like my little brother, even though he's gone on to have all this success. So it's just a beautiful thing that all these years later we can still be working together towards the same goals of making great music." And that is exactly what they've done. Produced mostly by Brown and his Organized Noize brethren, the LP boast work from the Neptunes as well as appearances by Big Boi and Joi, among others. "I just want to bring that real soulful vibe back to the music," he says. "And I think we made something that is just different than anything else that people have heard, even though hopefully, it'll remind them of the records from back in the day."
