This week, Da Gemini returned to Tables of Content to host another segment of HomegrOHwn. He interviewed Dayton MC Flambroghini, who released his latest album, Before the Summer’s Over, on September 23, 2023. Flambroghini describes the album as a “Rom-Com;” it tells the story of an ill-fated relationship, beginning with a first meeting and ending with the narrator alone again. In the interview, he calls the record his most cinematic work yet, and breaks down the real experiences behind the songs.
Flambroghini begins his new album with the words, “I think we all got one or two exes from the past where things ended so awkward, it’s hard to be cordial now.” Before the Summer’s Over tells the story of one such relationship in intimate, often painful, detail. He told Da Gemini,
“I’ve been told the Before the Summer’s Over album is kind of like a Rom-Com. It’s not really a love story, it’s kind of like a lust story. It’s based off the normal, everyday experience of normal men or women, but a lot of it is based around my experience and my perspective in the moment of the pursuit, the discarding, or the losing of someone.”
The album begins with the song “1st Sight,” which tells the story of the two lovers meeting. On the second track, “Shoot Your Shot,” sparks turn into flame. Happiness, however, is fleeting. For Flambroghini, the album is more than merely the particular arc of one relationship gone awry; it represents an archetypal cycle of attraction, possession, and loss present across romantic relationships.
“That’s the cycle. In the beginning, I really wanted this girl. Then it gets to the point where I'm showing her what it takes to make her like me like that. Then she likes me like that, and I don't like it. So I fall back to try to scale it down, and it creates friction within the relationship. Now she gets another guy to do what I don’t do. And then I realized, I kind of wanted it more than I thought I did. That’s how it goes; we don’t care until somebody else got it.”
While Before the Summer’s Over tells a unified narrative, the songs on the album were not produced in a single creative burst. Instead, Flambroghini explained, most of the songs from the album were drawn from his “vault” of unreleased songs. “This whole album is pretty much from the vault, it just got repurposed,” he told Da Gemini.
“With these all being from the vault, it’s the storyline that makes it all sound in the same moment. None of this sounds older than any of this, because the storyline makes everything equally relevant. I like the fact about this album that the storyline makes it so you can’t just jump into the record. You gotta listen to the whole thing.”
Production on the album was handled by Flambroghini and E. Blackk, who also executive produced the record. Before the Summer’s Over is out now on all streaming platforms. For more information about Flambroghini, including updates about his next album, find him on Instagram or Facebook.
Text by Peter Day, adapted from an interview by Da Gemini.
