Big Tez Inks Distribution Deal: "We Ain't Have To Leave The 317"

It happened in a basement, which is the only way it was ever going to happen.

Big Tez signed a distribution deal this week after three years of selling tapes out of a trunk and one project — 317 Til I Die — that has now been downloaded more than six thousand times off this site alone. The terms are not public and he would not discuss numbers. What he would discuss, at length, was the two offers he turned down before this one.

The Atlanta Question

Both prior offers required relocating. Both were, by his own description, better on paper. He said no to the first in 2008 and the second in March, and the reasoning has not changed between them.

"Everybody who left, left. And then what happened? Nothing happened. So I'm gonna try the other thing."

That is a harder position than it sounds. The people who left are not villains in this story and Tez did not present them as any. Several of them are friends. One of them, he says, called him after the second offer to tell him he was making a mistake.

The Room

Every song Tez has released was recorded in the same basement off 38th Street, in a room belonging to a friend of his uncle. He has been offered better rooms — free time, real rooms, at least twice by people reading this. He does not use them.

He plans to keep recording there. The deal, he says, does not require otherwise, and that was the part he actually negotiated over.