Lt Headtrip x NorthernDraw: Unbound Flight

In 2025 emcee Lt Headtrip and producer NorthernDraw teamed up for a project called Novel Path. The next chapter in the duos story is a release titled “Unbound Flight.” Released by Headtrip’s WATKK label, Unbound Flight blends music from all over the world with old fashioned American Hip-Hop.

Unbound Flight is an 8-track EP produced by NorthernDraw with additional production by Lt Headtrip, King Tim 33 1/3 and MLTZR. The project features appearances by Quelle Chris, Mostafa, Bassel & The Supernaturals, Ayatollah, Julimar, and Lana Shea.

Lt Headtrip and NorthernDraw spoke to The Real Hip-Hop about collaborating with international artists, losing bigoted fans, and their new EP, Unbound Flight.

TRHH: Why’d you title? the new album Unbound Flight?

Lt Headtrip: Thanks for asking. So, when Kipp and I first started making music together we had like a few songs, maybe like 5 or 6 started, and we were just like, “What are we making music about?” One of the things that me and NorthernDraw have in common is that we travel and we try to get into communities as opposed to just being like resort weekend tourists. We find a lot of value in meeting new people, and learning about cultures and communities, and that was what we talked about a lot and that’s what we wrote about. We decided to make our project about that. When I left Portland what did we have Draw, like twelve songs?

NorthernDraw: We had enough for an EP because we had already toured.

Lt Headtrip: We had probably like 5 songs finished, a few more started, and I was like, “Hey, instead of putting out an album want to put out 2 EP’s?” and NorthernDraw was like, “Nope! Let’s put out three EP’s!” All right, challenge accepted.

NorthernDraw: I also liked the idea of a triptych making it like a three-piece, one album, kind of idea.

Lt Headtrip: Which is a fun challenge. It’s something that I’ve never done before.

NorthernDraw: I think it’s also good with the times. It makes it more digestible when you’re marketing your album like three times rather than just one time when you make an opus — like a larger album.

Lt Headtrip: That’s smart. I think the title “Novel Path” came to me first and then the play on words there where ‘novel’ refers to something brand new and something never done before, but also refers to a piece of literature, and then ‘path’ being the part of the journey we’re in. NorthernDraw came up with the idea of the triptych being the beginning, the middle, and the end of whatever we ended up titling it.

We kind of settled on the beginning is like drawing out a map or a path, and the end is like finding your destination, settling down, or achieving a goal. The middle is like the journey itself. We had a couple different ideas but we landed on flight, pun intended. Just keeping up with the literature theme ‘unbound’ like a text can become unbound. It’s also a play on inbound and outbound.

NorthernDraw: A novel can be unbound.

Lt Headtrip: A novel can be unbound. High concept.

TRHH: How is this album different from Novel Path?

NorthernDraw: I think we already set kind of a precedent at the beginning and this one you jump right into the flight. You’re like in the airplane going on the mission right away. There’s no kind of like warming it up or anything. I think right off the bat the project has a lot of momentum. I think we have some similarities to the first one, too. We’re trying to kind of keep the template of having multiple languages or featuring people that speak multiple languages and from different countries to make that connection and alluding to the traveling kind of theme of the album. Also, we have a couple prominent features on this album as well, such as the last one as well.

Lt Headtrip: Rob Sonic, baby!

NorthernDraw: Rob Sonic! Hell yeah. Rob Sonic killed it on the first one.

Lt Headtrip: It does begin and immediately it’s a race. We are just jumping into it, you’re right about that. I also think that this album is more of a concept album. The first album does set the stage and plays with the ideas a bunch, I think that this by nature we had already kind of decided what we were doing, and so we gave that guidance to a lot of the artists that we featured on it, and so they kind of got in on the concept a bit more than the artists perhaps on the last album did as much. Although, thinking about it, the artists were super on point on that one, too, but I do just think this one has a little more of a concept album feel to it. It feels like it’s in motion.

NorthernDraw: The Quelle Chris interlude is so on point.

Lt Headtrip: Yeah, he really knocked it out of the park, to use another baseball metaphor.

TRHH: You mentioned the international theme throughout Unbound Flight; are these people you just met during your travels? How did you get all of these people?

Lt Headtrip: Draw you can speak to that. I mean you’re the one that brought Julimar on the album.

NorthernDraw: Julimar is a Venezuelan female rapper that lives in Portland. We connected in the scene here, I think we played a show together through a mutual friend’s gig called A Beat Happening. Shout out to Luvjonez and also Free Tillman. We do all ages events and I think that’s where I initially met Julimar for the Spanish verse. There is a shout out in Wolof, which is the native tongue of Senegal, I got that from my friend Ever who’s also a vocalist — she does stuff in Berlin. I was staying at her house one night and was like, “You speak Wolof, would you like to do a shout out real quick?” right before I left. Also, one of the gems of this EP is the outro which has my friend Mostafa who is an Egyptian American who raps like half in Arabic. We also have Bassel from Bassel & the Supernaturals, which Headtrip manages, who also does the chorus in Arabic and mixes it with English as well.

Lt Headtrip: Yeah Bassel’s a good friend of mine, we go way back. I tour with the band and I manage them when we’re on the road, and I do a lot of work behind the scenes. We got that verse back from NorthernDraw’s homie Mostafa and I think we both had the idea, what if we brought Bassel into this too? We kind of pushed Bassel to write some Arabic lyrics, which he’s been experimenting with more and more. He’s Syrian American and that track really came together. And we got Egbe who we met through the movement and he speaks in Ewe I think it’s pronounced. It’s Togo — it’s an African language.

NorthernDraw: Yeah, and then the other one is Dj Left_T who is a Filipino DJ.

Lt Headtrip: How do you know Dj Left_T?

NorthernDraw: Well, in our last interview with Sherron I was in Osaka. I went and played a gig with this this DJ from the Philippines and I hit him up to give me a shout out because he does cutting, and videos, and work out there.

TRHH: On the song “Back Around” you say, “Got a little older, lose a few supporters when I dropped the old persona, good riddance/Lost a little more when I walked out that closet door, and that’s a little different, wish I never appealed to those bigots.” Explain that rhyme.

Lt Headtrip: When I was younger I wrote a lot of conscious rap, I wrote a lot of social commentary. When I was in high school I was out as bisexual. I got to New York and I tried to enter some rap scenes and some punk scenes and a lot of the Hip-Hop scenes that I tried to enter were really intimidating and I kind of like walked back into the closet. I also was aggressive and angry and people weren’t listening to the lyrics and it was frustrating me as a young man, and so I integrated a lot of shock value into my work to get people to pay attention. In doing so, I ended up appealing more to the punk scene on Long Island than the Hip-Hop scene, and that kind of taught me all my DIY ethos that then carried me back into Hip-Hop as a show promoter, and event organizer, and it got me in with the right people, frankly.

So, I kind of had to like veer to head back in and over time I shed some of that like villain shock value persona. I remember playing a show in the South in like 2019 and one of my friends from college, a fan, came to the show and was so upset that I wasn’t playing this really vulgar Odd Future esque, pre-Odd Future, song. I was like, “I mean look, I was a kid. It was fun back then, but we were in this college bubble. I wasn’t hurting anybody with those songs, now my songs reach a lot more people and I don’t need to be out here using my platform for anything that could be mistaken as hate. It just is not how I roll anymore and frankly if I would have understood the implications of what I was saying back in the day, I would have changed up my act a little bit.” But again, you’re in a bubble with a bunch of kids in college just having fun.

So, that really hit me that I had lost some fans because I was no longer leaning into this “you can’t censor me thing.” Back in the day censorship was coming only from the right and the left was like, “We say whatever we want, and you can’t hold us back, parental advisory on my CD be damned.” But there’s a bigger conversation right now and it’s important to pay attention to what people need. So, I’m moving with care in that direction and honestly if people don’t mess with me anymore because I care about that kind of thing, good riddance. You want a copy of Headtrip’s album Raw Dog from 2008? I will send it to you, that’s fine with me. It’s just not on Spotify because I don’t want people to mistake who I am.

So “good riddance” is more of like a “be on your way, I’m good.” But I really wish that I never appealed to the people that thought that I was homophobic in any way. I think that our last EP, Novel Path, was the first time I just blatantly talked about romantic encounters with other guys not mired in metaphor. And to have people look at me different like I was doing something wrong, that’s not even like good riddance, that’s like I need to look back at what I was putting out and how I was performing. I’m kind of disgusted that I would ever appeal to people who have that kind of hatred. A little bit of self-reflection and a little bit of combing through old tweets to make sure that I wasn’t going off when I was a younger man.

NorthernDraw: You still have a Twitter?

Lt Headtrip: I still have a Twitter, yeah I do. I don’t really use it. I announced the album and I kind of leave it. This is like the third song that I wrote with NorthernDraw and I say that line but it’s more fitting that it happens on the second album because I did kind of come out more so on Novel Path. And then this is kind of a reaction to some of the reaction that that EP caught.

TRHH: “Camera Moves” is a different concept for a song. How’d you come up with that idea?

Lt Headtrip: Kipp loves analog cameras.

NorthernDraw: I think it’s because you were working for that estate sale place and getting a bunch of cameras and stuff.

Lt Headtrip: I was getting a bunch of cameras, I got camcorders everywhere.

NorthernDraw: I think it’s also fitting for the album when you’re like traveling and stuff and you’re like making memories, and you’re taking photos and you’re kind of capturing these moments. I love to take photos all the time and one of my favorite things to take photos of is like traveling and shows to kind of document shows. I like to take artistic stuff too here and there, but it’s more about people that surround me in events so I can look back on it like, “Oh, I was here and this is some cool memories of that.” So, I think it fit into this album really well, but I think it was recorded around the same time Novel Path was recorded.

Lt Headtrip: That was also one of the first songs we made before we really had a concept for the entire overarching thing. But again we were like, “What do we enjoy doing together? We like having all the cameras around.” When I was in college I was in a lot of student films. I was friends with film majors and they trusted me as an actor in their films and I delivered sometimes. I remember they would always go, “Camera moves!!” anytime they picked up the camera and moved it. I thought that that was repurposing camera moves to being like, we’re making camera moves right now. Everything we make is a movie.

My homie Googie that I’ve toured with for many, many years, he’s always talking about how we’re making movies. So, I kind of took that and put it in a modern sense where we all kind of have cameras, we’re all kind of in each other’s documentaries all the time, and so I kind of took the role of like a megalomaniac director and pretended like everything that I see is for my documentary. It kind of plays into that playing a character that I used to do a lot more and just ran with the concept.

TRHH: “DIY Worldwide” is a song that talks about being on the road. What’s your most memorable road story?

NorthernDraw: Man, I gotta say our first tour. I mean as far as music tour wise. As for traveling, I got too goddamn many.

Lt Headtrip: What’s something that you remember from our first tour The Atlantic Slide? That was our first one out, right?

NorthernDraw: [Laughs] Getting a tattoo of the van that we’re doing a tour in like the first day of the tour. I think trading the guy some illicit substances for the tattoo.

Lt Headtrip: [Laughs] Bartering! You bartered for the tattoo. The first tour we went on we drove around in a van that belonged to one of NorthernDraw’s good friends who was a world traveler and an extreme athlete — he was a BMX biker, Murphy, and he passed away. His brother hit us up like, “Yo, do you wanna take Murphy’s old van on tour?” It’s got a bed in the back. The first day on tour we landed in Richmond, VA.

NorthernDraw: No, we landed in Massachusetts then we drove to Richmond in a rainstorm.

Lt Headtrip: And you got the tattoo.

NorthernDraw: Yep. I got a tattoo right away.

Lt Headtrip: Oh, man, that was a wild tour. I hadn’t been out for more than like a few days in a while. We were we out for like 10-15 days or something.

NorthernDraw: Yeah, I think we did like 2 weeks. That was also my first time on the East Coast. I mean, I’ve been to New York City and I’ve been to Boston, but I’ve never been to a lot of other places around there.

Lt Headtrip: Yeah, we watched the solar eclipse in DC.

NorthernDraw: First time in DC.

Lt Headtrip: Yeah, that was dope. The story that I tell about I blew my vocal cords out at Eureka in a rainstorm. We throw these backyard shows in Pittsburgh — my buddies in Pittsburgh throw them, I show up and rap. I was on the road, and it was raining, and we got excited, and I just like gave up the mic and started rapping without the mic. Oh my gosh, and I blew my voice out and that was the second stop of the tour. So, for the rest of tour I had to rap in a whisper and I would spend my days breathing in vapor from like a Vick’s personal vaporizer for the entire tour. I just couldn’t talk. I couldn’t use my voice in between shows. I bet my tour partners were happy that they get a quiet Headtrip for the first time ever [laughs].

TRHH: Why should fans cop or stream Unbound Flight?

Lt Headtrip: You know, I like the songs that I wrote and all that. I like sharing my music with people, but I think that this album is more important than that. I think that the most important reason for people to listen to Unbound Flight is to listen to Julimar go off for like 50 bars in Spanish, even if they don’t speak Spanish. To listen to Mostafa and Bassel weave Arabic in and out of their verses.

NorthernDraw: Also, to listen to the dope features by MLTZR on those tracks. MLTZR killed it.

Lt Headtrip: Yes, MLTZR, brilliant producer. Sherron let me ask you, when you listen to a verse or a hook in a language you don’t understand what do you feel? Are you frustrated, are you excited, are you intrigued?

TRHH: Depends if I like the song. If it’s a good song I don’t care. If I don’t like the song, I just don’t like the song. The language doesn’t matter.

Lt Headtrip: Amen. Exactly, and that’s what I’m hoping people gather from this. You don’t have to know Spanish to love “Guevonadas” that’s a dope track.

NorthernDraw:  Or just tell that she’s barring out super hard.

Lt Headtrip: Yeah, she’s obviously barring out. You don’t have to speak Arabic to know that there’s emotion behind what Bassel is singing on that track. Frankly in a time when xenophobia has a national platform, and walls are going up, and borders are being drawn we just want to be like, “Hey, we’re all out here, making music. We all like the same stuff, it’s all good.” You don’t have to speak the same language to speak the language of music. We can build a community even if we don’t speak the same language or agree on all the same stuff. We’re still out here doing our thing.

Purchase: Lt Headtrip & NorthernDraw – Unbound Flight