He has professional production credits dating back over 15 years (to when the then high school student crafted tracks for the likes of Immature, Aaron Hall and Bobby Brown – for the King of Stage’s ’93 remix release Remixes In The Key Of B). He has also produced some of the catchiest R&B/Pop records in recent memory (Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” just to name a couple). But most fans of the futuristic Funk he has created likely still have no idea who Christopher “Tricky” Stewart is.
“This has been a nice long beautiful journey,” Tricky remarked to HipHopDX recently regarding his mostly under-the-radar trek in the industry. “There’s been hits… There’s been failures. It’s been a [typical] career – you know how they go, they go up, they go down. But really, at this point it’s just about staying passionate about the music.”
The multi-instrumentalist midwesterner (hailing from Markham, Illinois) was mentored as a teen by his older brother, and fellow producer, Laney Stewart, as well as the late Louis Silas, Jr. (founder of Silas/MCA Records). The latter providing Tricky with some of his earliest credits on Silas Records releases from the aforementioned Aaron Hall (the remix to 1993’s “Get A Little Freaky With Me”), his brother Damion Hall’s sole solo effort a year later, Straight To The Point, and songstress Chante Moore’s ’94 LP, A Love Supreme.
Additional back-in-the-day credits for Christopher Stewart include a remix to the track “Experiment” from Jamie Foxx’s first foray into album-making back in ’94, some production and keyboard playing credits on Color Me Badd’s ’96 release, Now & Forever (where Tricky worked along with a young Robin Thicke on the album single, “Sexual Capacity”), and work on an assortment of offerings from ‘90s R&B notables The Braxtons, Brownstone, and Tamia.
But maybe surprisingly to some, given his long track record of R&B production, the first real hit from Tricky came courtesy of rapper JT Money’s bouncy ’99 club smash “Who Dat.”
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“That record worked Urban, it worked Pop,” said Stewart of the gold-certified single, “I mean, that was the #2 record in the country on [Billboard’s] Hot 100 [Singles Chart]. And during that time [there] were so many big records out there, like I think Janet Jackson and Busta Rhymes’ record [‘What’s It Gonna Be?’] was out there, and it had like a zillion-dollar video. And it was just an amazing time to take a no-name girl from Kansas City with Sole, and [former Poison Clan member] JT Money, who had never had like commercial success, and be sitting on the top of the charts… It was a great, great feeling.”
While not nearly as commercially successful, Tricky scored some more late ‘90s southern Rap credits, putting in work on onetime No Limit Records twin duo Kane & Abel’s 1999 release, Rise To Power.
“I did [a joint with them and] C-Murder back in the day,” Stewart revealed to DX. “C-Murder was one of my favorite rappers. Too Short, JT Money, I always liked – Like when I like Rap I like ghetto Rap, like real…people that say it like how it really sounds. And C-Murder and those guys at that time, and Kane & Abel, they was saying it how it really sounded. Like, their music really, really sounded like the struggle that was going on with the artists that were trying to come out of New Orleans. And I did a record with them and Twista that…I can’t even remember the name of it, but man, I loved working with them dudes.”
Following his brief dip into the gutta southern Rap production waters, Tricky resumed his role as R&B hitmaker-on-the-rise, scoring his second smash single after “Who Dat,” this time for Mya with 2000’s “Case Of The Ex.”
However, it wasn’t really until Tricky was introduced by his brother Laney to an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who was calling himself The-Dream that things took off into the stratosphere for the long-in-the-trenches producer. Their musical union (with Dream as lyric writer and Tricky and Dream collaborating on production) has since netted two gold Dream solo albums (with a surely third plaque on the way for the next release from the self-proclaimed “R&B Gorilla,” Love King, due in 2010), and the aforementioned mega-hits for Rihanna and Beyonce (along with monster jams for Britney Spears in “Me Against The Music,” Mariah Carey in “Touch My Body” and “Obsessed,” and Mary J. Blige in “Just Fine”).
But now that he’s officially become one of, if not the premier producer in R&B music today, can we expect to see Tricky Stewart’s production credit begin popping back up on more Hip Hop releases?
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“Absolutely,” he replied when asked that very question. “It’s just a matter of whatever connection – What I do isn’t for everyone, so the artist that like what I do, they reach out to me… Whether it’s with Snoop [Dogg] with ‘Gangsta Luv,’ or whether it’s ‘Throw It In The Bag’ with [Fabolous], that has gotten me the opportunity where [Young] Jeezy is willing to listen to tracks that I may do, even though I may not be the type of producer that he necessarily would typically mess with. But at least the [R&B-tinged Hip Hop] records that I’ve made…are now opening up the doors for me to work [on] bigger songs in the Rap game.”
When asked if he always envisioned himself expanding his horizons beyond R&B production Tricky replied, “I always wanted to have exactly the career that I have right now, where I could do what I wanted. I knew I was capable of being on a Fabolous record, and producing Celine Dion. But when you tell people that, they don’t really think – People don’t think that you can really be authentic in that many different places. But for me, because I actually studied the [different] genres, I really know how a record is supposed to sound, even when I’m not in my lane.”
Tricky’s largely Electro-R&B sound has opened up to include many different sonic lanes. The immediate future appears to hold even more expansion for the in-demand maestro, as in addition to work on the forthcoming new albums from Pop stars Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez, Stewart will be behind the boards for Pop-Rocker Katy Perry’s next effort.
Tricky will also be expanding his repertoire via a new deal with Def Jam/Universal (home to new label Vice President The-Dream) for Stewart’s own RedZone Records. The label is currently preparing the debut release from Bryan J, which is led by the new single “Like I’m Obama.”
RedZone Entertainment was initially launched way back in 1995 when L.A. Reid requested Tricky move his production setup to the ATL to work on projects for lesser-known LaFace acts Blackgirl, Pressha, and Sam Salter. The 14 years it took RedZone to receive a formal distribution situation is just further proof of the virtuous patience that has finally paid off for Tricky.
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“One thing was I wasn’t always this good,” Stewart replied when asked why he thinks it took so long to reach his current level of career success. “I always had talent, and I always produced, but I didn’t understand songwriting as much as I do now. I’m a much better songwriter than I was throughout my career. So that’s one of [the reasons] my career looked a little bit more inconsistent. But when I got with Dream, and we started to build the chemistry that we have now, I started to understand more about the song and it wasn’t just – I couldn’t just make a hot track and somebody could just be saying whatever over it and just because it sounded good think people were gonna like it. When they strip away all that production there has to be a story, something there, or somebody saying something [in] a way that they haven’t heard it before, or the wordplay, or the concept of the record. My concepts earlier on in my career just weren’t consistent enough to have the type of success that I have now.”
