Milkdrop opens up about his faith and his latest release

It took John-Alan Suter five years to arrive at his latest album, Poet at Heart, which was released in the waning days of 2015. That half-decade, he is quick to say, shouldn’t give his work extra weight. Poet at Heart is not his magnum opus; he regards it more as a debut.

Suter, who performs as Milkdrop, has had plenty of collaborative albums and EPs (nearly a dozen in the past three years), but this is the first release, he says, that is truly him. And the road to it wasn’t always clear.

Poet at Heart traces it origins back to 2010, when Sean Hunt had moved back to Lawrence from San Francisco. Hunt, who performs as rapper Approach, is the founder of Lawrence hip-hop label Datura Records — and he also happens to be a longtime friend of Suter’s. Poet at Heart came about, Hunt says, at the perfect time.

“One of the first things that I wanted to do when I came back was Milk’s project,” Hunt says. “I hadn’t really produced an album in a long time, so it was a way to get back to the board in that respect, and Milk would handle all the lyrics.”

But, Hunt adds, there were plenty of starts and stops. Suter went through a divorce and several other life changes; Hunt had refocused on his own material. (Makeout with Violence, his first rap album in five years, was released in 2013.)

“The album [Poet at Heart] changed themes and changed sonically about three or four times,” Hunt says. “We would get going for about three or four weeks, and something would happen and we would have to stop. But about the time I finished Makeout with Violence, we really locked in. I gave him a new palette of music that I’d been working on and it just opened the floodgates. Suddenly, everything started falling into place.”

Hunt speaks with a purposeful cadence. We meet in the farthest back room of Java Break in Lawrence; Hunt is decked out in bright-red Chiefs gear, sipping coffee. (Suter, we have just discovered, has been stranded in Leavenworth due to the weather.)

In a way, Poet at Heart acts as a debut of sorts for Hunt, too. Under the name Aikido Bray, he’s credited as the producer or co-producer for the album’s 12 tracks; it’s the first time he’s worked as a producer on material that wasn’t wholly his own.

“Milk is a tricky artist,” Hunt says. “I’d say about six months into mixing was when I really caught on to what he was saying, because it’s complex. He’s got a unique groove to stuff, so it takes you a minute to understand what’s going on musically. I wanted to make sure the music sounds right and tone sounds right with the tracks, and it kind of took me a while to come around to everything that I was hearing.”

Hunt’s beats evoke a blend of mid-’90s R&B and sleek, slinking modern electronica; they make a smooth backdrop for Suter’s dense, compact verses. Suter’s phrasing can read like code, his themes so subversive that the stories he’s telling are never fully at the surface. Telltale clues of his vision come in song titles, such as “Bless” and “As It Is in Heaven.”

“I think a lot of people take certain things that I say as metaphors or wordplay because of how I write,” Suter says over the phone as Hunt conferences him in, “but a lot of the time it’s very literal. For instance, my morning now consists of everything I say in my music: I wake up, I read from the Bible, I drink coffee, I write, I sit in front of my laptop and draw up some artwork for whatever [album or release] we have coming. I’m very plain.” Suter laughs, and even his laugh sounds serious. “Right now, I’ve got house shoes on.”

Faith-inspired and mainstream music don’t often mix, but Poet at Heart is far from preachyp. Suter uses his lyrics to explore the complexity of religion, and his subtle approach is often more philosophical than anything else. (And there is certainly nothing on the album that could quality as “Christian rap.”)

But Suter is at his most effective when he is being concrete. On “Between Us,” he reflects on a conversation he imagines having with his young son. He opens with a deeper rhetorical question: What do we tell our sons when they were born to be kings/When we know now they’ll never be treated as such. Suter repeats this couplet throughout the track, and each time it sounds heavier.

“That’s the last song that I wrote for the album,” Suter says. “I wrote it on the night of the Darren Wilson verdict. I really wanted to just kind of give my perspective on that event, being that I do have a son who is biracial, so he is kind of viewed on both sides of the fence, as far as his appearance. I wanted to speak from a father’s perspective. How could I send him out into the world with the way things are currently? How do I explain to my son that there are people in this world who look [white] just like me, who look like dad, that might see him in a different way than I do?”

Later, I ask Suter how he reconciles the personal elements of his art with his real life. What struggle, I wonder, does he have in separating John-Alan the man from Milkdrop the artist?

“The great thing about the music that Sean and I make is that there isn’t a line in between the two,” Suter says. “Milk and John are the same entity, but when I have a microphone in my hand I happen to be Milkdrop, because that’s what I call myself.” Suter pauses. “I don’t think artists give people enough credit as to what they’re able to to perceive. If I didn’t include some of the foundational pieces of who I am in the music, I think people would be able to see through that. With this record, I wanted to just give as much as I could of myself.”