You can't blame Everlast for being edgy. The last time the former House of Pain rapper finished making an album, he went to bed and woke up a few days later in intensive care. He'd had a heart attack, due to a congenital flaw, and nearly died before getting an artificial valve installed. "This time, there were parts of me saying, 'Is something going to happen?'" he says, sitting in a cafe near his home in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley shortly after wrapping sessions for Eat at Whitey's, the follow-up to 1998's double-platinum Whitey Ford Sings the Blues.

But there's more to be antsy about. The massive success of Whitey Ford's hip-hop-meets-folk single "What It's Like" came as a huge surprise. This time out, there are expectations. "There was nothing to lose last time," says Everlast, thirty-one, whose real name is Erik Schrody. "Now I'm nervous. I see all these cats [with hits], and five albums later they've made the same record five times. I didn't do that with House of Pain, and I don't want to do that now. I didn't want to do, 'Here's your new "What It's Like."' Let's push the envelope."

To do that, he recorded most of the album in co-producer Dante Ross' spartan Manhattan basement studio. "I just didn't want to do it in L.A.," Everlast says. "L.A's too comfortable for me now. When I made the last record, it wasn't comfortable. It's a whole different ballgame when the bills are paid. But the basement is a hungry environment. There's not even a couch. You have to work. No PlayStations, not even a fridge. It's a great place to be reminded of where you started and why you started."

The sound takes Whitey Ford's hip-hop hybrid one step further, with Everlast, Ross and his partner John Gamble building tracks out of chunky blues guitar and Timbaland -influenced beats. Guest singers N'Dea Davenport and Merry Clayton (famed for her part on the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter") give several songs a soul sensibility, while rappers Kurupt and Cypress Hill 's B-Real sharpen the hip-hop edge. Santana adds a soaring guitar solo to the rocker "Babylon Feeling," continuing a collaboration that started when Everlast wrote "Put Your Lights On" for Santana's Supernatural.

Though the making of this album was devoid of heart-attack drama, Everlast deals with the experience in songs like "We're All Gonna Die" (which features Goodie Mob rapper Cee-Lo in a singing part) and "Graves to Dig," a meditation on mothers having to bury their sons, with shout-outs to slain rappers Scott LaRock, Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. "A lot of the record has to do with death," he says. "It's the first writing I've done since the whole thing happened with the heart attack."

And what about the title, Eat at Whitey's? "That was just comedy, really," he says. "It's a heavy record, but I'm not trying to be Bob Dylan or take myself too seriously. Before I decided on Eat at Whitey's, I was going to call it 'Salty Cracker.' But that was too much."

STEVE HOCHMAN
(August 22, 2000)