Breaking: Shwayze

Who: Malibu's Shwayze. One-half L.A. playboy and one-half trailer park MC, the duo look to prove they're more than just reality television stars with their self-titled debut album.

Sounds Like: If you're unfamiliar with their MTV show Buzzin', Cisco Adler describes the duo's tunes as "California chill stoner music," as evidenced by the duo's Sugar Ray-meets-Pharcyde first single "Buzzin'." Shwayze, the other half of the duo, says Adler's music industry father Lou "brought the California sound in the Sixties. Cisco and I are reinventing it for right now."

Vital Stats:

• Where to begin with Adler? The son of Lou Adler, who signed the Mamas and the Papas and helped launch the Monterey Pop Festival. The guy who dated actress Mischa Barton. The man whose genitals got namechecked by Sarah Silverman during MTV's Video Music Awards. The lead singer of the failed rock/reality show band Whitestarr.

• Shwayze was raised in a Malibu trailer park and met Adler one night while cruising the L.A. party scene. "I was like 'Let me intern for you,'" Shwayze says of meeting Adler. Instead of becoming his intern, Shwayze became his bandmate.

• Adler already knows what to say to the haters. "People might say that the music is so simple," Adler says. "I'm like 'Fool, it's hard to make something simple.'"

Hear It Now: Shwayze is due out August 19th, the band's second single "Corona and Lime" is expected out soon and MTV is replaying Buzzin' every other hour. Check out the video for "Corona and Lime" above.

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

More Song Stories entries »

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