Don Toliver Interview: Cactus Jack’s New Star Talks ‘Heaven or Hell’
Written by SOURCE on March 23, 2020
Act V
That July, Don Toliver received an invite to Hawaii for the final ASTROWORLD studio sessions.
“I recorded about 10 records,” he remembers. “Travis liked ‘Can’t Say,’ so he jumped on that. And now a couple of those records are going on Heaven or Hell.”
Sure enough, in Look Mom I Can Fly, Scott admits “Can’t Say” is “a Don song.” From the Hawaii sessions, “Cardigan,” “Spaceship,” and “After Party” all wound up on Heaven or Hell.
“‘Can’t Say’ really changed my life completely,” he says. “I had to focus harder than I’ve ever focused. I had to move different.”
So he went ghost for nearly six months. Publicly, at least.
“I wanted a certain mystique for myself,” he explains. To his credit, he’s remained committed to that mystique, staying mum about the influences on Heaven or Hell.
Privately, though, he began working with producers like the hot-handed WondaGurl. He also linked with Mike Dean, the legendary producer responsible for helping Travis and Kanye West craft their sound, and who cut his teeth producing for Texas icons like Scarface, Selena, UGK, Z-Ro, Devin the Dude, and Big Mello.
After his self-imposed hiatus, the public’s first taste of Toliver’s Wonda-Dean braintrust was “No Idea,” an end-of-the-night, club-closing anthem that sounds like it was made for a speakeasy on Neptune. In the song, Toliver holds a croon with the same phrasing Carlos Santana uses when he holds a note on his guitar. It was released just before his 25th birthday, at the end of May 2019, but didn’t take off until the end of the year, when Toliver released a music video for the chopped-and-screwed version of the song.
“Somebody took that record and uploaded the slow version to Apple Music,” he explains. “And you know how TikTok is. I felt like that slo-mo version was going really nuts. Then the regular version started going really nuts. Then they started making their own version with knife slashes and all that other stuff that they do on TikTok. So by the time it did all that, it was going nuts.”
The song wound up on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at the top of 2020, peaking at No. 43. To date, it has been shared in over 8 million individual videos on TikTok, with many of its most popular shares clocking over a million likes. Each. But he wasn’t finished.
“Then, right after that, we dropped JACKBOYS, and it was a big bomb,” he says, referring to Travis Scott, Sheck Wes, and Don Toliver’s collaborative album. After a year of breakout moments, Toliver’s appearances on JACKBOYS minted his star potential.
Two days after our joyride, Toliver will follow this up with Heaven or Hell, an album that represents his first fully-formed output, using the tools (Mike Dean and WondaGurl) that molded the La Flame sonic universe. As Le$ said, this album is Toliver’s planet within that universe. Heaven or Hell is a psychedelic exploration of Toliver’s duality.
On “After Party,” Toliver finds community in the strip club. With this Sonny Digital-produced gift to all the strip club DJs he once badgered, we’re dropped back into the McLaren, riding shotgun as Toliver tries to shake the feds he first rapped about on “12 Comin.” Mike Dean’s production, especially on songs like this where Toliver’s hook scrapes the sky, is made for the stadium experience. On the other side of the coin, “Candy” is Toliver’s most pronounced confession, owing much of its sonic anatomy to fellow cosmonauts Funkadelic—Dean’s guitar channels Eddie Hazel’s solo on “Maggot Brain” while Don sings that he’s “been living a lie” and compares his sin to genocide.
Heaven or Hell is an explosion of so many fresh melodic ideas that the concept of Toliver as a straight-on rapper seems like a fleeting and distant memory.
