Cruising Kitchens and a TV Shoot
People ask how a rapper ended up at a barbecue competition in Port Aransas. The answer is a job.
Cruising Kitchens
From January 2021 to September 2024 I worked at Cruising Kitchens, the San Antonio company that builds custom mobile units — food trucks, trailers, and considerably stranger things. Run by Cameron Davies, billed as the world's largest custom mobile business fabricator, out of a facility near San Antonio International Airport.
It is a genuinely San Antonio operation: fabrication, welding, design, a yard full of vehicles in various states of becoming something else. Builds that came out of there while I was around that world included trucks for Whataburger, Raising Cane's and Karbach.
The filming
We were filming with Davies Entertainment for Built for Business, which premiered on MotorTrend on August 20, 2020 and ran two seasons. MotorTrend sat under Discovery, and the show itself was a spinoff of Cameron's earlier run on Discovery's Blue Collar Backers.
That is how I came to be in Port Aransas for Palmfest — a festival and a serious barbecue competition with a large entry fee and a larger prize. I was not competing. I was there with a crew.
And that weekend produced a song, which went on to produce five awards at a festival in Los Angeles — not a sequence anyone could have planned.
The Eat. Learn. Play. bus
The build I will always bring up is the Eat. Learn. Play. bus for Stephen and Ayesha Curry's foundation.
It is a school bus, converted. A food truck on one side, a library on the other, a rooftop deck, a basketball hoop, murals by the Oakland artists Illuminaries. It launched in Oakland in September 2021 and runs with the Alameda County Community Food Bank, going to schools and community centres in parts of the city dealing with both hunger and low literacy rates.
A vehicle whose entire job is to show up somewhere and feed kids and hand them books. That came out of a shop in San Antonio.
And I got to meet Steph Curry. Which, when you are a guy from here who has been working on an album nobody has heard for a decade, is not a sentence you expect to be in your life.
Season 3, which never came out
I worked on season three of Built for Business. It was never released.
There is a trailer for it. The work got done — the builds, the shoots, the days — and then it did not come out, for reasons above my pay grade.
I have thought about that more than I expected to. I spent ten years on a record that kept not being finished, and here was a whole season of television, made by professionals with a budget and a network, that simply never reached anybody.
It is a useful corrective to the idea that finishing is the hard part. Sometimes you finish and it still does not arrive. Which is an argument for building the thing you actually want to exist, because the alternative is work sitting on a shelf you do not control.
What the job gave me
Two things I did not expect.
Proximity to craft. A fabrication shop is full of people who are extremely good at a physical skill and matter-of-fact about it. Same as the baristas, same as the pitmasters. Being around that enough times rewires what you think effort looks like.
Being on the other side of a camera. Watching a production get made — how long a shot takes, how much gets staged, how a day of work becomes ninety usable seconds — is an education. I think about it constantly now that I am directing my own videos. I know what I am asking for because I have watched people try to deliver it.
The pattern
A bowling alley. A coffee shop. A custom food truck shop with a TV crew in it.
None of those are music jobs and all of them are on the record. The bowling alley gave me the hours to write. The coffee shop gave me a city and a community and a way out of something. Cruising Kitchens gave me a weekend in Port Aransas that turned into the funniest song I have.
Three and a half years in a fabrication shop, in the middle of a decade spent on one record. Almost none of the important parts happened in a studio.