Out of the Blue: Ann Arbor hip-hop group Tree City makes a surprise return with “Pure Levels” album

MUSIC INTERVIEW

Tree City's Kyle Hunter, Jacoby Simmons, and Evan Haywood stand against a graffiti-covered wall.

Tree City's Kyle "Silas Green" Hunter, Jacoby "DJ Cataclysmic" Simmons, and Evan "Clavius Crates" Haywood in 2013. Photo by Cy Abdelnour.

A mature tree blooms every year. Fruit trees can take two to five years to produce. It took Tree City 13 years for Pure Levels to flower.

The Ann Arbor hip-hop group spent that time shaping and defining the album’s tracks before releasing it late last year.

“It’s a time capsule, and it’s a good chunk of our personal evolution as artists and as a group,” said Evan “Clavius Crates” Haywood, a Tree City MC and producer, about the group’s first collection of new songs since 2010’s Thus Far.

“It’s exciting that it’s finally at the point where we’re happy with it and we felt like it was ready. We did not want to release it when it was just good enough. We wanted to release it when we felt it was something really timeless, something that would hold up to repeated listens, and something that would hold people’s interest.”

Pure Levels features Tree City’s four MCs—Clavius Crates, Silas Green, DJ Cataclysmic, and Cheeks—rapping candid rhymes about broken relationships, aging family members, systemic issues, and capitalism alongside fantastical space-themed wordplay over sci-fi-sounding beats by producer Michael Dykehouse and several others.

“Over the years, I feel like we’ve always believed in ourselves as rappers, but working on these songs, we came to the realization that we’re good at what we do,” said Jacoby Simmons, who performs as DJ Cataclysmic. “And who doesn’t want to feel the feeling of accomplishment when you work on something for a long time, and you garner that success?”

And with that success comes a 15-track album that explores living life in another dimension while facing real-world challenges and everyday struggles.

“The theme of the album is—on one level—about space, and it has these space travel themes,” said Kyle Hunter, who performs as Silas Green, and is now based in Houston. “But on the other side of it, space represents growth and expansion and challenging yourself.”

To learn more, I spoke with Tree City’s MCs about the inspiration behind the album.

Q: You spent 13 years working on Pure Levels. What’s it like to finally release the album for people to hear? 
Evan Haywood (EH): [Michael] Dykehouse gave me [those] beats on a burned CD in 2011, and we started writing and performing over those beats then. From the post­­-Thus Far era of Tree City, those Dykehouse beats were very central, but most of the shows that we did from 2011 to now, those beats have been a big part of our sound. A lot of people have seen us perform some of these songs live, but they never came out in a recorded form.

A big reason for that is because the beats are so good, we were intimidated by some of them—like how do we even match the power of this music with our words? We all had to grow to be able to complete the album. We were able to start it, and even the first half has this fun, spontaneous energy of the early process, and the second half is a little deeper and more experimental and represents our journey over the last 10 years.

Kyle Hunter (KH): It’s surreal. It’s like if you haven’t talked to a good friend in a long time, and then all of a sudden, they show back up and say, “Hey, wanna start hanging out again?” And you say, “Sure. Let me clear my schedule so I can re-engage with this aspect of myself.” We had a lot of momentum, even though it had been years in the making. We had started to get focused right before the pandemic occurred. And even during the initial months of lockdown, we were still meeting up in our own little bubble to record parts, write some more songs, and put the finishing touches on things. Sometime during that period, I ended up moving out to L.A., so I was able to put all my parts down before that. This is a project that I’m very proud of and excited to finally show people what we’ve been working on for [over] a decade.

Jacoby Simmons (JS): I feel like it’s a relief for all of us. There was a long period of time when we didn’t think it was actually ever going to get done. With mixing and mastering, [Evan] has worked so many hours on this record. I can’t even put into words how much work he has put in for this record. It’s all a group effort.

Charles Cheek: In 2011, I took the opportunity to expand my studies and attend the University of Washington. It, of course, changed my involvement in the group, but I was happy that Evan, Kyle, and Jacoby continued the good work and kept the music pushing. I stayed connected with Tree City, although I was in the Pacific Northwest, so we still had the chance to collaborate on this new project. I’m excited for Pure Levels. I think it [shows] the growth of the music and the natural progression of artistry for all of us.

Q: What roles did all of you play in assembling Pure Levels
EH: It was mostly assembled by me, DJ Cataclysmic, and Silas Green. The three of us had a lot of meetings in the studio [about] cutting songs and deciding on track order. And then we also gave Dykehouse [an] executive producer credit because he gave us most of the music that we built it from. It was up to us to put that together in the right way. Cheeks has been out in the Seattle area, and he’s back now, but he wasn’t there for that period. He’s on a couple of tracks. The three of us were the ones who were spending the long, late hours putting it all together. We did it at my studio [Black Ram Treehouse], but it’s gone through five different studio spaces from when it started. It was short bursts of creativity, like maybe once a year or once every two years, we would spend three nights working on it intensively, and then we wouldn’t see each other for a year.

QPure Levels references personal experiences about love, family, money, and oppression across its 15 tracks. Why did you take such a personal approach to songwriting for this album? 
EH: A lot of it is inspired by personal experiences. A lot of it is straight autobiographical for all of us. I was writing about my experience of living with my grandfather as he was aging and his health was failing him. I was writing about relationships I’ve been in. I was writing what it was like to be out on the scene at that time performing and being in the mix.

We [also] were writing a lot about capitalism and how money was affecting us, our relationships, and bigger systemic issues. It’s not always necessarily our own perspectives on things. Sometimes it’s a bigger picture, almost like a bird’s eye view of things. I won’t say everything is autobiographical—it’s more like a movie with different characters.

KH: I knew after Thus Far that I did not want to make any more rap songs strictly about how good I was at rapping. I felt like that was thematically constricting after a while, and I was getting tired of hearing myself talk about it. I wanted to push myself to rap about my life, my thoughts, or my actual lived experiences and not keep feeding into this persona that’s divorced from any vulnerability or humanity.

JS: I want to keep honesty in my music at all times and write about the things I personally have gone through or deal with on a regular basis. I love this project in particular because it highlights a lot of the things that I feel are almost considered taboo in rap. We don’t shy away from rules or cultural norms, things that people think we’re supposed to do, or things that other people expect us to do or rap about or say. I love how there’s transparency and honesty throughout the whole record, but it doesn’t hinder us from being funny in a sense, too.

Q: The album’s personal approach to songwriting is interspersed with futuristic space references and imagery. What was it like to weave that space theme throughout Pure Levels
KH: As far as I was concerned, we were responding to the sound of the production. From there, we would write songs like “Love Hotels” or “Space Movies,” and it wasn’t explicitly that we wanted to rap about space. It organically happened that way because we were vibing off of the sound and going with the imagery that the production was inspiring. Dykehouse is one of the most underrated local producers in the city, and I think it’s high time he gets his due.

Q: “Boss Triangles” features Kool Keith and references being in a space lounge. How does this track help set the tone for Pure Levels
EH: A huge piece of the album was getting Kool Keith on the intro. I’m a huge fan, so it’s a bucket list moment for me as an artist. I reached out to him about being on the track, and we figured it all out. And then I sent him a lot of references for the things I wanted him to talk about and the style I wanted him to [have]. He masterfully took all those little pieces of information and wove them into his verse. He’s shouting out Tree City and 734 … and he says Pure Levels in there also.

I set the scene for him of being in this space lounge with all these pimps, players, and criminals hanging out … with velour couches and stuff like that. It’s like the waiting room before going into the portal. It’s the lounge where everybody is hanging out, smoking, and drinking. You leave the club, you walk into the screen of the portal, and it will take you into whatever dimension you want to go into. It’s the starting place of the album, and then almost every other track is like a different door you can walk into from there.

KH: [Kool Keith has] always been a big influence on how to revel in my own weirdness and how to play up the goofiness of rapping itself. It’s easy to take it way too seriously, and every song has to be about either the super-in-depth analysis of society or the super-complex rhyme schemes that I’m supposed to impress people with. I thought, “Neither of those is necessary. How about we come up with the coolest imagery that we can describe?”

Q: “Space Yacht” chronicles living high while traveling on a spaceship. What inspired this otherworldly track with Prince Shipwreck about being on a futuristic yacht? 
EH: I like Silas Green’s perspective on this track because [it’s about] galactic maintenance. He’s this cog in the machine, but even this cog in the machine is living this fly life with all these models partying [alongside] holograms and [having] champagne. It’s this idea of a utopian ‘70s throwback retro [environment] with shag carpeting but mixed with neon lights. [For Prince Shipwreck], this is probably his only hip-hop credit at this point. He raps on that track and sings on it, and he produced it.

KH: On this one, it is deliberately about space. It’s about all the imagery I have grown up with—people floating around and teleporting. But we also wanted to make a social commentary about capitalism influencing how people interpret the possibilities of being in space. It’s saying, “Yeah, we’re very advanced technologically, but we’re still dealing with the same things that everybody deals with.” It’s like trying to date, get your bills paid, or impress people with your status. That doesn’t go away even as technology intensifies, so that’s what I was trying to touch on in that song, but still keep it light and goofy.

[Prince Shipwreck] was a friend in that scene of U-M grad students that were hanging out in that area … and he was making his own rap song. When I heard it, I thought, “Not only is he such an original mind when it comes to how he writes his lyrics, but he’s a great singer, arranger, and producer.” He’s another one of those people who is very down-to-earth, but also very quirky. He was always down to work with us, so I said, “While you’re here, I want to collaborate.” “Space Yacht” was originally his song featuring me, but then we found it fit the sound and theme of the album perfectly. With his permission, we considered it a Tree City song featuring him.

Q: “1975” addresses the disappointment and heartbreak of seeing relationships end. How did experiences with past relationships inspire this track? 
EH: This one is about a couple of failed relationships that Silas Green and I both had at the time. It was very present and fresh. We were both dealing with heartbreak and reflecting on what it means to be in a relationship when you’re still in [it], but it’s falling apart at the same time. You’re holding on for dear life, but you know it’s disintegrating. It’s feeling that grief and loss of losing love or something that you felt was important.

KH: It was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to an older relationship. This [was] my first real adult relationship [that] had just come to a close, and I was writing that verse as a way to process it. It’s like a snapshot of the final stages of that relationship for me. And Evan, a couple of years later, had a breakup and wrote a verse about his experience. [For] me, I [named] it [“1975”] to double down on the fact that I’m considering this in the past. The times I spent with this person, they might as well have taken place in 1975. That’s how far back it is to me now.

Q: “Hurry Up and Die” examines rushing through life personally and professionally. How does this track serve as a reminder to slow down and enjoy life? 
EH: It’s about how the world is always pushing us to rush. It’s capitalism saying, “You should always be working. If you’re not producing, then you’re useless.” It’s this idea that life is more than that, and you don’t have to hurry up and die by living at the pace that people expect you to until you drop from exhaustion.

KH: We each wanted to write a snapshot of somebody experiencing some turmoil, challenge, or setback. And within the theme of that, it’s saying, “Yeah, that’s just as part of a life of everything that we’re hoping for and always striving toward.” It’s just a different side of the same coin. If you’re not careful, and you try to hurry through those periods of time, it’s gonna speed it up to the point where you’re gonna die. There’s no real value in trying to skip over or fast forward through the shitty shit of life—be it a divorce, be it death, or be it anything that is a necessary part of this deal.

JS: It’s about the whole progression of life, too. In the first verse, I talk about growing up as a kid, and then Kyle’s verse is about getting married through middle age. Evan’s verse is about being a senior citizen, and he mentions his grandad who was older and he passed away, R.I.P. I love the progression of that song because it sounds like life in a sense. You’re a kid, you get older, you’re an adult, and you get really old, and then that’s it—try not to hurry up and die.

Q: “Mama Says Education” examines the challenges of colorism and capitalism and the damaging impact they leave on society. How does this track help educate listeners about those struggles? 
EH: It’s about structures of oppression and how they work. In Tree City, a big part of what we have done is having many long conversations about race, class, money, society, social structures, and mass incarceration. Those are the types of things we would talk about on an everyday basis so that worked its way into our rhymes.

KH: We wanted to have a few songs that talk about race. Because in Ann Arbor, race is kind of the elephant in the room a lot of the time. We would be doing ourselves a disservice, and we would be doing the city that raised us a disservice if we did not at least speak to our experiences with race and how it informed our own identities. In Jacoby’s case, he delves into a lot of inter-community tension and a lot of colorism and how that can warp people’s sense of their own self and their own identity. I don’t know too many people who are willing to be that vulnerable about something. I encouraged him to speak his truth on that track, which he did brilliantly.

JS: Growing up as a kid, it wasn’t easy because people who look like me would put me down for having darker skin. It’s such a … conundrum because it’s like, “We’re all Black people, and just because I have a darker complexion doesn’t mean that I’m less than or inferior, or [that] you have the high ground because you’re lighter-complected.” I wanted to write a verse about that kind of experience, and it took a long time for me to be comfortable talking about that on the record. It’s crazy how people think sometimes and why [they] would assume that one human being is less than another because of how they look.

Q: “Animal Skin” is about living behind another identity and developing a tough exterior. What inspired this tale of camouflaging yourself from the world? How did Eye-Vizual MD become part of it? 
EH: That one is a standalone piece by Eye-Vizual MD. [He] was one of the founders of Tree City—Justin Nunn. He’s a genius, and he was the one behind the early sound of Tree City. Our first project, The TreE.P., was produced almost entirely by him, and he rapped on that as well. He was one of the real people who lit the spark for Tree City. It was great to get him back on that track. We sent him the beat and he sent that back.

KH: It’s a slight bookend in the same way that “Boss Triangles” is. The last voice you hear is not anybody in Tree City, but it is a call-back to all of our older fans who know Eye-Vizual and have been waiting and wishing that he would rejoin us on something. It’s a way for us to satisfy that, and thematically, return to more of a traditional hip-hop pose. We’ve been very vulnerable, we’ve opened up, and we’ve talked about all the gooey stuff, but now we’re gonna have this moment at the end where we can get back to basics.

JS: It highlights, with some people, the lack of vulnerability or the decision you make when you come to that fork in the road. You can either stick to your façade and go through the motions, or you can accept the fact that you’re a human being with emotions and you do the work to learn how to regulate those emotions. You put your best foot forward with every interaction and do not assume that you have to just portray this image that you came up with in your head to function in society.

Q: Tell me about the creative process for Pure Levels. How did the album come together during that 13-year period? 
EH: It had to do with recording a lot of material and then shaping that material to fit these themes and this vision. A lot of it came down to editing and track placement and how we put the flow of the album together to tell this story. There are songs on the album that were written in 2011 and then there are songs on the album that were written in 2021. There’s 10 years’ worth of writing and recording on the album, which is why it was so hard to make it all flow the way it does now. And that’s what took us so long—it was not making the songs—but being able to make the cohesive project that we wanted and something that would age well.

Q: How did beats from different producers help shape the album sonically? 
EH: [Dykehouse’s beats] are about 90 percent of the album, and the remaining 10 percent is other producers adding inflections to that. You have “Space Yacht” by Prince Shipwreck. Asante produced the outro on “Hurry Up and Die,” which has DJ Cataclysmic rapping over this weird beat. Chrome Sparks did “Fantazia” with Sigidy, and Vulfpeck contributed “Raspberry Balm.”

I contributed a couple of beats as well—the “Superpozition” one and then also the outro to “Wetness.” All of those things added detail and range to the album … but it’s always anchored by those Dykehouse beats. Those are the core of it, and the other things are side quests that we thought were important to put in there so the album didn’t get too much of the same.

The sound is the most polished of anything that we’ve ever put out. It has less of the underground hip-hop elements—although they’re still in there—but it has more of this highly produced feeling to it. We added live instrumentalists over some of them as well, so that added even more layering and texture to it.

Q: You also collaborated with Intricate Dialect on “We’ll Figure It Out,” Dante Peaks on “Superpozition,” and Sigidy on “Fantazia.” How did they help elevate their respective tracks on the album? 
EH: Intricate Dialect is a great friend and was a mentor to us in many ways. The whole Abolitionist crew—Kadence, Charles Trees, Tenacity, S.A., Lo Key—all those folks were very helpful to us when we were starting out. They gave us shows and they brought us along on their journey, and that helped us to foster our journey. It was great to get Intricate Dialect on the album because he’s somebody who has always looked out for us. When you’re dealing with a concept, and you’re dealing with a story where you have to tell it in a somewhat linear way, Intricate Dialect is a great person to work with because he’s so much of a storyteller in different ways.

KH: As for Dante Peaks, he was involved with the group when we were just getting started. He was and is one of the best rappers from Tree City. He had one of the best verses on our EP, he had one of the best verses on Thus Far, and he has one of the best freestyles on this album. He’s always been our spiritual guide. I always wanted to make sure that the people we came into this game with, we have space for them to be heard and to share their talents also.

JS: I think Sigidy is one of the most stylish artists from the area. I love the way he puts words on records. It’s always fun to listen to him flow because he’s so natural with it. 

Q: What’s up next for Tree City in 2025? 
EH: This album is the culmination of our work as a group. And whether or not we do anything after this, I’m very proud this is finally completed, able to be heard, and put out there. And what happens after that is something we’ll have to figure out.


Lori Stratton is a library technician, writer for Pulp, and writer and editor of strattonsetlist.com.