Smiley Gatmouth merges the unlikely pair of rap and ukulele, creating a unique approach to hip-hop. Photo by @honourindigo and @inqueueinc took over as a more prominent vehicle for expression for me.” While his music was embraced by the Madison college crowd, music business wasn’t part of the program. Lynch returned to Denver after he sharpened his creative sword, but without the skills to parlay that into a sustainable career. “Once I wrapped up school and I came back to Denver, I fell hard onto this new reality where I was used to playing these big, full rooms,” Lynch said. “And then all of a sudden, I came back, and I was like, woah. I don’t know how to sell a ticket to a show. I didn’t know how to do any of this stuff.” Lynch switched gears and started working with a local SMILEY GATMOUTH YOUR FAVORITE RAPPER'S FAVORITE RAPPER MOST RAPPERS are widely known by their stage names. Calvin Broadus, who? Oh, you mean Snoop Dogg. Robert Diggs? You must mean RZA. With respect to the likes of JOSHUA ABEYTA DENVER VOICE MUSIC REPORTER Tupac Shakur, the vast majority of MCs create a unique handle that accentuates the parts of their personality they want to project from the stage. For the underground heads, Sage Francis — born Paul Francis — became widely known partially because he used to perform as three different personalities: Sage, Zaul Xan and Strange Famous. Even Beyoncé, one of the biggest names in music, famously had to invent the alter-ego “Sasha Fierce” to deal with her stage fright. Elijah Lynch, aka Smiley Gatmouth, has managed to do a bit of both. “I don’t tend to take on personas in [my music]. It’s really kind of cut-and-pasted just from my life,” Lynch told the Denver VOICE. “I wish I had a cool way to characterize this separate person, but it’s really not a separate person. “When I was a kid, people especially noticed that I was very smiley,” Lynch continued. “When I went to hip hop [events], I was always very bashful and kind of slept on. I didn’t come and present, like, a very fierce outer personality. But then as soon as I started rapping, there was this effect that it would have where people’s minds would be blown.” Lynch grew up in Denver and began performing publicly in his teen years at venues like the Mercury Cafe, mixing his time between hip-hop cyphers and competing at slam poetry events, often winning the competitions along with hearts and minds. He would commonly get a version of the back-handed compliment: “I didn’t expect that from you.” At 18, Lynch was offered a full scholarship to the University of Wisconsin in Madison where he was able to further explore his artistry. “Denver, at the time when I was growing up, had a really rich poetry scene. A lot of the music scene happen[ed] in bars and stuff like that, and so I hadn’t really had much exposure to that before I went out there,” Lynch said. “I went to Wisconsin where it wasn’t exactly dope poetry every night, but music was more readily available. That was a big time of transition where music nonprofit organization, teaching creative writing to high school students. Not long after, he was asked to teach music production there as well. At the time, he had zero experience in production but took the job and quickly learned the software just enough to stay ahead of his students. “My artistry expanded, and I got more experience as a music producer and making beats,” Lynch said. From there, he began to further explore his own musicality, learning to play the ukulele and piano while he rapped, both of which he has incorporated into his live show. Lynch’s debut full-length album “Carousel” came out in 2016 and marries classic boom-bap with the post-millenial backpack introspective/emo style pioneered by the likes of Sage Francis and Atmosphere. His most recent single, “Underneath The Sky” ft. YasmineEmani, marks a full decade between official releases, and it showcases his evolution as a lyricist while still capturing the essence of why he was drawn to hip-hop in the first place, highlighting his storytelling, playfulness, melodic sensibility and radical honesty. He raps on the track: “I’m 29, and I still ride the bus / I waste a ton of time I’ve come to find it kind of sucks / that might for what might otherwise be quite the Midas touch / it seems a nicer life just wasn’t for the likes of us.” The song is a lament to lost time, the fading promise of youth and the stark realization that our dreams may remain just that: dreams. It’s haunting, melancholic, yet somehow still hopeful, and above all, completely engrossed in the moment. A chance connection through rapper Murs made this release possible, part of an upcoming album. Murs began his career with Living Legends — the audaciously named hip-hop group that took the world by storm in the late ‘90s and early aughts. He had a residency at The Music District in Fort Collins, and Lynch applied to be a part of his program, which connected him to a producer who was willing to invest in his work. Outside of music, Lynch works at an emergency shelter for youth who are experiencing homelessness. While working there, he noticed a divide between young people from the U.S. and young refugees from other countries who spoke little to no English, so he used his oldest and truest friend to help bridge the gap: hip-hop, starting a regular freestyle cypher for the youth to share the universal language of music. Catch Smiley Gatmouth at the Aggie Theater on November 28th. DENVER VOICE COMMUNITY PROFILE 5
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