“Boblo Boat,” Royce warmly looks back at his childhood growing up in the D, a proud, blue collar city that has not always received the most positive of accolades. Royce transports listeners back to a time in the ‘80s when families could take a boat ride to Boblo Island and forget, for just a few hours, the stinging realities of life for black folks in Ronald Reagan’s greed-is-good America. “The song came together super organically,” he says of the heartfelt “Boblo Boat.” “There was a boat back in the days that took people across the Detroit River to these little obscure islands. One of the islands, Boblo, housed a poor man’s amusement park where a lot of young black kids would go. It was the best s### ever. We didn’t realize it was a cheaper option looking back at it in retrospect. We were too busy having fun.”
Book of Ryan is the seventh solo studio project from the grinding rhyme visionary born Ryan Montgomery, and is a work that defies well-worn, grizzled veteran rap clichés**. Royce** wrote more than 60 songs for the album, For Royce, it’s all about the journey. “I just want the fans to hear my evolution as an artist as well as me as a man and learn from my mistakes,” he says. “I think they got a little bit of that with Layers, but Book of Ryan is me letting it all out. We’ve been taught everything but the right way to do s###. I want to be an example to the younger artists and help out anyway I can.”