Homeboy Sandman turns his focus inward

The NYC rapper gets introspective on new album Kindness for Weakness

When he picks up the phone to chat, Homeboy Sandman is on Broadway in his hometown of New York City, doing a little sneaker shopping. The hustle and bustle of the scene is palpable; at one point, Sandman interjects a “pardon me, miss” into the middle of a thought.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Sandman was holed up in a studio, taking advantage of a space between long tour legs to lay down some fresh verses penned on the road.

“I’ve got a one-week break right now, and I’ve been writing a lot in the van and I’ve got a lot of stuff I’ve been waiting to get into the studio to do,” he says. “So I hit the ground running as soon as I got home.”

For a decade, Homeboy Sandman has been a promising and prolific presence on the underground hip-hop scene, an MC with a sturdy, measured flow and an affinity for thoughtful rhymes. Just since signing to indie-rap powerhouse Stones Throw Records in 2011, Sandman has tackled government overreach, economic inequality, gun violence, poverty and privilege in his verses, to name only a few topics.

But on his new album, Kindness for Weakness, released in May, Sandman has turned his focus inward. Across 14 tracks, the MC is in a reflective mood, ruminating on maturity, faith, insecurity, love, and more against a set of soulfully low-key beats.

To be clear, Sandman’s detour into more personal territory isn’t just a gimmick or a writing exercise for variety’s sake. The guy is changing, and significantly so.

“I think I’ve really tightened my circle mentally and physically,” he says. “I used to feel like a very communal type of person. I used to feel that I had a lot in common with people. And I don’t feel like I have very much in common with people anymore. I don’t feel like I have very much in common with anybody at all.”

He continues: “I used to feel a part of something bigger than me in a lot of different ways and now I feel pretty much like I’m my own universe, where my own thing happens. My life doesn’t really appear to go down like other people’s lives go down. My laws of physics don’t really appear to coincide with the laws of physics of others. So I’m just taking notice of that and writing accordingly.”

You can hear evidence of Sandman’s divergence throughout Kindness for Weakness. In “Talking (Bleep),” he raps about riding his bike down a bike path “going the wrong way, but who’s to say what the wrong way is?” as a weird beat skitters and burbles behind him. “Seam by Seam” is a tender electro-soul love song that finds Sandman emotionally wide open: “I miss your heart beneath my face, the only space that it is safe for me to cry.”

But it’s near the beginning of “Eyes,” with its boom-bap beat and loping funk bass line, where Sandman speaks most plainly about his new perspective:

You could leave me out of your loop.
Black, brown, poor, I’m not trying to be part of your group.
Save the lecture and the swearing
‘Cause I don’t care about how you feel about me not caring.

If that sounds gruff, so be it — as Sandman says in the album’s closing song, “if you seek truth, you gotta speak truth.” This is an MC who has already spent years speaking truth, as he sees it, about the world at large. He has worked tirelessly to point out problems and offer solutions. Now, it’s time to work on Homeboy Sandman for a bit.

“I hope I’m growing. I’m trying to grow. I try to evolve, and I hope I’m headed in the right direction,” he says. “But I can just definitely say I don’t feel similar to people anymore.”

Fair enough. But one more question: Does that bum him out?

“Nah, I feel fine,” Sandman says. “I never had it so good.”