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“Downtown” is the second song released from Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ follow-up to 2012’s breakout album, The Heist. The track features Eric Nally of Foxy Shazam on vocals, along with rap figures (as well as hip-hop pioneers) Kool Moe Dee, Melle Mel, and Grandmaster Caz. The track premiered through an hourly airplay initiative on iHeartRadio stations on August 27, 2015, preceding its digital release and premiere performance on the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards.
The chorus’ soaring vocal (and the song’s title) also pay a bit of homage to Petula Clark’s ‘60s classic “Downtown.”
Oh and it’s about mopeds. Yes, mopeds. He did say he would make a song for everything after all…
The music video was shot in Spokane, Washington.
"Ryan made a beat on the road called “Moping Around.” I got the beat, I thought it said Moped. Coincidentally we had both purchased Mopeds for being on the road so we could go around, leave the venues that we were performing at, and I wrote a song about Mopeds, which now a year and a half later is out in the world." - via MTV
"I would say for the first portion of this year I was hitting the point as a producer where I was like “I don’t really think this is going to be able to work,” so a huge portion of that time was making all these songs within a song and getting those to feel what you want to feel.
And what took forever was how do we sew this together in an intentional way and in a fluid way and not have the rock side invade on what the verses are supposed to be, and the hip-hop side invade on what that rock chorus is supposed to be.
I hit the end, and I said “This feels done.” I was more like, ‘I don’t think I can do better than this.’ It was a weird record to make, but we really wanted to do it for whatever reason." - Ryan Lewis via MTV
"I was listening to Backspin on XM Radio and hearing these older rappers' cadences and vocal tones and I was like, “This is so dope, nobody’s doing this anymore.” Ryan was like, “Yo, you gotta flip something like that for the new album. People aren’t doing these old school type cadences.” And so I messed around with that a little bit.
We were also listening to a lot of Queen and a lot of music from the ‘70s and it was, “How could we kind of merge these two worlds, these two very different worlds, in a way that seamlessly worked, that were obviously different, but could live on the same record?” Like, “Is that even possible?”" - Macklemore via MTV
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