Anniversaries: Miles: From an Interlude Called Life by Blu & Exile
If Below the Heavens was about reaching for the skies, Miles is about digging into the earth below, unearthing the roots, and understanding how those roots shape the fruits of the present.
In 2007, a young Los Angeles rapper named Blu and producer Exile released Below the Heavens, an album that quietly rewrote the West Coast underground rap scene. It was a soulful, unpretentious record about striving and surviving—a working-class blues in hip-hop form. Despite a botched initial release and a small label, Below the Heavens became a cult classic, later hailed as a “magic album” and “a tectonic shift that changed West Coast rap.” For years, Blu & Exile lived in the long shadow of that debut. They dropped a follow-up in 2012 and toyed with experimental projects (even scrapping a trap-influenced album) but, as Blu admitted, they still hadn’t “answer[ed] the call” of their monumental first effort. Now, over a decade later, the duo returns with Miles: From an Interlude Called Life, a sprawling double album that is both a tribute to their beginnings and a bold statement of where they stand today. It’s the worthy spiritual successor fans have been waiting for—a record that bridges eras, honors a jazz icon, and charts how far Blu & Exile have traveled in the miles between.
From its very title, Miles wears its heritage on its sleeve. The name is an homage to the great Miles Davis, the revolutionary Black jazz trumpeter whose spirit infuses the project, and it’s also literally the name of Blu’s son, Miles Elijah Barnes, to whom the album is dedicated. Blu & Exile have always been old souls, crate-diggers steeped in tradition, and here they explicitly link their hip-hop to the wider lineage of Black music. Exile laces the album with dusty soul and jazz loops—everything from classic Philadelphia soul to Tony Bennett croons and cool-era Miles Davis horns. The effect is a richer, more expansive palette than the minimalist boom-bap of Below the Heavens, yet it retains that warm analog feel. On “All the Blues,” for instance, Exile flips a jazz-flavored beat (a nod to Davis’s Kind of Blue era) as Blu delivers an “unauthorized biography” of Miles Davis in rhyme. It’s a clever full-circle tribute: Blu recounts the jazz legend’s life story while also explaining how deeply Davis has inspired him, right down to naming his son after the icon. The album’s very DNA is imbued with jazz and the blues, a throughline connecting Blu & Exile’s personal roots to the broader roots of Black music.
If Below the Heavens captured Blu as a hungry twenty-something “rap romantic” with headphones on, dancing in the rain to escape life’s hardships, Miles finds him older, wiser, and looking both backward and forward. Blu has grown into what Sheldon Pearce calls a “great rap bluesman, laborer, and journeyman thinking about what produced him and the nature of connection.” Throughout the album’s 20 tracks, he rhymes like a man intent on closing loops in his life—musical loops, personal loops, historical loops. “It felt like we had been miles away from where we started, and it felt like we had a lot to say about all those miles that we’ve traveled since we’ve begun,” Blu told Bandcamp Daily of the album’s conception. That sense of distance traveled fuels the narrative. In many ways, Miles is a bookend to the journey that Below the Heavens began, measuring how far Blu & Exile have come and finding a kind of closure in the process. Yet the perspective is decidedly optimistic. As if to set the tone, Blu opens the album with a line that glistens with hard-won hope: “I don’t see the glass half full, I see the whole pitcher.” It’s a mindset that pervades the record—seeing life not as scarce or half-empty, but abundant, a full picture (or pitcher) of experiences to pour out.
Miles details those emotions. It’s a spacious double album (95 minutes across two discs) that gives Blu the room to take lengthy strolls down memory lane. On one level, he is retracing his personal history. Many of the early tracks are deeply autobiographical, charting the people, places, and moments that molded him as an artist. On “Music Is My Everything,” Blu lovingly recounts his childhood musical education, learning what a bassline is from his cousin, riding to the beach with his father figure, and bumping N.W.A., or marveling that his aunt once dated gangsta rap legend Eazy-E. The anecdotes are intimate and evocative—tiny scenes that show how hip-hop became a lifeline for a kid from South Central L.A. striving to escape poverty. On “Blue As I Can Be,” Blu recalls recording his very first song and feeling “I had to paint my portrait enormous,” a flash of youthful idealism that “continues to color Blu’s music today.”
Even the recurrence of the word “blue” (or Blu) in song titles is a personal touch—Blu filtering his identity through the color of melancholy and the legacy of the blues. By threading these memories throughout the album, Blu pays homage to the Below the Heavens era, the dreams of his younger self, while also assessing them from the wiser vantage point of adulthood. The presence of old friends on the album reinforces this tribute to his beginnings: R&B star Miguel, who was Blu’s childhood friend and appeared on Below the Heavens before his own fame, returns here for a cameo, and Aloe Blacc, Exile’s original partner who literally introduced Blu and Exile back in 2003, also joins the journey. These collaborations make Miles feel like a family reunion, tying today’s work to the foundation they built years ago.
On another level, Miles zooms out to place Blu’s personal journey in the context of a much broader Black history and musical legacy. As the album progresses, the focus shifts from the micro to the macro, linking one man’s story to the grand continuum of Black cultural experience. The second half of the album, especially, dives into ancestry and collective memory. It’s as if Blu, now a father, is reconnecting not only with his own roots but with the roots of his people. Songs like “Roots of Blue,” the record’s sprawling nine-minute centerpiece, unfold as sweeping historical epics. Over Exile’s soulful, slow-burning production, Blu traces the lineage of Black civilization from the cradle of humanity to the present day. He invokes Egyptian deities, biblical figures, freedom fighters, jazz poets, and more, “unpack[ing] a royal, spiritual, political, or musical Black legacy” in each verse. Rather than a dry history lesson, the verse comes alive with Blu’s voice, sounding not like he’s “rattling off names or reciting facts,” but rather “connecting dots” between eras. It’s history as an unbroken chain, and Blu places himself—and all of us listening—somewhere in that chain.
On “African Dream” and “The American Dream,” twin songs that mirror each other, he juxtaposes the motherland’s hope and the complicated promise of the USA, as two halves of a whole. By compiling these extensive lists of influences and ancestors, Blu affirms what he sees as a fundamental Black bond—a shared heritage that “lives with [him] every day.” It’s a rare sight in rap to see an emcee reach this far back—“as far as [he] could go,” Blu says—folding ancient history, the Middle Passage, and present-day struggles into one narrative. Miles achieves an almost spiritual scope in these moments, weighing individual experience against the cosmic weight of history. By album’s end, Blu has effectively closed the loop with the past, tying his own story to a legacy far larger than himself.
All of this thematic ambition is matched by Exile’s evolution as a producer. Back in 2007, Exile was revered for his “dusty” boom-bap aesthetic—chopping up vintage soul and jazz records into warm loops that felt like sepia-toned snapshots of hip-hop’s golden age. On Below the Heavens, that meant gritty drums, crackling samples, and a distinctly ‘90s throwback vibe that perfectly framed Blu’s earnest rhymes. On Miles, Exile retains his crate-digger’s soul but pushes the production to new heights with stunning, rich sample work, more live-sounding instrumentation, and a willingness to let songs sprawl and breathe. His beats are extravagant in texture yet understated enough to let Blu shine—a tricky balance that Exile manages with veteran skill.
Take “The Feeling,” a track that glitters with a gorgeous piano melody and soulful vocal snippets as Blu reflects on maintaining hope amid hardship. Or “You Ain’t Never Been Blue,” which flips the script with a minimalist, hollowed-out boom-bap beat—a moody canvas for Blu to unload some of his frankest bars about the struggles of an indie rap life. Exile has clearly broadened his sound: where their early work stuck closely to the classic soul loop formula, Miles incorporates everything from triumphant horn sections (“Dear Lord” opens with a gorgeous gospel-inflected brass fanfare to reggae and funk flavors (the groove on “Troubled Water” bounces with a dancehall lilt). He even nods to hip-hop’s own lineage by digging up a classic Mos Def sample: on “Miles Away,” Exile cuts up Mos Def’s verse from the 1998 song “Travellin’ Man,” stitching it into the hook of this road-warrior anthem about touring city to city.
It’s a “clever bit of stitching” indeed—the kind of move that delights hip-hop heads, linking Blu’s journey to the travels of a prior generation. Through these varied textures, Exile’s production on Miles feels like an open road stretching over the horizon: sometimes sunny and soulful, sometimes dark and bluesy, always scenic. He’s painting with a broader palette now, but crucially, he never loses the earthy, sample-based feel that gives Blu & Exile’s music its heart. The beats still bump in that comforting, head-nodding way, but they also sprawl, making room for the big ideas and historical depth the album tackles. Blu & Exile use history as a foundation to build something resonant for the present. In doing so, they subtly acknowledge their own influential place in West Coast rap’s lineage. There’s a moment on Miles where Blu reflects on the ripple effects of Below the Heavens, recognizing that the album he made in his early 20s helped open doors for a new wave of introspective West Coast rappers.
They’ve crafted a work that stands on its own as a mature, reflective masterpiece, one that honors their landmark debut while pushing their art forward. Miles is suffused with the same sincerity and soulful spirit that made Below the Heavens a cult favorite, but it dares to go bigger: tackling history, celebrating fatherhood and family, grappling with faith and mortality, and ultimately affirming the enduring power of music in the face of life’s trials. In a hip-hop landscape that has evolved dramatically since 2007, Blu & Exile prove they can evolve right along with it, without ever betraying the ethos that got them here.
They may have traveled long and far—miles and miles, as it were—but this album finds them right back at home in their element, older and wiser, with plenty still left to say. And if Below the Heavens was about reaching for the skies, Miles: From an Interlude Called Life is about digging into the earth below, unearthing the roots, and understanding how those roots shape the fruits of the present. It’s Blu & Exile’s journey come full circle: from an interlude called life, they’ve returned with a soundtrack for living. In seeing the whole pitcher instead of a half-full glass, Blu & Exile have given us a record overflowing with insight, soul, and the blues—one that secures their legacy in Black music culture while celebrating the very miles that made them who they are.