Maybe Iman Shumpert is preparing for life after basketball. I mean, could we be looking at the start of the next Ashford & Simpson?
Shump is in love, and just dropped this Carl Thomas-like emotional seven-minute dedication to his pregnant fiancee Teyana Taylor, who also appears on the track.
The injured Cavs shooting guard penned a long explanation for the track as well.
“The song is about keeping my promise to people that I love and all the stuff I ever said I was gonna do,” said Shumpert.
He seemingly speaks those recent events into existence, rapping, “I wanna marry your smile/I wanna spoil your style/I wanna sleep with your dreams/and then father the child.”
“The crazy thing about it is when I was writing it, I was speaking figuratively,” the Cleveland Cavs guard said. “I wrote this song about a year-and-a-half ago. Teyana didn’t add her part until right before the playoffs last year. With everything that was going on it just started to line up in my mind, I kind of envisioned what was happening and timed it up accordingly.”
Taylor added soft, intimate and well-placed vocals of her own to bring the collaboration full circle.
Director Sasha Samsanova captures slick black-and-white shots, along with cold silhouettes against a blood red background, all of which synchronize accordingly with the song itself. As the beat breaks down, the shots get more emotive and find Taylor, in particular, in a most honest and vulnerable state.
“The emotion I wanted to capture, that breakdown part of the video, was telling the story of [Teyana] feeling something new, something real that no one could take away,” said Shumpert. “I think [Sasha] did a great job of trying to capture that story.”
By Glenn Erby
