Meet Jermaine Quattlebaum and Mohamed Conteh of Free Party in Hollywood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jermaine Quattlebaum and Mohamed Conteh.

Jermaine and Mohamed, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We’re two kids from Largo, Maryland and that’s where the foundation of our business and friendship began. We were freshman in high school and Mo was walking down the hall in a Lanham Raiders jersey, and me, having played for Lanham myself went up and asked him if he knew the people I knew and what years did he play there. The rest is sort of history, us as well as our homie Dennis were sort of inseparable from that day forward. We played football in high school together for the next couple of years and even some in college. We were all super into hip-hop. Downloading the best songs off limewire, debating whose the best in the world while in the locker room, and just being kids of that blog era. Around that time, we were heavy into Wayne, and that’s when he was just taking the hottest beats in the world and killing them, so we started trying to do the same. Freestyling over the hottest beats and trying to come up with fire punchlines lol. Around the time football started to tail off and friends we’d show some of the freestyles to would start to say they think we should take it serious and try to create our own songs. We began trying to do that, becoming students of the craft and really putting years into honing our skills to become Great MCs.

Has it been a smooth road?
Smooth definitely isn’t the first adjective that comes to mind. We definitely had our backs against the wall and we were faced with a lot of uncomfortable situations which forced us to grow. We made a decision to move to LA and actually did the move in like a two months span. We packed about three bags each; clothes, shoes, and recording equipment and stayed on our friend’s couch in Woodland Hills. Also, us as well as our business partner Woody all grew up as athletes, so we all had to learn how to navigate a different world and industry. We were able to carry over some skills such as work ethic and honing our skills relentlessly but at the end of the day, we were not only learning and navigating a new city but also just an entirely different world that was the music industry. We didn’t know many people and still have to really push each other to be better and learn every single aspect of the process. From the writing to the production, to the videos, to the marketing plans, really becoming students of this world to try and attain the level of greatness that we seek, and make the risk worth it. Our entire first album was recorded in the living room of our place as well as our friends who allowed us to stay when we first moved to LA there were many long nights of various obstacles, working odd jobs, moving to different places, not knowing what the next day had in store but we came out the other side blessed, and things are better now for sure since dropping the project.

Can you give our readers some background on your music?
Free Party is a music duo consisting of myself and Jay. F.R.E.E. is an acronym for Family Reaching Everything Empowering. We want to be known for not doing anything basic ever lol. We pride our selves on writing and being true students of the craft like the greats before us. We always want to push the boundaries of sound and consistently create art that feels new and unique to us. Whether that be in the music, the cover art, the videos, our pictures, we want it to ring thru in everything we put into the world. We released our debut project titled “Grey” in June of 2019 after moving to LA. The project Grey was about the grey areas of being in your 20’s, the ups, downs and uncertainty thru it all. In addition to that, it also covered topics such as relationships and the struggles of being black in America. Grey was met with a lot of praise and went on to do numbers we didn’t even initially imagine. It ended up being featured on numerous popular playlists on various music platforms and websites, and also got great blog coverage. It was streamed over 100,000 times in those initial months, and we still have people contact us to this day about their favorite songs. But that was just the beginning for us. We have a couple of projects set to drop this year that we are really excited about and are looking forward to pushing even further this time around. We also don’t plan on stopping with music, we want to eventually venture into writing some scripts and fully fleshing out any creative urges we have.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Likes: Weather, Networking opportunities, Resources, Businesses, Food, Beaches, Palm trees

Dislikes: Traffic

Contact Info:

• Website: https://song.link/album/sc/788555322
• Phone: 240-535-9969
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: freexparty
• Twitter: @_FreeParty

Image Credit:
Noah Stenhouse

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