“I remember seeing a close friend of mine's face as I was in the ambulance and he was almost in tears. It wasn't until that moment that I realized how serious the whole thing was.”

When emcee E Major says “the whole thing”, he’s referring first to his state of health after taking a boxcutter to the chest while trying to break up a fight at a weekly party he was promoting in his hometown of Baltimore in 2004. Ultimately, he’s also talking about life, something he never quite examined for what it really is until the instant he almost lost it. “After that I definitely started appreciating my friends more. Started taking rhyming more seriously. Just generally started trying to enjoy everything I do more and see it as something that's not permanent.”

To that end, he finally achieved his dream of moving to Los Angeles, a gamble for an artist with the kind of support he commands in B-More. His 2010 album Better Than Yours had already made Baltimore City Paper’s top ten albums of 2011 – two years after dubbing his Majority Rules album “a classic” - by the time his 2010 hit “Paper Runnin’” started doing the rounds on 92Q, later remixed by local legend DJ Booman. Wielding common-sense lyricism and a relaxed, persistent flow which presides on equal footing over boom-bap and trap alike, E’s shared stages with Lupe Fiasco, Wale, and Little Brother and has gotten the nod from Okayplayer, MTV, VH1 and DJ Booth.

The fruits of E’s new outlook will soon become apparent this summer on his forthcoming album Baltimore Bruin, which he calls “a response to my change of scenery. There are definite threads that go back to my oldest work with some soul and boom bap aesthetic, but I'm branching out more with the synthy wooziness of some the new tracks.” The jewels slated to drop on Bruin are ones he carries with him to this day. “We were promoting this event every week. We all had wads of cash in our pockets every week from this party. We were getting fucked up every week. We were just having a good time. [Getting stabbed] was like a dose of reality: that life can be taken from you at any moment.”