He is back, renamed and at the top of his game: Vassar rapper Jolyn Prescott ’27, aka Coyote Joe, has released his third album, “COYOTEJOE!” Some fans of Vassar’s rap scene might know him better as Sir J Cryptic—fear not, he is still his same talented self. Coyote Joe is a performer to watch in the world of Vassar music: from performing in the rap group Cypher at Tiny Desk to playing shows in Rockefeller Hall and the Mug, he commands any stage he gets on. Now, he has something new to say. Two years in the making, Coyote Joe’s self-titled release is energetic, expansive and, in my opinion, his best work yet.
Thematically, Prescott gets vulnerable on “COYOTEJOE!” “For me, it is really personal. I think about the music that I like and music I wanna hear,” Prescott said in an interview with The Miscellany News. “This album is inspired by hard times. You might come down pretty hard, and it feels really hard to get back up. There’s not a lot of music that can bring that feeling out of people, that drive to want to better yourself and proceed even though things are stressful and dire. I think in some of these songs you can feel that, this anxiety and energy of having to push past something you might not necessarily want to.”
Prescott’s vocal performance on this album is artful. I had to keep looking at the song credits on my first listen—from melodic rhythm on “C4” to raspy murmuring on “NEW$KIN,” Prescott has an incredible ability to sound like three different rappers on one track. In my experience, there is often a kind of trap artist that finds a cadence and rhythm and sticks to it. Prescott refuses to be confined to one sound, moving from fast-paced exuberance into raw emotion seamlessly.
Part of what makes the production on this album so impressive is how it supports Prescott’s rapping, no matter where he goes. There were a lot of standouts for me on this album—including “Stopwatch” and “U dont know shi”—but “Paranoid” might be my favorite. The soundscape is bone-chilling; whispered voices in the background call out over and over, “They’re watching me / I can’t see ‘em.”
Prescott works in collaboration with his producers to find beats on platforms like YouTube. His main producer and sound engineer is his close friend Alex Lewin-Knauer ’27. “Alex and I have been roommates all through college. He’s in the room when I’m writing, when I’m recording, he will tell me if I need to redo something or if something’s not sounding right.”
Production-wise, Prescott is involved from start to finish. “As the process goes, I listen to the unreleased track constantly in cycles to keep fresh,” Prescott said. “As I’m working on it, I’m finding things that I like, things that do and don’t work, things I wanna try, that’s the process. On songs like ‘Stopwatch,’ ‘C4,’ ‘HASZTT,’ some of the harder and bouncier songs, I’m really proud of. Something I’ve been intentionally trying to do with my style is upping the cadence, maintaining these humorous but serious tones throughout. ‘THE INTRO’ was the first song we did for the album that we felt like, ‘This is what we have to match.’ A lot of people touched it: In the beginning, there’s this sound effect of a rocket. Our friend and roommate Klaus recommended that, and Alex tweaked it to sound like it does now. We worked on three or four versions before landing on this one.”
Raised in the Bronx, Prescott has been putting out music since 2016. Before moving over to bigger music streaming services in 2020, he and a few of his friends started putting out their early music on SoundCloud while in middle school.
Prescott names longtime friend and rapper IAMTHEKLOUD (Lenny Santos) as one of his favorite collaborators—the two of them have performed together for years and worked together on tracks like “BAGHDAD,” which has over 5,000 streams on Spotify: “If he wasn’t making music, I don’t know if I would be.”
Prescott and Santos developed their rap sensibilities side by side. “We were really inspired by people like XXXTentacion, Ski Mask the Slump God and duo rappers, underground rappers. We actually started rapping in our theater teacher’s closet in school. We would record during lunch, where we’d have like 30 minutes in this closet, all of us recording on a phone together. It was a janky setup, but we had a lot of fun.”
When Prescott came to Vassar, he was in the process of dropping his first album, “Lve Like Yu Knt Die,” which included music he had written and performed in high school. The following spring, Prescott dropped “THE SPR1NG BRE4K TAPE” where he collaborated with several other musicians, including Vassar artists such as Naomi Sullins ’27 and Finntann Mangalam ’27. “It was a very acoustic-sounding, very Vassar-sounding project. IAMTHEKLOUD made a comment like, ‘You only dropped one rap song this year, man, what are you doing?’ Which, hey, sometimes that’s what you gotta do, but I made a promise to him and myself that this next one would be a harder, more true to my own rap, album.”
A fun fact people may not know about Prescott: he has a passion for making cover art. The cover of “COYOTEJOE!” is a photo of Prescott at age 10 that he distorted and recolored himself. He has also made several pieces for IAMTHEKLOUD.
Though he has found success and community here, Prescott also expressed occasional frustration with how the Vassar music scene—which skews towards indie-rock—receives rap and hip-hop. However, he feels this struggle is mitigated by the opportunity to explore what rap can look like in a mixed-genre environment. “Going to stuff like orchestra concerts, getting involved with those experiences, even if they feel cliche or really Vassar-y, they’re all valuable for my creative process when I get to write and when I think about the direction to take a song.”