Mint Condition Celebrate 20 Years Together, Their New TV Gig And New Album

For two decades, Mint Condition has been keeping audiences entertained with classic songs like “Breakin’ My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes),” “What Kind Of Man Would I Be,” and “If You Love Me.”  As they prepare for the release of their seventh album, appropriately titled 7…, theurbandaily.com sat down with Stokely, Lawrence, Rick, O’Dell, and Jeffrey and talked about the album, the music scene in their hometown of Minneapolis, and their latest gig as the house band for TV One’s Way Black When.

It’s been 20 years since the release of Mint Condition’s debut album. When the band first formed, did you guys think you would still be around?
Lawrence: Each of us probably has a different answer, but I definitely didn’t think we’d be here at the start.  Not for reasons of the group broke up or something, but I thought we probably would’ve moved on into adulthood or something.  When you’re young, you think “30 is old!” So by that time we thought we’d be old and not want to do it anymore.  But here we are still doing it, feeling pretty young.
Rick: I knew we were going to be great. I knew we were going to be doing things.  I felt at least if we weren’t doing that much, we’d be doing the chitlin’ circuit.
Minneapolis had this big black music scene back in the 80s and early 90s, with Prince and The Time and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis leading the way.  Is it still there?
Lawrence: It’s still there, but it ebbs and flows. I was listening to the radio and they were saying that they’re running out of places for bands to play. It’s becoming so competitive because there are so many bands.  It used to be where you could go see a Reggae band at this club, hip-hop group at this one… So if you wanted to see hip-hop on Friday, you could. There wasn’t that much competition.  But for each genre, there might be five bands all on the same night.  It’s getting hard for the clubs to figure out what to do.  read the full interview theurbandaily.com