Omaha hip-hop artist, producer and community leader Marcey Yates is back with “Vanilla Sky 2,” a sequel to his debut album “Vanilla Sky.”
Since his debut, he has won multiple Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards, founded the Culxr House, and released close to a dozen projects, including many critically acclaimed albums such as, “9 Months” and the collaborative “Culxr House: Freedom Summer.” Yates played the Somewhere festival in Wichita, Kansas last summer with Bigxtheplug, Aloe Blacc and Flying Lotus. That festival was put on by Midtopia, a non-profit that isn’t a record label, but offers many of the same services as a record label for artists like Yates. This year he will be making another trip to play the massive Tree Fort Festival in Boise, Idaho, which he also performed at in 2025.
Yates was on set filming a video when he took a break to answer a few questions about the album, mentoring young artists and his career of the last ten plus years.
The first Vanilla Sky album featured the same tagline on the album cover as the movie by the same name: LoveHateDreamsLifeWorkPlayFriendshipSex. That album dealt with all of those topics and had songs like “Love Stories,” “Brenda’s Baby” and “Relationships.” Vanilla Sky 2 finds Yates as a father, entrepreneur and community leader with a much different life than the young man who made that first album. Vanilla Sky 2 has songs such as “4:14” about his daughter, “Scholarship” and “Malnutrition.”
“I know on the first one my perspective was me wanting to prove myself, wanting to accomplish,” Yates explained. “Whereas now I can speak on the results. I am trying to speak more about those things from a different position. I get to speak from that angle now.”
Yates added it felt like the right time to release Vanilla Sky 2.
“It just seemed like a good time,” he said. “I released Vanilla Sky in 2014, and that was the first record I dropped when I was coming on the scene. It is like a certain life that people kind of give it around here, so I wanted to defy those odds. I felt like things are always progressing, things are still progressing for me. That record was the first time I got nominated for OEAA’s, and I got three nods that year for Vanilla Sky. It was a double album, Vanilla Sky and Social Studies I dropped.”
He also released Sophomore Slump in 2024.
Yates has worked with collaborators and guests on each of his albums. His 2021 album Culxr House: Freedom Summer was all collaborations. On Vanilla Sky 2 he taps an Omaha artist, but also reaches out to Wichita, Kansas and his Midtopia labelmates.
“The guest artists on there include Paris Jane,” he said. “She is from Wichita, she is one of my label mates with Mid-Topia. I really like her music, I am a fan of her music. I usually have an R&B feature on my records so I put it on there. One is BCS, he is a new artist and he is from Omaha, he is a guy I have been working with, so I am just giving him an introduction to the scene. The last one is Marrque Nunley and he is actually a drummer for Rudy Love & The Encore from Witchita, but this dude is dope and dope lyricist and he is with the Midtopia crew also.”
When asked which song has a special meaning to him, he mentioned “Gift Curse.”
“I have been doing this so long, sometimes it is a gift and a curse,” Yates said. “Sometimes there are other artists, and they want some things. A gift and a curse is where some people think you should give them what you worked for. Things from having your successes. The gift is obviously more opportunities, getting the opportunity to expand resources and having different situations in business to help me. Then you have haters, you do it so long you have haters. You make such an impact and you have the jealousy and things like that.”
The Culxr House is a community center that Yates founded in 2018. Culxr House is a space for arts, music and civic engagement. There are a lot of young artists of all types that attend programs and events, which finds Yates sometimes in the role of a mentor.
“I look at it in this game, I do as much as I can for someone who is willing to receive it,” Yates said. “I am learning to share resources and not necessarily tell them what I would do, but what they should do and how they can achieve something. The artist wants to be empowered so you have to find ways to educate them without them feeling artists want to be equal. There has been that fine line. The ones that keep coming back and ask a lot of questions and want to be involved are the ones I can really focus my attention on. But trying to reach and change any mentalities is a double-edged sword, because once I get them they already have some bad habits. It’s work, they have to put in the work and then they get the results. I am there to try and help them not try to cut corners.”
The Treefort Festival will happen March 25-29 in Boise, Idaho and is headlined by popular indie acts Geese, Father John Misty, Flipturn and more.
“It lies in the messaging and the content and I think the musicianship,” he said on why he gets asked to perform at festivals. “I don’t have to reach very far, if you stay with it long enough, things come your way. They know I am professional and they know I am going to show up and that I have good music.”
Around town, Marcy Yates can often be seen with someone filming him and sometimes a crew.
“It is for social media content, YouTube channels, Instagram,” he said, continuing with a prediction, “Over time it will come together and it will be a Netflix documentary, you can believe that. It is for people to engage. It is the day and age, we have to do that. Part of this thing is the landscape has changed, the way we made it and the way we distributed it and promoted it has changed.”
What about that video he is on set for currently?
“The song is unreleased, me and the guys are shooting a video for it,” he said. “When I got done with Vanilla Sky that was back in June, I can’t imagine just sitting around and doing nothing.”