After trading rebellion for fatherhood, Kiwi rapper Tom Scott has documented the change in his latest album Avantdale Bowling Club.
Most people would recognise Scott as the bad-boy frontman of Kiwi hip-hop group Home Brew. If that doesn't ring a bell, his time in band @Peace belting out controversial songs like 'Kill the PM' just might.
Scott is the first to admit his past is riddled with rebellion, but in his latest album he's turned a new leaf.
"Yeah it was definitely a growing process - I don't know, it was like the third act in a film, ya know? There was conflict, and then resolution."
Scott calls its contents a "self-help book addressed to himself".
"Going from your 20s to your 30s is kind of like a metamorphosis in some kinda way - yeah, it was just me learning how to be a man I think."
A big part of that growth was the birth of his son Quincy.
"Just to have responsibility for once in life, to have someone that needs you," he says.
Like his outlook, Scott's music also appears to have matured, taking influence from smooth jazz.
"I dont want to sound like a sophisticated pr**k and say, "Jazz is a sophisticated style of music" - I don't want to go down that road, but it's just the music I like."
Coincidental or not, it certainly sounds smooth - and like the album's title suggests, Avantdale Bowling Club has an Avante Garde feel.
It's also an ode to the suburb so close to Scott's heart.
"One day, my dad sent me a text - it was just a picture of the Avondale Bowling Club and I was in Melbourne home sick, and it just hit me."
He says it's been an emotional project that brought more than a few tears to his eyes.
"It had to hit me here[in the heart], otherwise it wasn't worth sharing."
And what started as an album became a full exhibition, after Scott enlisted the help of teens Tak Soropa and Luca Macioce to photograph parts of Avondale.
"I sent him a DM on the old Instagram asking him if we could take his photo, and he pretty much replied surprisingly, and it pretty much went from there," says Soropa.
The pair, both fresh out of high school, were already huge fans of Scott and couldn't believe their luck.
"I remember I had to kind of convince him a little bit - a bit of charm - I told him that he looked like Tom Cruise."
And after winning him over, Macioce says they took a range of shots of Scott and his family.
"After we got them developed and got the scans back, we thought, 'Oh we've blown it, we've definitely shot better before', but when we sent them to Tom he loved them."
That was about two months ago, and now some of those photos adorn the walls of an exhibition studio in central Auckland - because a picture speaks a thousand songs.
You can check out the Avantdale Bowling Club exhibition Friday through till Sunday. It's at CorpStudio, 86 Pitt Street, Auckland Central.
Newshub.
