What Is Hawaiian Salt?

I dove head first into promoting this mixtape without actually explaining the name behind the project: Hawaiian Salt. What is Hawaiian Salt? For many of you, it's an expensive alternative to the all-too-familiar stuff you douse on your food to add flavor. Except unlike table salt, Hawaiian Salt comes in all kinds of colors and flavors, meaning you can pick the appropriate seasoning to compliment the dish you're serving. For those who dig a little deeper, Hawaiian Salt reaches back thousands of years to Native Hawaiians who cultivated this sacred, medicinal, healing mineral on our islands in order to preserve humankind's most important commodity: food. One thing is certain: Native Hawaiians cherished salt for its most important use, preservation. And that's exactly what Fitted x Aloha Got Soul are doing with this mixtape: preserving the funky, flavorful music of Hawaii's past. I could go on and on with clichés and puns about salt, but I'd like to spare you that grimace. So let me break down a few reasons why we chose Hawaiian Salt as the name of this seminal project.

Most importantly, Hawaiian Salt preserves

Is music nothing but food for the soul? Every time I listen to music, I can feel my soul fill up with some kind of feeling—whether it's joy or sadness or empathy. But these feelings won't be nourished or provoked if the music isn't preserved. Our main goal with this mixtape is to document and preserve the music of Hawaii's past—a time when soul, funk, and groove flowed through the islands, fueling a renaissance of optimistic energy during the 1970s and 1980s that propelled what I see as one of Hawaii's most musically prolific eras ever. We want to preserve this incredible era of our the music of our islands.

Hawaiian Salt also adds flavor

That's an obvious one, right? But I tell you, after going back-and-forth on this project with Fitted for the past two years, this name—Hawaiian Salt—hit us like an apple on the head. When we brainstormed this name 14 months into the project, we knew it was perfect because it spoke of exactly what we were hoping to achieve: preserving Hawaii's musical past and imbuing the local community with incomparable sounds of the island. Evidently, those sounds are as mixed as the sounds you'll hear on the mixtape: disco and funk and soul and pop and jazz and groove and anything else that sets you up on the dancefloor. Just like the music, the salts of Hawaii come in a variety of flavors:

• Red: salt mixed with volcanic clay
• White: the original un mixed salt
• Black: salt mixed with charcoal
• Green: salt mixed with bamboo leaf extract

With so many flavors (and with 27 tracks on the Hawaiian Salt mixtape), you too can season up your musical collection with the Fitted x Aloha Got Soul mixtape. Forgive me, I couldn't resist that pun.

Where can I get this mixtape??

On April 20, 2013, Fitted will release an exclusive tee and the accompanying mixtape online and in-stores. The best way to ensure you get your hands on this project is by subscribing to these mailing lists, cause that's how we're announcing it first:

• Subscribe to the Fitted mailing list
• Subscribe to the Aloha Got Soul mailing list

And if you aren't one of the lucky one to buy a tee/CD before they all sell out, stay tuned—I've got something to ease your craving, soon!

Check out the previous blog posts about Hawaiian Salt here.