Young up-and-coming duo EVENODDS are comprised of M-A and D.E.O. M-A (born March 6, 1985), which stands for “Money Alwayz”, and D.E.O. (born February 28, 1985), which stands for “Doing Everything Official” have been friends since back in middle school and are now making some noise in San Francisco as a duo to be reckoned with. Recently, the duo chopped it with TheSource.com to see what they are up to.

TheSource.com: When people think of San Francisco and the Bay Area, they used to think more about the Hyphy movement. How do you feel about that?

D.E.O: As far as EVENODDS is concerned, we’ve always marched to our own sound. We never followed trends or anything like that. There was always respect with it, but at the end of the day we did our own thing. We like to call it our sound Fly Gangsta music. It’s fly shit with a message.

TheSource.com: How did you guys meet?

M.A. : We linked up in middle school and hang out in between and before and after classes. I would be beat boxing and D.E.O would be freestyling. It started with the real essence of what rapping and hip-hop embodies, you know? We always had ambitions to do music in one fashion or another, and the chemistry just worked. WE were just finding ways to record. We’d use an analog four track, a beat, and a mic. That’s how it started.

TheSource.com: Who were your earliest musical influneces growing up?

M.A.: First and foremost, it would be my father who influenced me. He would play in the church. He would play piano, sing, in the street, blues bands, jazz bands, reggae. As far as rapping goes and our generation, our influeces had to be OutKast, our regional rap pioneers like San Quinn, even guys like Jay-Z and Nas.

D.E.O. : San Quinn played a large part as far as lyricism. My cousin Coughnut, he died on September 4th, 2001 and we buried him the same day the towers dropped on the 11th. I loved early Snoop, and 50, Fabolous. Those are the guys that I’m bumping right now.

TheSource.com: If you can describe your sound to a fan in about 5 words or less, how would you describe it?

D.E.O.: I can do it one word, original. The reason why I say that is because there are a lot of ways that the music can influence us especially with the skinny jeans and the rockstar look. But we choose to ignore it and stay on our own lane.

M.A.: Yeah, we don’t follow all that. We have our own original sound, and it’s not one sided. It’s a song that feels good and has a colorful feel, but then we can have another song which is real dark. So we can cover all aspects.

TheSource.com: It seems like if you are from the West Coast and you aren’t getting cosigned by the guys like Snoop,. Dre, Cube, The Game or E-40, you might not get a fair shake when it comes to getting some attention. Is that a fair assumption?

D.E.O.: Dre is not no asset to the Bay Area because he never did work with anyone from the Bay Area, you know? As far as The Game is concerned, he got his start in the Bay Area. I feel like the people in the forefront have gotten there fair shake and they need to let the young guys step up and get our turn. You got guys like Pac Div, Bigg Rich, ourselves. It’s a lot of people waiting for their shot, basically.

M.A.: That’s what inspired us to take our own money and shoot our own videos and get it on TV ourselves cause no one is going to do it for us. There aren’t any record labels in the Bay.

TheSource.com: So tell us about some of your future projects.

D.E.O: Right now it’s all about the album. It’s called The Revision, it’s our first official album. We dropped a pre-album called The Rough Draft back in high school. We are just trying to give the fans a chance to know who we are as artists. We want to give the fans a chance to adapt to us, and not the other way around.

Check out EVENODDS feat. Big Rich Get Money All Day