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According to its nonprofit charter, Give a Beat’s mission “is to use the power of music as a pathway to healing and opportunity for those impacted by the criminal justice system.” Indeed, since its founding in 2014, the L.A.-based organization has offered DJ, music-production, and educational programs inside and outside youth and adult correctional facilities.

In 2019, it launched the Prison Electronic Music Program at two California State Prisons. In 2021, it began its “On a New Track” Re-Entry Mentoring Program, which paired formerly incarcerated persons with mentors in the music industry. This past year, in order to support people post-incarceration, Give a Beat Records was launched to give them a platform and share their voices. Its first release was geriFree’s “Pure Joy,” an uplifting house-music nugget; its second is Pelligroso’s “Street Poetry,” a gritty hip-hop track.

One notable supporter of Give a Beat is Eli Goldstein, one-half of the popular electronic DJ/production duo Soul Clap. In the course of his work with the non-profit, Goldstein (aka Elyte) met Russell Wardlow – a prison poet currently serving time in the Nebraska correctional system. Through one of Give a Beat’s related initiatives, the Prose of a Con radio series where DJs recited Russell’s powerful poetry online, Goldstein became impressed with and inspired by Wardlow’s work.

Now the duo has seen its distinct talents converge on a unique, new project, Insides Outed . Released on Soul Clap Records by WayOfLife (Wardlow’s artist persona), the album’s vocals were recorded entirely from the Nebraska State Penitentiary’s solitary confinement unit and ultimately mixed with productions from Goldstein and Taylor Bense at Brooklyn’s Hyperballad Studios.

The result is a nine-cut full-length brimming with touching and honest songs filled with regret and hope, patience and frustration, love and pain. It’s a statement of redemption, and one that further explores a question that Wardlow has asked: “If a man can become a monster, can that monster become a man again?”

In separate interviews, DJ LIFE connected with both Eli Goldstein and Russell Wardlow to discuss Give a Beat, recording the Insides Outed album (from which a rollout of remixes from Mr. V, Nickodemus, and Pontchartrain expects to be available later in the year), and much more.