Girls like Lee Shaner.  Girls like Intuition.  Girls like rappers.  One of the above has to fit the crossword puzzle I’m mentally working as I sit across from Lee Shaner, a.k.a. Intuition, a.k.a. rapper, in a booth in Silverlake diner Brite Spot.  He’s asked me to write an artist bio for him, and is telling me lots of strategic stories (his words, not mine), but I’m not listening. 

Until he finishes the thought:  “People that listen to my music will know more about me than they would ever know about me by my talking to them.”  And I get it.  Girls like Intuition because he appeals to their deepest, junior-high-school day-dreamiest, selves:  He writes songs for them. 

Granted, the song might be the jingly-jangly, country-tinged, Main Ingredient-sampling “Lonely,” an ode to the girl(s?) who never refuses his late-night invitation to offer ministrations, but you gotta give him a little credit for honesty.  He’s not trying to pull anything but their shirts over their eyes. 

Girls love a challenge, though, and songs like that serve only to re-up their efforts to wrestle the slightly jaded, rambler-by-birth Intuition to a commitment.  Born in Texas, the Air Force landed his family in the North Pole shortly thereafter, and he couldn’t wait to get out.  “There are no shows in Alaska.  Not just no rap shows.  The three concerts I went to in Alaska were Weird Al, Los Lobos, and Great White.” 

He chose the diametric opposite, of course, when he made his escape.  He knew he’d live somewhere in Southern California, and by 2000 he found his way to Pomona.  He gorged on the shows he’d been missing growing up, and gained a reputation in the ciphers that broke out between acts. 

In 2003, Intuition was living in Santa Barbara, and had dropped off copies of his demo in a record store with instructions for the employees to give a copy to anybody who came in and bought “some underground shit.”  Mark Pawlak, better known as Equalibrum, Intuition’s primary producer, was one recipient. He liked the demo, and the first time they met, Intuition told him, “Yo, we should make an album- we’re gonna be famous.” 

Something worked with the pairing, or “musical fucking soul brothers”- Lee had been trying for a year and a half to book a show in Santa Barbara, and within two weeks of meeting Mark, got his first. 

He started writing “Girls Like Me” two years ago, when he moved to Los Angeles. While his first album, “Stories About Nothing” relied heavily on inspired fabrication, “there’s not a single lie on ‘Girls Like Me.’ If someone doesn’t like this album, that person won’t like me.” 

Besides being forthright, the album reflects Intuition’s ethic: work smarter, not harder. He writes for a reason, and that conservation of energy produces lean records ready to pounce.  His rhymes and vocal control are meticulous; even his relaxed flow on the “Al Bundy” and “Don’t Try” hooks is deliberately so. “I have a tattoo of a brain over my heart. Is [my] heart my brain; do I only think with logic? Do I even have a heart?” 

“Girls Like Me” is indeed why girls (and guys, grudgingly or admiringly) like Intuition. And plenty of them are praying he not only has a heart, but that it’ll be theirs.  I imagine he’ll loan it out, at least for the night. 

Intuition's record release party for "Girls Like Me" is tonight at Low End Theory.  Change up the game and go hit on him on MySpace or Twitter.