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'To Pimp A Butterfly': Kendrick Lamar shares history

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58th GRAMMY nominees Lamar, Terrace Martin, Thundercat, Rapsody, and other key players reveal the inside story of the Album Of The Year-nominated To Pimp A Butterfly
Andreas Hale
GRAMMYs
May 15, 2017 - 2:36 am

Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly album cover
'To Pimp A Butterfly': Kendrick Lamar shares history

In between Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and To Pimp A Butterfly, a 2014 trip to South Africa changed Kendrick Lamar. As he toured the country — visiting historic sites such as Nelson Mandela's jail cell on Robben Island — his worldview broadened, and so did his music.

The trip led Lamar to scrap "two or three albums worth of material," according to engineer/mixer Derek "MixedByAli" Ali. Lamar wanted to make music that reflected the sounds of his upbringing in Compton, Calif. He began to listen to the likes of Sly Stone, Donald Byrd and Miles Davis. Eventually To Pimp A Butterfly took form, incorporating elements of jazz, funk, soul, spoken word, and hip-hop.

"I wanted to do a record like this on my debut album but I wasn't confident enough," says Lamar.

Lamar garnered 11 GRAMMY nominations, including Best Rap Album and Album Of The Year. Following, Lamar and key collaborators tell the story of To Pimp A Butterfly.

Kendrick Lamar (artist): The title grasped the entire concept of the record. [I wanted to] break down the idea of being pimped in the industry, in the community and out of all the knowledge that you thought you had known, then discovering new life and wanting to share it.

Sounwave (co-producer): I remember he took a trip to Africa and something in his mind just clicked. For me, that's when this album really started.

Lamar: I felt like I belonged in Africa. I saw all the things that I wasn't taught. Probably one of the hardest things to do is put [together] a concept on how beautiful a place can be, and tell a person this while they're still in the ghettos of Compton. I wanted to put that experience in the music.

Derek "MixedByAli" Ali (co-engineer/mixer): [Lamar is] a sponge. He incorporated everything that was going on [in Africa] and in his life to complete a million-piece puzzle.

Lamar: I was on tour with Kanye [West] and I had Flying Lotus with me because I wanted to work on the bus studio. He would make beats and it was one particular beat that he forgot to play. He skipped it but I heard about three seconds of it and I asked him, "What is that?" He said, "You don't know nothing about that. That's real funk. … You're not going to rap on that." It was like a dare.

Thundercat (co-producer): ["Wesley's Theory"] started with Flying Lotus and I sitting on the couch in front of the computer analyzing George Clinton. He became the fuel for creating. I was really blown away that Kendrick was so into that song.

Sounwave: That song is the album cover.

Lamar: I had to find George Clinton in the woods, man. He was somewhere in the South and I had to fly out to him. We got in the studio and just clicked. Rocking with him took my craft to another level and that pushed me to make more records like that for the album.

Sounwave: When we first did "King Kunta," the beat was the jazziest thing ever with pretty flutes. Kendrick said he liked it but to "make it nasty." He referenced a DJ Quik record with Mausberg ["Get Nekkid"] and he told me what to do with it. I added different drums to it, simplified it, got Thundercat on the bass, and it was a wrap.

Thundercat: That strong-a** rhythm with banging drums and bass was created by me and Sounwave watching "Fist Of The North Star" while eating Yoshinoya. It's funny because a lot of this album was created eating Yoshinoya and watching cartoons. It was so funky and so black.

Terrace Martin (co-producer): If you dig deeper you hear the lineage of James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Mahalia Jackson, the sounds of Africa, and our people when they started over here. I hear something different every time. I heard Cuban elements in it the other day.

Kendrick Lamar - King Kunta

Martin: [For "Complexion"] we were listening to a lot of J Dilla, Jimi Hendrix and Lalah Hathaway, who's on that song too. Robert Glasper played piano over it. Me and Sounwave heard the piano but wanted another beat so we called Lalah Hathaway and got into the spirit of J Dilla. Then Rapsody got to it and murdered it.

Rapsody (featured artist): I was in New York the first time I got the call. [It was] the day after [Lamar's] "Control" verse dropped. Everybody was talking about the verse and Kendrick was in Africa. I went about a year before him so I knew what that trip does to you, especially as a black person.

Lamar: The idea was to make a record that reflected all complexions of black women. There's a separation between the light and the dark skin because it's just in our nature to do so, but we're all black. This concept came from South Africa and I saw all these different colors speaking a beautiful language.

MixedByAli: [Lamar] has an index in his head of everyone's voice and when he hears something that fits, he knows. He sees music as colors. Every song is like putting together a rainbow.

Lamar: Immediately when I heard the beat I heard [Rapsody's] voice and vocal tone. But what made her special was that I knew that she was going to bring the content from a woman's perspective about complexion, being insecure and at the same time having gratitude for your complexion.

Rapsody: He said he wanted to talk about the beauty of black people. I told him to say no more. What tripped me out is Kendrick originally said that he didn't want to do a verse on there. He wanted me to do two verses and Prince to do the hook.

Lamar: That's true. Prince heard the record, loved the record and the concept of the record got us to talking. We got to a point where we were just talking in the studio and the more time that passed we realized we weren't recording anything. We just ran out of time, it's as simple as that.

Thundercat: The album's theme was forming over time and a lot of the social issues he presents on the album were inevitable for him being a black man in America.

Sounwave: I didn't expect ["Alright"] to be the protest song but I did know it was going to do something because the time we're living in made it the perfect song.

Martin: One of the biggest moments was seeing kids marching to "Alright." We cried like babies because we were doing something. This is [our] vessel to get the message out. We had to use art for the message to help heal and help love.

Kendrick Lamar - Compton | Witness Greatness | GRAMMYs

MixedByAli: [The] session [for "U"] was very uncomfortable. [Lamar] wrote it in the booth. The mic was on and I could hear him walking back and forth and having these super angry vocals. Then he'd start recording with the lights off and it was super emotional. I never asked what got into him that day.

Lamar: It was real uncomfortable because I was dealing with my own issues. I was making a transition from the lifestyle that I lived before to the one I have now. When you're onstage rapping and all these people are cheering for you, you actually feel like you're saving lives. But you aren't saving lives back home. It made me question if I am in the right place spreading my voice. "Should I be back home sending this message or be on the road?" It put me in this space where I was in a little bit of a dilemma.

I sat on the beat [for "The Blacker The Berry"] and then the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown situations happened and I knew that this needed to be addressed.

Sounwave: That last line, "gangbanging make me kill a n***** blacker than me," was a slap in the face. He wants you to be uncomfortable.

Lamar: If you speak on this kind of subject matter you're labeled a conscious rapper. I don't even know [if] that word conscious can only exist in one field of music. Everybody is conscious. That's a gift from God to put it in my heart to continue to talk about this because that's how I'm feeling at the moment. The message is bigger than the artist.

When Tupac was here and I saw him as a 9-year-old, I think that was the birth of what I'm doing today. From the moment that he passed I knew the things he was saying would eventually be carried on through someone else. But I was too young to know that I would be the one doing it.

With over a decade of experience as a journalist and editor, Andreas Hale has been called the "Swiss Army Knife of Journalism" by his peers. His work has been featured on Billboard, MTV, Complex, Jay Z's Life+Times, XXL, and The Source, among others. He is also the co-host of combat sports podcast "The Corner" on the Loud Speakers Network.

Tune in to the 58th Annual GRAMMY Awards live from Staples Center in Los Angeles on Monday, Feb. 15 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on CBS. 

Kendrick Lamar AOTY Oral History
Feature

Kendrick Lamar, Pluss, Terrace Martin & More On Making 'DAMN.' | Album Of The Year

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Go behind the scenes for the making of Kendrick Lamar's Album Of The Year GRAMMY-nominated LP with the creative team who was there in the studio supporting him
Andreas Hale
GRAMMYs
Jan 25, 2018 - 2:02 pm

After releasing good kid, m.A.A.d City and To Pimp A Butterfly to critical acclaim and multiple GRAMMY nominations, Kendrick Lamar made it a point with his next album to create something markedly different from his previous two efforts. With GK:MC being about the challenges a young man faced growing up in Compton, Calif., and the latter encompassing the sounds of black power and pride, the artist formerly known as K-Dot decided to explore the complexities of spirituality with DAMN.

Kendrick Lamar wins Best Rap Album GRAMMY

What initially sounds like his most accessible album to date turns out to be far more complex upon multiple listens. From the rambunctious "DNA" to the jaw-dropping true story of "DUCKWORTH.," DAMN. is layered with deft lyricism, stellar production and multiple meanings that are made all the more significant once the listener realizes that the album was also designed to be played in reverse.

The acclaim swiftly piled up on social media as both fans and critics hailed DAMN. as the third consecutive instant classic in the 30-year-old's catalog. To get a better insight into the mind of an artist who has mastered the art of secrecy surrounding his projects, a few of the individuals who were behind the shaping of DAMN. paint an intriguing picture of how Lamar's spiritual journey was captured in musical form.

Terrace Martin (producer/songwriter): He initially shared the idea about DAMN. to me during the To Pimp A Butterfly sessions but it was really vague. But I knew that whatever we did next couldn't sound anything like what we just did. We needed to do the opposite of what our opposite thoughts were.

*Sounwave (producer): Literally as soon as [To Pimp A Butterfly] was done we started [working on DAMN.]. He goes into these phases where basically his mind is this big storyboard and he's picking ideas: "What if we did this? What if we did that?"

**Lamar: The initial goal was to make a hybrid of my first two commercial albums. That was our total focus, how to do that sonically, lyrically, through melody – and it came out exactly how I heard it in my head. … It's all pieces of me.

"Kendrick is the type to not let anybody know what he’s doing. It'll come out of nowhere." — Pluss

*Sounwave: Once he got his whole brainstorming thing down and we knew the direction we were going, we locked down the studio for months. [I] never left — [we] literally [had] sleeping bags in the studio.

**Lamar: I wanted it to feel like just the raw elements of hip-hop, whether I'm using 808s or boom-bap drums, the idea of Kid Capri. …The initial thought was having [Kid Capri] on some real trap 808 s***. Something I've never heard from him. I got in the studio and had him do a thousand takes. He's the greatest to ever even do it.

Kid Capri (narrator/vocals): The first time I met Kendrick was when we worked together [on DAMN.]. He called to ask me if I'd work with him. ... He told me the direction of the album being God and spirituality, but he already knew what he had in his head and he came up with a lot of what I needed to say.

Pluss (producer): "HUMBLE." started when I was at the studio with Mike WiLL Made-It and we started throwing ideas together. Mike said that this song needed to be "ignorant." He started with that piano. It was simple. And then he started throwing in bass and drum ideas. I did the arrangement. It was missing one little side and I started playing with a sound effect and threw another effect on top of it. That's how that siren sound came out and it put the beat on another level. We knocked it out in 30 minutes. I didn't know what was going to happen to it.

***Lamar: Mike Will sent the beat over. All I could think of was [Marley Marl's] "The Symphony" and the earliest moments of hip-hop, where it's complex simplicity, but it's also somebody making moves. That beat feels like my generation, right now. The first thing that came to my head was, "Be humble."

Pluss: I didn't even know "HUMBLE." was happening until I heard it. I was riding in the car a few months after we did the beat and I got a phone call from my friend at Live Mixtapes and he said, "I know you have something to do with Kendrick's new record!" I didn't know what he was talking about. "HUMBLE." was a surprise for me and it was all over the radio. I listened to it like "This is the beat that we made!"

Terrace Martin: I got the call to work on "LOYALTY." while I was working with 9th Wonder and Rapsody on Laila’s Wisdom. I heard something with Bruno Mars' "24K Magic." The original talk-box player on that record is a genius by the name of Mr. Talkbox. He had a sound that I loved. I just wanted to reverse it, tweak it and give it a new edge. I got with DJ Dahi and Sounwave to put it together.  I thought this would be dope for my album. But then I thought that nah, this would be for Kendrick and I called him and told him "I got some s***." He had mentioned the idea that very day that he wanted Rihanna on it.

**Lamar: I've always wanted to work with Rihanna. I love everything about her, her artistry, how she represents women to not only be themselves but to express themselves the way she expresses herself through music and how she carries herself. I love everything about her, so I always wanted to work with her. I did the record and immediately, her name popped up. Reached out, we locked in a studio, and made it happen.

9th Wonder (producer/mixer): I was in Los Angeles in December of 2015 and I went to see Kendrick. We were at the beginning stages of Rapsody's album, so I had a bunch of beats on me. I played him 20 beats and he said, "Let me get those." I didn't find out that there were at least two beats on one song ["DUCKWORTH."] until he sent me a video snippet of him playing an MP3 off his computer. It was a 9-second clip that played right when the beat changed. After it was over, I hit him back saying, "Yo man, what the hell?" and he put "LOL" and that was it. I gave him the beats in December of 2015 and he sent that video in June of 2016. I hadn't talked to him in six months and that came out of the blue. I noticed on the MP3 that the name of the song was "Life Is Like A Box Of Chicken." I didn't hear anything else until it was time to clear samples.

Pluss: Kendrick is the type to not let anybody know what he's doing. It'll come out of nowhere.

9th Wonder: The night before I was supposed to fly out for SXSW and Kendrick calls me and says, "I need for you to mix the beat part of this record." Khrysis and I are mixing the beat that night and I'm just listening to the beat. Khrysis is saying, "Are you listening to what he’s saying??" When I’m listening to music I'm listening for the flow pattern before I'm listening to your words. So I listened to the words and I had to sit down, man. ["DUCKWORTH."] is making so much more sense to me. I texted him immediately after I heard it and asked if it was a true story. He said, "Yep. And I left some stuff out."

**Lamar: It was just the right time [to tell that story]. Top Dawg himself didn't know I was going to do it or even execute it in that fashion, to be the last song or to be anywhere. Just making it made sense. I remember playing it for him, he flipped because further than the song, when you really can hear your life in words that is so true to you and that affected your life one hundred percent through one decision, it really makes you sit back and cherish the moment. I think that's something we all did playing that record. Like man, look where we at. We're recording music for the world to hear and we're taking care of our families. We're blessed. But listen to these words, like this is what happened. This is real life. It's amazing and since a kid I've always said to myself "anything is possible and it always comes around 10-fold, confirmation." And that story is confirmation.

* As told to GQ Magazine
** As told to Zane Lowe of Beats 1
*** As told to Rolling Stone

(Andreas Hale is a former editor at BET.com and HipHopDX.com. His work has been featured on MTV, Vibe, XXL, Jay Z's Life+Times, Black Enterprise, Ozy, and more.)

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Rap + R&B Focus: Kendrick Lamar Wins Big

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Rapper leads the 58th GRAMMYs with five wins; R&B music saluted on Music's Biggest Night
Andreas Hale
GRAMMYs
Feb 16, 2016 - 12:27 pm

Kendrick Lamar wins Best Rap Album GRAMMY

At the 58th GRAMMY Awards, Kendrick Lamar had a huge night. After garnering a leading five awards — including Best Rap Album — the rapper took to the GRAMMY stage to deliver a memorable GRAMMY Moment that will likely be talked about for years. 

Lamar’s set was a fearless declaration of black pride and celebration of his Compton, Calif., hometown, Africa and the musical influences that helped mold his Best Rap Album-winning To Pimp A Butterfly. Lamar marched onstage in a prison jumpsuit, while shackled to a group of men also dressed as inmates. As his band played inside a makeshift prison cell, Lamar delivered a passionate performance of “The Blacker The Berry” before transitioning to "Alright."

His performance managed to provide timely social commentary on the GRAMMY stage with a relentless fervor. He closed the performance with a previously unheard lyrical barrage punctuated by an illuminated image of Africa with the word "Compton" scrawled across the continent. The performance elicited a worthy ovation for Lamar, who also won Best Music Video for "Bad Blood" with Taylor Swift and swept the Rap Field, including Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song for "Alright" (with Kawan Prather, Mark Anthony Spears and Pharrell Williams) and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration for "These Walls" (with Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat).

Many of those who helped bring the musicality of Lamar's acclaimed To Pimp A Butterfly to life, spoke on his behalf at the GRAMMY Premiere Ceremony. Bassist Thundercat, singers Bilal and Anna Wise, and producer Sounwave — all first-time GRAMMY winners — took to the stage to thank the rapper for recording the project.

"We come from nothing and people don't realize that," To Pimp A Butterfly co-engineer/mixer Derek "MixedByAli " Ali said. "If it wasn't for God, loyalty, trust, and teamwork we wouldn't be here."

Hip-hop legend and host of the evening LL Cool J kicked off the telecast reminding viewers that music is universal. "Our shared love of music unites us," he said.

Other hip-hop legends were in attendance, including Russell Simmons, Reverend Run of Recording Academy 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award recipients Run DMC and Ice Cube, who was joined onstage by his son O'Shea Jackson Jr. to present the GRAMMY for Best Rap Album. Ice Cube noted rap had come "a long way to change our world forever."

The father-son team fittingly presented Lamar his award for Best Rap Album in front of a standing audience. After thanking his parents, fiancée Whitney Alford and Top Dawg Entertainment family, Lamar declared, “This is for hip-hop. [This is for] Ice Cube. This is for Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle. This is for Illmatic. This is for Nas. We will live forever!"

The night also included big celebrations of R&B music. Tyrese Gibson, John Legend, Luke Bryan, Demi Lovato, and Meghan Trainor paid tribute to 2016 MusiCares Person of the Year Lionel Richie with a medley of the singer/songwriter’s hits. Legend breezily rolled through “Easy” while Demi Lovato’s rendition of “Hello” had the former Commodore shaking his head in amazement. Tyrese punctuated the set with a funky performance of “Brick House” before Richie took to the stage and brought the house down with “All Night Long.”

GRAMMY winners Stevie Wonder and a capella group Pentatonix paid homage to the late Maurice White — founder of 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award recipients Earth, Wind & Fire — with a beautiful rendition of “That’s The Way Of The World.”

Later, Earth, Wind & Fire would take the stage to present Album Of The Year. The GRAMMYs also paid tribute to the legacy of Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall by enlisting GRAMMY-winning R&B singer/songwriter Miguel to deliver an intimate performance of “She’s Out Of My Life.”

A satellite performance of the hip-hop Broadway musical "Hamilton" — which took home Best Musical Theater Album honors — easily made one of the toughest tickets to grab that much harder to get. "Hamilton" creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda rapped his acceptance speech, thanking a list of people including Lamar. Adele also shouted out the Compton rapper after her performance, yelling, "I love you, Kendrick. You're amazing."

Canadian singer/songwriter The Weeknd had a strong showing, earning his first career GRAMMYs with a pair of awards for Best R&B Performance for "Earned It (Fifty Shades Of Grey)" and Best Urban Contemporary Album for Beauty Behind The Madness. The singer celebrated his birthday a day early with the wins and a performance of “Can’t Feel My Face” and “In The Night” while freshly dipped in a black tuxedo. R&B newcomer Andra Day would take to the stage with Ellie Goulding for a collaborative set as the two rising talents filled the Staples Center with their powerful voices

Elsewhere, singer/songwriter D'Angelo won Best R&B Song for "Really Love" with Kendra Foster. D'Angelo And The Vanguard snared the Best R&B Album award for Black Messiah, D'Angelo's first album following a decade-plus hiatus from releasing music. At the Premiere a tearful Lalah Hathaway thanked her late father Donny Hathaway as she took home the award for Best Traditional R&B Performance for her remake of 1972's "Little Ghetto Boy." Choking back tears, Hathaway offered: "Thank you to my father for leaving this song to me to give to other people."

Ultimately, hip-hop and R&B had an incredibly strong showing at the 58th GRAMMY Awards, which celebrated some of the genre's finest talent. Many will likely remember this as the night that Lamar made another powerful mark on the industry and owned Music's Biggest Night with a performance for the ages.

With over a decade of experience as a journalist and editor, Andreas Hale has been called the "Swiss Army Knife of Journalism" by his peers. His work has been featured on Billboard, MTV, Complex, Jay Z's Life+Times, XXL, and The Source, among others. He is also the co-host of combat sports podcast "The Corner" on the Loud Speakers Network.

GRAMMYs

Kendrick Lamar

Photo credit: Getty Images

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Mortal Man: Author Marcus J. Moore Talks 5 Years Of Kendrick Lamar's 'TPAB' & His Forthcoming Book, 'The Butterfly Effect'

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Moore opens up to the Recording Academy about 'To Pimp A Butterfly''s "new-classic" legacy and how his forthcoming book is "as much about the evolution of black culture as it is about Kendrick"
Onaje McDowelle
GRAMMYs
Mar 18, 2020 - 3:09 pm

Marcus J. Moore first had the idea to write a book about Kendrick Lamar on the way to lunch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As an avid fan of the Compton-based rapper’s critically heralded 2015 effort To Pimp A Butterfly, and a self-proclaimed sucker for fly-on-the-wall stories, it dawned on Moore, who at the time was working as a Senior Editor for Bandcamp, that bringing the album to life in the form of a not-so-typical biography only made sense. "There’s a book in here," Moore remembers thinking as he mused over the project track-by-track that day.

Moore is not wrong in describing the album as story-like. In 16 songs and 79 minutes, TPAB unfolds more like a work of calculated improvisation than just a rap or hip-hop record. Tracks like the album opener "Wesley’s Theory," and standout single "King Kunta" hear Lamar toying effortlessly with sensibilities of funk, jazz and gospel, while "Alright" and "The Blacker The Berry" combine poetry with 808s to showcase his consistency as one of the most heavy-hitting lyricists to date. Where the seams of these genre explorations meet with jarring American historical and political metaphors and stream-of-consciousness runs, is where TPAB most comes alive.

Inspired by the likes of Miles Davis and Sly Stone, TPAB was recorded after a monumental trip to South Africa where Lamar visited historical sites like Nelson Mandela’s jail cell, after which he scrapped all previous work on the album. He recruited a cast of all-star producers, singers, songwriters and instrumentalists, including GRAMMY-nominated artists Anna Wise, Bilal, Flying Lotus, Rapsody, Robert Glasper, Thundercat, SZA and Terrace Martin, among others, to help put his new insights on Black history and the contemporary Black experience in America. The sessions were said to be sacred, fruitful and sometimes even "uncomfortable," according to Lamar’s engineer/mixer Derek "MixedbyAli" Ali. In an interview with Hot 97, Top Dawg Entertainment signee SZA noted an intense musical bond that strengthened among the artists over time, resulting in the lengthy and fully layered arrangements that appear on the album. If there were ever an album to come together in the fashion of an avant-garde chapter book, it’s this one.

Following its 2015 release, To Pimp A Butterfly won a GRAMMY in the Rap Album of the Year category at the 58th Annual GRAMMYs. That night, Lamar walked away with five trophies including awards received for his hit single "Alright" in the Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song categories, as well as a Best Rap/Sung Collaboration nod for "These Walls." In less than a decade, Kendrick Lamar has collected 13 GRAMMYs and 37 total nominations.

Following TPAB's five-year anniversary, the Recording Academy caught up with Moore to discuss the book writing process, the multi-dimensionality of K Dot, unearthed stories about To Pimp A Butterfly’s recording and the album’s long-term cultural impact.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up working on a book about Kendrick Lamar and To Pimp A Butterfly?

My byline is Marcus J. Moore and by trade, I'm a music journalist. Right now, I work as the contributing editor at Bandcamp Daily, and contributing writer for The Nation Magazine, but I also freelance for a bunch of different places. Over the past 10 years, I’ve covered soul, jazz, electronica, hip-hop and other subgenres for Pitchfork, NPR Music and I’ve written a piece for The Atlantic, Billboard, SPIN, MTV and BBC Music.

I thought [To Pimp A Butterfly] was amazing just like everyone else. I'm just listening like, man there’s a book in here because I’m a sucker for fly-on-the-wall stories. I wonder what it was like when Thundercat walked in and when Robert Glasper showed up or when Terrace Martin is playing, I wonder what that’s like? I’m just curious. I ran the idea past a good buddy of mine who is also an author and he thought there was something there. He was like, "Welp, okay cool, that’s a good idea. You need to talk to my friend," who at the time was a senior editor at Simon and Schuster. I ran it past him and he, too, thought it was a good idea and was going to help me bring the idea to fruition.

I didn’t want to write the typical celebrity bio that everyone would anticipate. I was influenced to broaden it out a little bit and write about TPAB, and also write about DAMN., good kid, m.A.A.d city, Section.80, Black Panther and all of that. I went home and I started seriously working on a book proposal, got it done by early 2018 and we got it locked in by March of 2018.

What was it like figuring out how to write a book, since up until that point you had mostly been doing journalistic writing? How were you able to scale Kendrick’s story in relation to social and popular culture within those confines?

Well, it’s going to sound crazy but I found the transition to be easier. The thing with music journalism, even though I feel like I’m always going to be a music journalist or the guy who wants to shout out some "underground" record and people get to hear about it. That whole process can be a bit draining because the record comes out Friday, you have to have your review up by Tuesday for people to even care about it. I found this to be a lot more refreshing because it allowed me to get lost in the story, to calmly walk through Kendrick’s coming up and his music and how his music has influenced Black people. And, as a Black American male, it gave me an opportunity to dive into how it made me feel personally. He and I aren’t the same, but writing the book taught me that we’re not that dissimilar in terms of having fears about what you’re writing and anxieties about the world, things of that nature.

Because Kendrick is such a complex character, it’s not easy to try and pack everything into a 2,000-word article. Writing about Kendrick in book form is more conducive to his career in that regard because it allows you to talk to other people and get into why he would feel survivor’s guilt, why he was depressed being on the road away from his family. And it allowed me to talk to these Compton OGs who had seen him come up but also remembered Compton before…

When we write about Compton, we’ve always heard about the danger, red and blue. But, it’s also important to remember that Compton wasn’t always that. How did it become that? So, writing this book allowed me to really go heavy on the context, you know going into Compton in the '60s, '70s, even though we have unarmed Black men being killed by police in 2014, 2015 and today, the city of Los Angeles has its history. This wasn’t anything new. That I thought, was indeed helpful because it gave me more time to explore what I wanted to write about him and what his music meant. I didn’t realize until I dove in just how forthright [Lamar] is. He layers it under so many different facets, it’s so much poetry. That’s why he doesn’t give interviews anymore. It’s all on the record.

"He and I aren’t the same, but writing the book taught me that we’re not that dissimilar in terms of having fears about what you’re writing and anxieties about the world."

You talked about the complexity of Kendrick the artist and the person. What’s your insight on Kendrick being a bridge between different generations of rap/hip-hop fans? What’s so compelling about Kendrick that allows him to reach so many different people?

The thing that connects him to everybody is that he’s incredibly honest and the music is resonant. The music industry always goes through waves where this is the new thing, the new artist, the new mainstream single, the song we’re going to stream over and over, or the artist we’re going to put on all the magazine covers. But, I’ve seen it happen time and time again where no matter who that person is, good music is always going to last.

I think the thing that makes Kendrick stand out is that he’s a new classic. He’s an album’s artist. Granted, he has songs that you can pluck out of a record and it’ll still work as a single, but at the same time, he’s creating these different sort of paintings, very intricate pieces of work that will take years to dissect. That’s what caters to everybody. The intentionality behind it is always very brilliant because, you’re dancing to this song with 808s or this club song, but then when you dive into the lyrics he’s talking about survivor’s guilt, taking you through prison mentality. All of this really deep stuff, but he’s able to reel it within something that still makes you move.

Robert Glasper told me during the interview process that Kendrick caters to the music nerds and the OGs. Dr. Dre, Snoop, all these people from his city totally respect him, but at the same time, he can jump on tracks with Travis Scott or whoever and it works each way. It’s these different generations, but also not giving as much of himself publicly to create this mystique which then extends his lifeline. Anything with his name attached to it is automatically going to blow up because now there’s such a level of intrigue around anything that we just want to see what he’s doing next. He’s like D’Angelo in that way. "I gave you guys VooDoo, now I’m going to disappear, and then when I drop Black Messiah by surprise it’s still going to be a hit." Frank Ocean is the same way. I think that’s what helps him connect to so many different people.

You mentioned the word "intentionality." Based on your conversations with people like Robert Glasper and others about the recording of the album, how do you view Kendrick’s ability to blend different genres; jazz, gospel, soul, etc., into TPAB? What were you able to learn about the album?

Well, the main thing that I learned from the recordings of To Pimp A Butterfly is, even though I mention the word "intentionality," they were intentional about not saying "Oh hey, we’re creating this thing." They worked so much that everyone was like, "Yo, they’re forming together like Voltron” after a while. You know, they were taking the same lunch breaks, eating the same food, doing everything. There’s never this intent to be like here’s the jazz track, here’s the gospel track. They just spent night and day in the studio, throwing things against the wall to see what would work. It was around the clock.

What I learned about those sessions and from Kendrick’s ability to put things together—and I’ve heard this from a few different people—is that Kendrick essentially is a jazz musician. When we think of the tradition of jazz music, we think of a person with a trumpet or a saxophone, and since it’s all based on improv essentially, they’re trying to come in and feel their way through the music with their notes. They say, whether from Glasper or Terrace Martin, that Kendrick does the exact same thing. He’s not going to just jump on an instrumental, and he didn’t for that album. He wasn’t going to jump on just anything in the room and just suffocate it with words, he was going to kind of dip in, dip out. He was going to tweak his voice a certain way so that it would hit the drum snare in a different sort of way. He was going to breathe differently, or back up and let the instrumental take shape and breathe until it expands.

The thing about Kendrick during those sessions was honestly that he was no different than Miles Davis working with Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and all these people or any jazz head where yeah, that’s the band leader, but I’m going to back up and let these people do their thing and then once the music hits me I’m just going to fall in where I can. And he was taking his time. He sat on the "Alright" beat for several months, I want to say like six months.

The whole squad is very methodical about the way that they work because they know that there are a lot of eyes on them. And at the same time, with To Pimp A Butterfly, they knew that they wanted it to be a cross-section of super black music. Just to think of that time, it’s fascinating because when you think about when TPAB came out, months before that in December of 2014 you had D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, March 2015 you get TPAB and then two months after Butterfly you have Kamasi Washington’s The Epic. It very much fits within that pantheon of really grassroots, hardcore black music. I think that’s why it took so many people because it came at a time when we needed it.

Earlier you mentioned that a lot of Kendrick’s material will take people years to unpack. How do you think Kendrick and TPAB's legacy will evolve beyond this five-year anniversary point?

The immediate impact of TPAB, especially when it came out in 2015, was that—to me at least as a full-time music journalist—I feel like a lot of records after that were jazz. All of a sudden jazz came back; it was a combination of TPAB’s success and Kamasi’s The Epic. And jazz hadn’t really gone anywhere. It was just that now there was a palette for it among younger listeners. Now, jazz can be at a festival. So, the immediate impact of TPAB I guess was two-fold, one it was this beacon of jazz returning, but at the same time, personally it made my job a lot easier just based on the liner notes. When you’re flipping through and you see Flying Lotus is on here, Thundercat’s all over this, Kamasi is in here, Terrace Martin, all of these people that I had been jumping up and down about as an editor for years, all of a sudden were on this one record and they were now getting stories. It opened up the landscape and it made sonically challenging music acceptable. Now you can do whatever kind of record you want, as long as it comes from the heart and there will be ears for it, there will be coverage for it.

Moving forward I think it’s one of those records that will just keep coming back, and that’s not easy. I feel like with us, those five years flew by very quickly. And I do believe that it doesn’t matter what the thing is five years from now, dance, pop, jazz, whatever—the music on there was so sonically rich that it’s going to find another generation of listeners and will just keep going forever and ever. I look forward to the day when my godson, who’s now two, is 22 in the record store and he’ll find a used TPAB copy and he plays it and he’s like, "What is this? This came out a million years ago but this is crazy!" And then it’s going to be a whole new generation of jazz heads who are just going to keep discovering. And in turn, there’s going to be more books written about it, there’s going to be school curriculum and classes. It’s one of those records. I don’t classify it by genre, as crazy as that may sound. I feel like a lot of critics still, even though hip-hop is how many years old now, they still kind of look at hip-hop as this other thing. To me, and I even wrote this in the book, TPAB is on the same level as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? It resonates the same way as Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key Of Life. You know, take any iconic album in any genre and you can put TPAB beside it and it’s right there with it. 

"The book is as much about the evolution of black culture as it is about Kendrick."

Why do you think telling Kendrick Lamar’s story and cementing his history in this way is so important?

A lot of the criticism that I heard when the book deal got announced was, "Oh it’s too early, Kendrick is still working, Kendrick is still doing this and doing that." I’m coming from the standpoint of, to be honest, we have to give people their flowers when they’re around to smell them joints, because you just never know. Pop Smoke died when he was 20, we lost Kobe Bryant unexpectedly. I’m really of this mindset of yes, he’s still doing his thing, but why can’t we already acknowledge what he has done for black culture? Yes, he still has a whole life to live and there’s still going to be plenty written about him and I can’t wait to read it. But you also can’t deny this moment in time where from 2010 to now, he essentially changed the world. TDE, his creative community, they’re now superstars. "Alright" is a protest anthem. He had a record that rewrote a whole genre that he’s not even in. They call him a jazz musician, but he’s a rap artist.

I just wanted to make sure that I canonize that because quite frankly it’s just an important story. It’s not about clout chasing or getting famous or anything like that. I just wanted to tell Kendrick’s story because it’s a very impactful story and it inspired me and so many people. I just think it’s important for us. We need more books that celebrate black culture in an unadulterated fashion. We need to celebrate ourselves, not continue to wait to be validated by others. There’s been a lot of hype around the book, but I just hope people like it. I’m thankful that people are interested. The book is as much about the evolution of black culture as it is about Kendrick. 

Moore’s book, "The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America," is due out later this year on Oct. 13 via Atria Books. The title is available for pre-order here.

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Flying Lotus in Pittsburgh 2019

Flying Lotus

Photo: Matthew Miramontes

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Flying Lotus On The "Eternal Flame" Of 'Flamagra,' Making Fire With David Lynch & Learning From Solange

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The multi-hyphenate artist shares the magic behind his latest album, an epic 27-song journey through the flames of the City of Angels
Ana Monroy Yglesias
GRAMMYs
Sep 19, 2019 - 10:31 am

L.A. native Steven Ellison is quite the creative polymath. The GRAMMY nominee is likely best known as his experimental electronic producer/DJ alias, Flying Lotus, but you may also be familiar with the indie films he's directed and/or scored and the record label he runs, Brainfeeder, home to other genre-defying artists including TOKiMONSTA, Daedelus and Thundercat. It's difficult to summarize exactly who he is or what kind of art he crafts, as he's constantly changing it up and wearing new hats, all rather seamlessly.

Most recently, Ellison released his sprawling 27-track sixth Flying Lotus album, Flamagra (he's also released hip-hop music under another alias, Captain Murphy). The LP, released on May 24, follows his GRAMMY-nominated 2015 project, You're Dead!, which some might recall earned a nod for Best Dance Recording at the 58th GRAMMY Awards for "Never Catch Me" featuring Kendrick Lamar. This time, the sonically rich Flamagra is themed around fire with, well, fire collabs from Anderson .Paak, George Clinton, Little Dragon, Tierra Whack, Denzel Curry, iconic experimental director David Lynch, Solange and others.



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FLAMAGRA art by @winstonhacking

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Catching up with Ellison over the phone between shows on his visually stunning 3D Tour, the Recording Academy talks to the wunderkind about how Flamagara came together and how "Fire Is Coming," the spooky track he worked on with Lynch, was born. Ellison also takes us back to when he first met George Clinton and how his great aunt Alice Coltrane (yes, she was married to that Coltrane!) got him started on the trailblazing musical path he's on today.

You're currently on tour right now with your 3D show, which looks really epic and fun. What's been your favorite part so far about this tour?

Well, I think my favorite part so far has been seeing Brandon Coleman on stage. It has been really special for me just because he's the main reason why I even got involved in actually playing on the keyboard and stuff like that. He's the opener. I brought him with me because he's kind of been my piano teacher. You know?

Read: Meet The First-Time GRAMMY Nominee: TOKiMONSTA On Authenticity & Why 'Lune Rouge' Is "A Celebration Of Life"

He's with you on the whole tour?

Yeah. For me, ever since I started taking it seriously, I was like, okay, in five, 10 years from now I'll be able to rock with Brandon on stage. And it has been a year and now we're already at it. It's also been fun riding my bike around small towns and stuff, been really enjoying that. I brought my bike with me. Riding it around really fast in Missoula, Montana made me very happy.

What has it felt like to share your new music with people in the format of this tour?

It's nice, it's fun. It's a trip because there's always, I think, there are certain people who are like, "We want to hear the old stuff." And there's always people like, "We want to hear new stuff." So having accommodate for all that and figure out a good flow is nice and to also, you know, see the result of the hard work and all the efforts. When people know the words and they got the vibes, it feels really nice.

Flying Lotus in Pittsburgh 2019

Flying Lotus plays Pittsburg | Photo: Matthew Miramontes

Flamagra came out a few months ago now and when I first listened to it, I right away felt the journey of the album. Not only does it have a lot of tracks compared to most album nowadays, but it really does feel like a journey through all these different sounds and textures.

Yeah. I'm glad. I was hoping that would come across. All the layering and all that stuff. It's the most fun part to me.

In terms of the fire theme, can you talk about where that came from and how you developed it?

I think that the idea just came from the fact that I just felt for so long that L.A. was on fire. Everything in L.A. was burning, everything. It seems like the various points when I was seriously on the music, it was just like some fire going on, whether it was outside or internal or something. I kept coming back to specific imagery in my mind of fire and a story that I had been kind of imagining about this town that had an eternal flame. And that was kind of my vibe for a while. I was like, all right, what if where I lived, there was an eternal flame and we couldn't do anything about it?

There would be a lot of people who loved it, a lot of people who hate it. A lot of people who wish it never happened and it would attract a lot of attention. I thought about all this stuff for some reason, I vibed with it. I was just like, "Man, what if there was this fire that we couldn't put out in L.A.?" I think that's the music, in a way, you know? No matter what, the music will always survive and it's something, thankfully. It's a thing we can leave behind. No matter if I'm here or gone, music will continue. They'll be putting sh*t out after I'm dead. I hope not. When I'm dead, I don't want them to drop nothing else. That's it.

We can print that on GRAMMY.com if you want.

I don't want no posthumous release. Don't do that sh*t. I don't like that. Whatever I do, whatever I'm doing, whatever I'm working on, that's it. That's the story. It would just kill me if people put out a bunch of half-finished stuff that I did. I would be so mad.

And I've been a witness to it, you know? I've seen a lot. I've seen how people scrambled when [J] Dilla died. What happened with that, it was a terrible. It happened when Mac Miller died. Everybody was like, "Oh, he would have wanted this. He would have wanted this." Everyone thinks they know. Do you know? In terms of my thing, I just feel like, I got it. I got it. If my homies don't got it, then it shouldn't come out.

I feel that. So, on "Fire is Coming" with David Lynch, I'm not gonna lie, it's just freaky. It's eerie.

It's his voice. It's funny because he isn't really saying anything too crazy. It's just when you hear David Lynch, it's instantly terrifying. Almost like when you hear Rod Serling introduce the Twilight Zone or something like that. It has the same kind of feel to it.

I read that you met Lynch at a party and that spawned asking him to record that story.

The story is almost right. We met a couple times before, then I saw him at a party. He was kind of kicking off the party with that story, that same thing. I was already knee deep in fire thoughts already and then this cat did that thing. I was like, "You got to be f**king sh*tting me right now." I've been trying to get David Lynch for like 11, 12 years to do something with me, asking a friend of a friend. "Oh, yeah, he told me he loves you but he's really busy. He's on Twin Peaks, he's doing a billion things."

As soon as Twin Peaks [The Return] was over, I was like, "I'm getting on it." It was just one of those things. I made it a mission to make it happen. And he was still like, "Oh, well he's so busy." And then I heard that thing. I was like, "Look, he's got that done already. Let's just record that, that bit right there. I need that." "Okay, well we can make that happen."  I mean, it was kind of trippy to hear him do that at a party.

That's crazy.

[Lynch said] "Fire is coming." I'm like, "Oh, sh*t." It did right after that. Remember when the 405 was almost on fire and it looked like a volcano by the Getty Museum?

Oh man, yeah. That was right before I moved here, I was in San Francisco. It was on fire on both ends of California.

See? Yeah, that was one of the main catalysts right there. I had people hitting me up I didn't even talk to often, like, "Yo, you good?" "Yeah, I'm fine. Someone else's sh*t is burned down though." It was weird, after I made the album all these weird fire things started happening. The day before my f**king album came out, my grandma's house almost burned down. It's crazy. My sister was like, "Yo, can you make an album about butterflies next? Please? Something peaceful."

Since it was a theme that you'd been thinking about, were you making songs here and there? What was your creative process once you decided to make it into a cohesive album?

Well, I go through several stages of it. Kind of shooting in the dark for a little while and then I feel like, "Oh, I know where I'm going." And then it's like, life happens and then it actually shows you what the story is, you know? I try to steer it too much. It never works out. I always have to kind of step away and be like, "Okay, what are you really saying now?" Every album is like that for me. I almost predict it.

I don't even like to say what I'm working on because I know it's going to change and get manipulated until the day it comes out, or until I deliver it at least. Flamagra, in a lot of ways, was very easy to put together, but at the same time became very difficult, especially working with all the guests and stuff. That was a huge freaking headache, just on legal and getting clearances.

I finished most of the album last November and I ended up having to make changes for the guests. Put a song here, almost have to take a song off there or whatever. It ended up being a little frustrating. Now, I'm in the situation where I think—here we go with predictions. Right? But I feel like the next thing I do would be without guests. That was a lot. Plus I'm getting tired of this whole co-sign thing. I don't want to have to have all these co-signs for anyone to care about my project. I feel like that's a thing, "Who's going to be on it?" I'm on it. It's my thing. So the next one, who knows? Might just be one guest. Might be purely instrumental. I don't know.

Did all of your collaborations happen organically?

Always. Except the Lynch one because some people you got to push a little harder. But pretty much everyone else. There was always someone like, "Oh, we got to do a song together. We got to work together." I'm calling you on it right now. Is this the moment? Are we doing this? Are we going there? Especially Toro [y Moi]. He is the cat I would run into every Saturday. We'd be at the same hotel and get picked up at the same time to go to the same stage. And we'd always be like, "Oh man, we should totally do something together." For years. And I was like, "You know what? Call this man." So, I would say it's natural, organic.

That's real. When you run into someone you haven't seen in a while and they go, "We should hang out." And you're like, "Okay, but when are we hanging out?" I can only imagine with artists' schedules, there's many factors preventing you from getting in the same room together.

That's why artists like Coachella because everyone puts a face to a name. I was like, "Oh, I'm a fan of you." "I'm a fan of you too. We should totally." And then things happen.

Do you always work with people in the studio or do you ever do remote collabs?

A little bit of both actually. It all depends on who I'm dealing with. A lot of times I'll assess if they're the type of person that would be better to work with them or if they're better if they're left to their own devices. There's certain artists who you can tell just need to be in whatever your comfort zone is to make the best track possible. But then there's some people who you need to kind of inspire a little bit. For example, George Clinton, brilliant. Super together, he's an older cat, but he's still got his sh*t, knows everything. I'm like, "Man, how do you remember all these things from your history?" I don't even remember what happened yesterday.

George is super sharp but he's the kind of person who would love that bounce back vibe. When we did "Burning Down The House," I wrote that with him as a freestyle. We're sitting together, he's holding the microphone, he's saying something, I'm calling response with him and then eventually the song came to be what it became. But it was the result of us being in the same space, shouting at each other freely without thinking about if it's sh*tty or not, you know?

When did you and George Clinton first work together? It was on the Kendrick [Lamar] track, "Wesley's Theory," right?

That's how it all started.

Did you know him before that?

How that came to be was, I was vibing on Parliament for a while. On the You're Dead Tour [in 2014], I was like super on it. As soon as I came back from that tour, I was making a lot of Parliament funky-type stuff after that.

The funk was in you.

I went super deep in that. And then Kendrick hit me up to help him build a show for his tour with, on [Kanye West's] Yeezus Tour. He hit me up, I never designed a show before but I stepped into the role and helped him. And it was right before To Pimp A Butterfly began and he was still kind of getting ideas for it and whatnot, trying to figure out what it was going to be.

I started planning some of that funky sh*t and the next day he was like, "I got it." And it really was. It was one of the sparks that that made that record and he asked me after he recorded that song, he was like, "Who do you imagine on this sh*t?" I'm like, "George, of course George, that'd be amazing." And then suddenly George was in the mix and hanging out with Kendrick and stuff and I was like, that's f**king dope. And then eventually George was hanging out at the crib, telling stories about Quentin Tarantino. F**k, that's cool.

What do you think is the biggest thing you've learned from working with George Clinton?

Sh*t. So much, I don't even know. After that whole thing happened, the first thing I did, we didn't even work on music together. The first thing I had him do was be in my movie, Kuso. That was the first time me and George really worked together and he was like, "Okay, I'll do this, but I really want to make some music with you, man." I was like, "Yeah, yeah. We'll get to that." On the first day of shooting, after he got on set, he comes up to me, he's like, "Hey man, you got the script?" I was like, "Yeah, there's a copy over here." He was like, "Oh, cool. Because I don't know any of the dialogue yet." I was like, "Are you f**king kidding me? We're about to shoot this sh*t right now. You don't know the words? You don't know what the hell is happening?"

He's like, "I'm a doctor, right?" I'm like, "Yeah, you're a doctor." He's like, "Can I just be myself?" "Yeah, of course. That's what I thought you'd do." And we pretty much worked it out in the doing, but he had to figure out every line as he did it and do it a million times but his performance of that sh*t is so George. It's so great. I don't know what the moral of the story is. But he's that kind of a person. His personality just shines through. He can make anything happen. The sound of his voice and the vibe. He was so open-minded too.

And then when you guys were working on "Burning Down The House," how long did it take to go from freestyle to recording it?

Oh, the freestyle is the recording. We used a sh*tty microphone. Solange taught me this thing. She told me about using the SM58 or 57 to record. It's pretty much like the microphone everyone uses live on stage, the SM57. The reason why it's a good mic for shows is because you can have all the monitoring on stage and all the loudness and it doesn't feedback. So, Solange was the one to tell me, "Yo, I like to figure out a song with that because you can have the beat playing in the room. You don't need headphones. You can just listen to it loud. Record some sketches and let that be the thing." But for Solange, she was like, "The sketch ends up the song because the freestyle has this energy to it." And that was something that I've taken and it will last me the rest of my life.

Because when it comes to that vibe, by not having headphones on and sketching ideas out freely, it's so different and you don't feel inhibited because the beat is loud in the room and things are vibrating and the ideas are flowing from one to another. I'm hearing George figure things out. I'm spitting ideas back and he's looking at me. So you're getting this different type of energy that if he just had headphones on, on his own, it wouldn't be the same. There's something about it and it has a raw edge to it. There's something about doing it that way. I'll never go back to using nice microphones and headphones, just sh*tty microphones. That's all I do now. When Solange told me about it, I looked at her like, "Are you crazy? Why would you do this?" It made no goddamn sense. She was like, "Just trust me." She was right.

I love the song "Land Of Honey" on the album with her too. Here I am talking about all the collabs after you said you're over them. It's obviously a different dynamic, bringing on someone for your project and figuring out how to align your creative approaches, right? Does that sometimes pose a challenge, getting on the same page with the other person?

It has presented itself once or twice. I feel like all that being said about collaborations, I think I actually really learned how to be a producer by doing this album because I had to deal with all types of different personalities. I had to deal with different egos and stuff and how to get the best thing out of somebody, especially someone you might not know that well. It's like, I'm meeting you for the first time and I'm trying to make a dope track with you. It's not easy. How much time are you going to spend getting to know each other before you start playing music? How much back and forth are you going to get to go before you stumble on the right thing.

There's an artistry in bringing the best things out of people. That's why people love Quincy Jones and all the great producers because they're able to tap into what makes a person great and pull that out of them. Dr. Dre is the same way, being around him. It's the exact same thing. He'll take way more time though and he don't give a sh*t about if you've got things to do. You'll stay with Dre, you'll be there a little while.

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What do you think was the biggest thing you learned in that context of producing and getting the juicy bits from working with someone else?

Well, I don't know. I think everyone's different and that's a thing in itself. Just don't feel like the same shit is going to work on everybody, like everything else. Right? It's like a relationship. You can't take a vegan to the steak house. You got to think of a different place to go on that date. It's similar to dating, I guess, in a weird way. You want to make a good first impression, make them comfortable, all that stuff.

I feel that. Reading the vibe.

"Oh, you don't like this? Okay. Let me change this." Find out what works, what sticks and sometimes it doesn't work. Collaborating don't always go well. I feel like more often than not the idea of the collaboration was better than the result. It happens from time to time.

Let's go back a little bit. You grew up with a musical family; Alice Coltrane was your great aunt, right?

Yeah. It gets crazier as I get older and as I pursue my instrument more. I feel like every three years I have a light bulb, a lightning strike thing happen to me with my family's music and all that stuff. It makes more sense to me and makes me trip out even harder. Like "Whoa, what the f**k? They were? What am I doing?" And the fact that there's new John Coltrane music coming out soon is crazy.

Speaking of posthumous music.

Yeah, exactly. See? That's a tricky one but I ain't mad. 

How do you feel like your childhood or your family connections influenced your love of music or your relationship with it?

Oh, so much. Even though they didn't get the sh*t when it first came out. It's not like when my sh*t dropped they were like all about it or fully understood it. It was still like, "What the f**k is this? What are you doing? This sounds like you're hitting garbage cans over and over again." It's the classic thing you're supposed to hear as a young musician trying to find your way, even from this family of avant-garde thinkers. Eventually they came around.

But I will say, the thing that was most inspiring was seeing that it was real. That it could happen. I think that's the difference for a lot of artists, is that they don't have anyone near them in their vicinity that is a success in that field. My mom wasn't mad that I was pursuing music because she was like, "Well, we know people who it worked out for." But I'm sure it's not the same for everyone. I'm very grateful for that especially.

Where it's encouraged versus the, "Oh, you want to be a musician?" kind of attitude parents can give.

Exactly. I had a little bit of support early on and that made a huge difference, I'm sure. My aunt, she supported me 130% in anything I wanted to do. There were moments where I was like, "I want to program video games, auntie." She was like, "Okay, well here's the computer, Steve." "Really?" Then I was like, "Hey, auntie, I want to be a filmmaker." "Okay, well here's the camera." My aunt was beyond believing in me, it was crazy. She knew there was something. I was going to do something. She treated me like that at least.

When did you first start making music? What was your first instrument?

I started playing saxophone when I was 14. That's how it started. My aunt gave me the saxophone. It was like, "I have to go to middle school now and I have to take and elective." "Oh, you should be in the band and play the sax." Little bit of pressure, but no problem. I played for a while and I didn't feel like that was me, but I did enjoy it while I was doing it. I think if I was playing cooler music in middle school, high school, I would have really stuck with it. But the music was not so inspiring.

And when you were a kid, did you think you would go into music professionally? What was your dream future self when you were younger?

I never really imagined it to be like that. I never imagined I'd be on stage, that's for sure. I did imagine being Dr. Dre-ish, being the guy behind the scenes making beats and stuff. I did see that for myself when I was like 14, 15. I loved that Dre was the cool guy in the background who was making those ill melodies and dark beats and stuff. I was like, "Ooh, that's totally me." He was the first kind of, "I want to do that." And then it's a trip to be in the same room with that cat sometimes. I'm like, what?

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