DJ Shadow: HMV.CO.UK - Exclusive DJ Shadow Interview
How does 'The Outsider' differ from your previous albums?
After 'Private Press', I knew it wasn't going to be possible for me to do another instrumental album. As different as it was from 'Endtroducing', I knew the fact it was instrumental would draw comparisons so I knew I was going to have vocals on this new record. Rap is what I grew up on and all my early records were with rappers so I wanted it to reflect what I like. But I knew I didn't want it to be "all-rap" that all my traditional fans from the Mo Wax era would easily digest because I feel that's too easy. So when I started working on this record, the very first person I got was David Banner.
What was it like working with David Banner?
Very good. I actually finished the track in 2003 and he recorded the first verse for 'Seein Thangs' in 2004, then I was going to get Mystikal to do the second verse. But er.. I knew he was deep deep in jail! So Banner did the second verse in 2005, about two months after Hurricane Katrina, so the track has that theme running through it.
How did you decide on which vocalists to use?
I just work with people I like and try not to get too caught up in fashions. So there's people like Q-Tip, Lateef, Phonte Coleman from Little Brother but there's also the guys from Kasabian, which came about through their producer Jim Abbiss who also engineered 'Private Press'. A couple of years ago he sent me some of their stuff and I thought it sounded really cool. Jim's now very successful - he just did Arctic Monkeys - so I knew I couldn't rely on him but he did produce three new songs. He'd been sending me CDs of groups he's worked with and that's where I first heard the Stateless album which I thought was absolutely stunning. Their lead vocalist Chris James appears on two songs on the record which we recorded before they got their 4-track EP released. Usually, if there are rappers and rock singers on the same album, one or the other is gonna suffer. Combining the two in one track is just kind of a cliché now like when rock groups sample or scratch something into the music. So I wanted to have a record that was just purity over here and purity over there and everything in-between but not necessarily track to track.
Richard Ashcroft mentioned in 'Q' magazine that he was working with you - does he appear on the album?
I recently went up to Manchester and did 'Lonely Soul' with him as the surprise guest on-stage but no, he isn't on the album. To be totally frank, my heart really isn't in rock music right now. Maybe I'm not being exposed to the right stuff but I don't feel I'm hearing anything that's really doing anything for me. I'm feeling purity on a hip hop level and I think a lot of rock artists are feeling purity on a rock level. I'm not in a huge rush to force an unhappy marriage right now. I feel spoilt living in the Bay Area (of San Francisco) because I really feel the most compelling music being made right now is literally around me. If I'm driving and I hear 'Hyphy Juice' by The Team or something, I'm going "God damn! If I could only do a track this good!" and I don't really feel that listening to a lot of stuff.
You've been working with Bay Area artists such as Keak Da Sneak and E-40 - are they fans of your music?
People like E-40 hadn't necessarily followed my career but they knew my name and knew I was local so when I reached out to them it was like "yeah cool lets do it". It wasn't a situation of like "who?, I don't know you", it was more like "I don't really know your music but lets do it".
What's the Bay Area reaction been to your new 'Hyphy' tracks?
I heard '3 Freaks' played on KMEO which is the main urban outlet radio-wise and for the first time in my life it was in context, played alongside all these hyphy records. So we did a video and that got played next to 50 Cent videos! This gave me confidence to continue down that road. It's not as if I grew up getting rock radio love or any type of radio love so for that to happen it was like "oh I'm gonna come with something better next time!". That's why some of the album is hyphy cos you just get that bug of like "OK, they like this, now I'm gonna hit 'em with THIS!" and hit them with the Droop-E remix, then do a track with Federation and hit them with that.
Apart from "radio love", was there anything else to prompt this switch in style?
Definitely. A lot of things have happened that allowed me to be very honest with my career, how I'm perceived and the quality of my own work. Before I began working with Mo Wax, I had jumped from graduating college to working with a Bay Area rapper called Paris which was the very first studio experience I had. I was 23 when 'Endtroducing' was released and it was like I stayed 23 for the next seven years. Then around the time I started working on the new album, we found out my wife was pregnant with twins and that they were 'monoamniotic' which means there's two eggs sharing one sac. There's no books on this subject and we were getting all kinds of mixed information, some of which would've killed them, so I had to stop making music and basically fight for their survival and make sure they were gonna be born. Sitting in the hospital every day for 4 months worrying about my wife's life and my unborn children's life just blew my mind and made me grow up and so I stopped being 23. It opened my eyes about everything. A year ago I was in England, working on the album, and I was in a mini-cab and the driver fell asleep, ran a red light and he slammed into a bus. It dawned on me a couple of days later that had we been going faster it would have been permanently debilitating - definitely "lights out". So you walk away from those experiences and you kinda go "OK, tomorrow isn't guaranteed to anybody" and suddenly it makes internet criticisms seem very petty. The benefits have been enormous. The things that I feel used to hold me back like "maybe I'm going too far?", "are my fans gonna follow me?" - that stuff is permanently etched out of my brain. Now it's about what I wanna do and say musically and that's why in a lot of ways this album is more like 'Endtroducing' in spirit because I had nobody to impress or satisfy. I'm OK saying this is a great album and I never would have said that before.
Is your recording technique the same as ten years ago for 'Endtroducing'?
I was getting kinda bored being identified as "the sample guy" and it was my engineer who was responsible for weaning me off my old way of working. For tracks like '3 Freaks' I used stock keyboard sounds because that's what is "in" in the Bay but the response locally in an urban context totally diverted the record that way. There are tracks on there which are "all-live", or where only the vocals are sampled. The vocals on 'This Time' are about 40 years old. A recording studio in the Bay Area closed down and a friend of mine got hold of all these reels. It's literally 1 minute 20 seconds of this guy tuning up his guitar, singing this little song, and I just fell in love with that vocal track so I literally built the song around it and I'm happy with the way it came out. I have a lot of imitators back home following the 'Endtroducing' model so I just wanted this album to be as hard to imitate as possible. That's one of the reasons I called it 'The Outsider'.
Guest Questions Coldcut: What was the last 7-inch you bought?
That's not THE Coldcut? Really? Really? Much respect. Big influence! The last 7-inch I bought was on ebay and it would've been an Afro-funk thing but the last one I bought in a store was from a record store near where I live. The same guy has run it since 1967 and for years he's told me about his storage but I've asked directly many many times for him to let me in and he's always turned me down flat. Then about 9 months ago, he just said "you wanna go to storage?" and in the last 9 months I've bought probably 15 thousand 45s! At the pace he's going, it would take him 100 years to go through them all and put them all on the shelf so I was really happy he let me cut that down by 99 years! So the last time I was in there I bought six copies of Joe Washington's "Blueberry Hill" on West Sounds - it's not the Fats Domino song, it's a funk tune.
DJ Yoda: What are your guilty musical pleasures? (Something very uncool please)
I've got a friend that I respect musically to the point that he's almost a muse, and we often talk about things like how much we hate Billy Joel or artists of that nature. I remember talking about the movie 'Almost Famous' with him and going "Yeah I really like that movie, I just wish Cameron Crowe was into music slightly more interesting than Elton John" and we keep driving something into the ground and then he'll occasionally hit me with "I can f**k with a little bit of early Elton!", and I'll kinda go "hmmm…I'm gonna have to take that home with me for a sec" before I react. I used to like groups that all the girls I was attracted to liked. Back in junior high school, all the girls that were cute but had this kind of edge to them and weren't in any real clique were always into music. They loved British groups like the Cure and so I started listening to them just so I could have things to talk to them about. Depeche Mode was a big group as well. No males I knew really liked them - it was all girls so that's why I suppose I felt sort of funny about liking them so much.
Prime Cuts (Scratch Perverts): Can you explain to us Brits what the Bay Area 'Hyphy' scene is about?
I'm always eager to point out I'm by no means an expert on Hyphy cos to really be an authority you have to live the culture and I'm easily about 10 years older than everybody I've been working with! It was Keak Da Sneak who invented the word in '98 - initially it meant too over-the-top like "that dude's too hyphy" but then Mac-Dre turned it round and made it into a positive. It's just an extension of living in the roughest parts of the Bay Area. Ecstasy has moved from raves to the hip-hop scene so that's affected the sound and made it faster. Car culture is really big; they have these impromptu car rallies called 'side-shows', and there's songs referencing this going back to 1990. I grew up listening to this music at a time when I still listened to every type of rap but at the point where the gangster scene blew up my career kind of took me away from all that and, like every artist did at that point, I had to "choose sides". If I like something I like it for life. Otherwise you're just a hipster following everybody else. If hyphy is the new thing and nobody likes crunk anymore then I still like crunk because once music gets under my skin it's there forever.
How does 'The Outsider' differ from your previous albums?
After 'Private Press', I knew it wasn't going to be possible for me to do another instrumental album. As different as it was from 'Endtroducing', I knew the fact it was instrumental would draw comparisons so I knew I was going to have vocals on this new record. Rap is what I grew up on and all my early records were with rappers so I wanted it to reflect what I like. But I knew I didn't want it to be "all-rap" that all my traditional fans from the Mo Wax era would easily digest because I feel that's too easy. So when I started working on this record, the very first person I got was David Banner.
What was it like working with David Banner?
Very good. I actually finished the track in 2003 and he recorded the first verse for 'Seein Thangs' in 2004, then I was going to get Mystikal to do the second verse. But er.. I knew he was deep deep in jail! So Banner did the second verse in 2005, about two months after Hurricane Katrina, so the track has that theme running through it.
How did you decide on which vocalists to use?
I just work with people I like and try not to get too caught up in fashions. So there's people like Q-Tip, Lateef, Phonte Coleman from Little Brother but there's also the guys from Kasabian, which came about through their producer Jim Abbiss who also engineered 'Private Press'. A couple of years ago he sent me some of their stuff and I thought it sounded really cool. Jim's now very successful - he just did Arctic Monkeys - so I knew I couldn't rely on him but he did produce three new songs. He'd been sending me CDs of groups he's worked with and that's where I first heard the Stateless album which I thought was absolutely stunning. Their lead vocalist Chris James appears on two songs on the record which we recorded before they got their 4-track EP released. Usually, if there are rappers and rock singers on the same album, one or the other is gonna suffer. Combining the two in one track is just kind of a cliché now like when rock groups sample or scratch something into the music. So I wanted to have a record that was just purity over here and purity over there and everything in-between but not necessarily track to track.
Richard Ashcroft mentioned in 'Q' magazine that he was working with you - does he appear on the album?
I recently went up to Manchester and did 'Lonely Soul' with him as the surprise guest on-stage but no, he isn't on the album. To be totally frank, my heart really isn't in rock music right now. Maybe I'm not being exposed to the right stuff but I don't feel I'm hearing anything that's really doing anything for me. I'm feeling purity on a hip hop level and I think a lot of rock artists are feeling purity on a rock level. I'm not in a huge rush to force an unhappy marriage right now. I feel spoilt living in the Bay Area (of San Francisco) because I really feel the most compelling music being made right now is literally around me. If I'm driving and I hear 'Hyphy Juice' by The Team or something, I'm going "God damn! If I could only do a track this good!" and I don't really feel that listening to a lot of stuff.
You've been working with Bay Area artists such as Keak Da Sneak and E-40 - are they fans of your music?
People like E-40 hadn't necessarily followed my career but they knew my name and knew I was local so when I reached out to them it was like "yeah cool lets do it". It wasn't a situation of like "who?, I don't know you", it was more like "I don't really know your music but lets do it".
What's the Bay Area reaction been to your new 'Hyphy' tracks?
I heard '3 Freaks' played on KMEO which is the main urban outlet radio-wise and for the first time in my life it was in context, played alongside all these hyphy records. So we did a video and that got played next to 50 Cent videos! This gave me confidence to continue down that road. It's not as if I grew up getting rock radio love or any type of radio love so for that to happen it was like "oh I'm gonna come with something better next time!". That's why some of the album is hyphy cos you just get that bug of like "OK, they like this, now I'm gonna hit 'em with THIS!" and hit them with the Droop-E remix, then do a track with Federation and hit them with that.
Apart from "radio love", was there anything else to prompt this switch in style?
Definitely. A lot of things have happened that allowed me to be very honest with my career, how I'm perceived and the quality of my own work. Before I began working with Mo Wax, I had jumped from graduating college to working with a Bay Area rapper called Paris which was the very first studio experience I had. I was 23 when 'Endtroducing' was released and it was like I stayed 23 for the next seven years. Then around the time I started working on the new album, we found out my wife was pregnant with twins and that they were 'monoamniotic' which means there's two eggs sharing one sac. There's no books on this subject and we were getting all kinds of mixed information, some of which would've killed them, so I had to stop making music and basically fight for their survival and make sure they were gonna be born. Sitting in the hospital every day for 4 months worrying about my wife's life and my unborn children's life just blew my mind and made me grow up and so I stopped being 23. It opened my eyes about everything. A year ago I was in England, working on the album, and I was in a mini-cab and the driver fell asleep, ran a red light and he slammed into a bus. It dawned on me a couple of days later that had we been going faster it would have been permanently debilitating - definitely "lights out". So you walk away from those experiences and you kinda go "OK, tomorrow isn't guaranteed to anybody" and suddenly it makes internet criticisms seem very petty. The benefits have been enormous. The things that I feel used to hold me back like "maybe I'm going too far?", "are my fans gonna follow me?" - that stuff is permanently etched out of my brain. Now it's about what I wanna do and say musically and that's why in a lot of ways this album is more like 'Endtroducing' in spirit because I had nobody to impress or satisfy. I'm OK saying this is a great album and I never would have said that before.
Is your recording technique the same as ten years ago for 'Endtroducing'?
I was getting kinda bored being identified as "the sample guy" and it was my engineer who was responsible for weaning me off my old way of working. For tracks like '3 Freaks' I used stock keyboard sounds because that's what is "in" in the Bay but the response locally in an urban context totally diverted the record that way. There are tracks on there which are "all-live", or where only the vocals are sampled. The vocals on 'This Time' are about 40 years old. A recording studio in the Bay Area closed down and a friend of mine got hold of all these reels. It's literally 1 minute 20 seconds of this guy tuning up his guitar, singing this little song, and I just fell in love with that vocal track so I literally built the song around it and I'm happy with the way it came out. I have a lot of imitators back home following the 'Endtroducing' model so I just wanted this album to be as hard to imitate as possible. That's one of the reasons I called it 'The Outsider'.
Guest Questions Coldcut: What was the last 7-inch you bought?
That's not THE Coldcut? Really? Really? Much respect. Big influence! The last 7-inch I bought was on ebay and it would've been an Afro-funk thing but the last one I bought in a store was from a record store near where I live. The same guy has run it since 1967 and for years he's told me about his storage but I've asked directly many many times for him to let me in and he's always turned me down flat. Then about 9 months ago, he just said "you wanna go to storage?" and in the last 9 months I've bought probably 15 thousand 45s! At the pace he's going, it would take him 100 years to go through them all and put them all on the shelf so I was really happy he let me cut that down by 99 years! So the last time I was in there I bought six copies of Joe Washington's "Blueberry Hill" on West Sounds - it's not the Fats Domino song, it's a funk tune.
DJ Yoda: What are your guilty musical pleasures? (Something very uncool please)
I've got a friend that I respect musically to the point that he's almost a muse, and we often talk about things like how much we hate Billy Joel or artists of that nature. I remember talking about the movie 'Almost Famous' with him and going "Yeah I really like that movie, I just wish Cameron Crowe was into music slightly more interesting than Elton John" and we keep driving something into the ground and then he'll occasionally hit me with "I can f**k with a little bit of early Elton!", and I'll kinda go "hmmm…I'm gonna have to take that home with me for a sec" before I react. I used to like groups that all the girls I was attracted to liked. Back in junior high school, all the girls that were cute but had this kind of edge to them and weren't in any real clique were always into music. They loved British groups like the Cure and so I started listening to them just so I could have things to talk to them about. Depeche Mode was a big group as well. No males I knew really liked them - it was all girls so that's why I suppose I felt sort of funny about liking them so much.
Prime Cuts (Scratch Perverts): Can you explain to us Brits what the Bay Area 'Hyphy' scene is about?
I'm always eager to point out I'm by no means an expert on Hyphy cos to really be an authority you have to live the culture and I'm easily about 10 years older than everybody I've been working with! It was Keak Da Sneak who invented the word in '98 - initially it meant too over-the-top like "that dude's too hyphy" but then Mac-Dre turned it round and made it into a positive. It's just an extension of living in the roughest parts of the Bay Area. Ecstasy has moved from raves to the hip-hop scene so that's affected the sound and made it faster. Car culture is really big; they have these impromptu car rallies called 'side-shows', and there's songs referencing this going back to 1990. I grew up listening to this music at a time when I still listened to every type of rap but at the point where the gangster scene blew up my career kind of took me away from all that and, like every artist did at that point, I had to "choose sides". If I like something I like it for life. Otherwise you're just a hipster following everybody else. If hyphy is the new thing and nobody likes crunk anymore then I still like crunk because once music gets under my skin it's there forever.