I was just kind of sick of sticking out all the time. But it was through that, that I found At The Drive In and a ton of other bands that really changed my life. I read that your mother was a Jubilee singer.
Legacy is something that weighs heavy on me. Like, I always grew up hearing about my mom singing when she was younger and all over North Carolina. Everyone knew my mother, and I would remember being a kid and every time we go home in North Carolina, I was listening to her sing in all these huge churches.
As I got older, I learned more about my mom's side of the family, and all of these people who were tremendous singers and vocalists and guitar players and bass players, and all the way back as far as like anyone can think. And this is like Chitlin' Circuit, era, Black music in the South. My first solo project I ever put out was a six-song folk album that was all about just connecting country music and blues and all of these like super Black sounds together.
It's definitely in the backdrop of the music I make. On "Lemonworld," you changed the line from "I was a comfortable kid" to "I'm an uncomfortable kid, but I don't think about it much anymore. Like before I really started taking music seriously, I was very precious. And I felt like I was trying to be this person that I really didn't like. And a lot of the record was about saying goodbye to that.
It's like me sneaking in saying that I'm growing, I'm moving on, and I'm feeling better about who I am and I'm more comfortable now.
It's just fun songwriting to put your own kind of feel into it and to reference things. I always kind of think of it as like sending smoke signals up to people that I want to work with one day, like there's shit that I did in the National record purely because I wanted Aaron Dessner to hear it.
I guess subconsciously, I want people to catch t, but I don't plan for that, you know? Oh, I'd love to. I mean, I just don't think Aaron has ever considered doing that with me. She probably would imagine he's pretty busy, but I would love to work with him. Would you be down to work with me?
Like at all? I went for like almost two weeks in February and recorded 17 songs. And then me and Brian DiMeglio started mixing it right after that. And he and I shot a bunch of versions back and forth, like over the next month, probably a month and a half.
And then we got it mastered by Jesse Cannon, who's in New York and he's a great engineer. It's a cool studio up there. And then, I circled back up with Jamie and we were like, cool, we've got a record. Let's see if we can build a team around it and see if we can find the label.
We shopped it for a long time and no one really was that into it, to be honest. Like, I think people thought it was cool, but maybe it just wasn't the right time or something. And then we just kept on going and we got some booking help and eventually like we got it to Will and then he was really, really into it, like super pumped.
And that was honestly like right before we put out Pretty Boy. So we were shopping the album around for almost a year. It must have been frustrating to have this whole album ready to go without actually releasing it! I really felt like I wanted to take the time, I know I've seen a lot of bands release music and I've been in a lot of bands that released music and we always did it way too fast.
And Jamie gave me great advice. She was like, "We should take our time. Like if it takes a year, like it takes a year. They're like, we're gonna just get it to as many people as we possibly can. Eventually, we found somebody, but I think in that year I also locked down the Pretty Boy project and recorded it.
So, we had a label to do one release and I think that was like a really great thing to happen. I think it was like a good way to introduce my music. So it all worked out somehow. There are several left-field experiments like "Flagey God" and "Mossblerd.
I really wanted the album to be like an exploration of sounds. And I feel like I naturally am writing a lot of different things all the time. Like it's always been hard for me to just be write hardcore songs or just punk songs or whatever.
I felt like with songs like "Kelly Rowland" and "Mossblerd" and some of the more beat-driven ones, it's hard for me to say that there's like a through line between those and like the rock songs.
But I remember looking back at the projects and saying, "I don't have to be afraid that all these songs sound different" because the through line I think is just me, just that I made them. And that it's my story and my voice and my experiences. I think beyond that, there's no sonic element that makes everything similar.
I'm just kinda pulling it together. That kind of storytelling about your own life is very rooted in rap.
Was that contrast deliberate? I think that was very deliberate. One thing that I love about hip-hop for me is, I know what's going on. Like, shit is very clear. All of the messages are sharp and succinct and clear and if you're not familiar with the lexicon, I guess that's a barrier, but if you are familiar, you can know what's happening.
And I feel like in rock music, you could be talking about anything in a rock song, but if it's arranged right, it can just be great. And I wanted to bring that type of approach that's normally used in hip-hop with writing lyrics and making things super clear and concise. Like there's no intros, it's just like, boom, like we're in the song [and] I'm rapping, you know? That was something I wanted to do a lot. I did it on "Mossblerd" too.
Cause I thought that shit was genius. Like those DaBaby songs are so simple and they start so fast and so quickly, it's like a freight train. And I was like, "How can we do that in a pop punk format? Those were some ways that I was like, "Maybe I can smash these two ideas together. When you're writing, are you thinking in terms of "this is my National song, this is my weird trap song?
So I normally start with a loop or a piano part. Once I work that section, I just start collecting sections, like, so like literally in project files. Then, once I like have as many sections and ideas collected, I just start arranging them and when I can hear it and I can look at it and say like, "Oh, it would be sick if I was rapping.
Or if there was a drum and bass beat here. But I definitely don't think like, "Oh, let me make [this kind of] song. Many of our most popular forms, pop-rock-dance-soul-funk-gospel-country-folk-blues, hip-hop, all seem to be rooted in Black people.
Or at least shaped by formative Black artists. I think that it's kind of strange and impossible to be expected to stay within a genre. And I feel like genres, and how they've played out, just in the categorization for Black artists, it's all just kind of set up so we'll lose.
Like, these are huge, super future-facing pop records, you know? I don't see how naming them all Urban [helps]. I think that Black people that are just, you know, the shit and it shouldn't be weird to see Black rock bands. Like, there should be tons of them. It shouldn't be weird for them to also have hip-hop influences. And also just like how genres grow to impact your life and how you see yourself and the contributions that your community makes.
I ended the song talking about my nephew who is a pretty outstanding rapper. But I remember being 16 and Black, and I know a lot of young Black guys that all thought they were going to be rappers and we were just going to sell drugs and just be rappers you get that from the shit you see on TV. And it's all tied back to genres and what we're telling people that they can accomplish. So it can be kind of dangerous. That's why when people ask me, Oh, what's it like making "genre-defying rock music.
Do you have a message for them, the kind of thing you wish you heard when you were 16 and thinking you were going to be a rapper? And I remember seeing Bloc Party and TV on the Radio and bands that had people that looked like me and how much it meant to me. And I think that was really important and something I've just learned in making music is that sometimes you just have to be your own biggest fan, and you have to build the thing that no one else knows is real yet.
You might be the only one for a while that knows that you have something special to offer. And that doesn't mean that you're wrong. I spent a lot of time, in my teens and 20s, playing in all sorts of bands, trying to fulfill myself because I didn't trust myself. And I didn't believe that my music was worth making because I didn't look like other people. And my voice was so resonant. And I just sounded like a church kid in a hardcore band, which is weird to hear my Black voice over these riffs.
You just feel like you can't do it cause no one has seen it, but you might just be on some shit that other people can't do. And you have to learn to trust yourself and really learn to go with your gut early.
And then people will just form around you because you'll be doing something that is genuine and from the heart. And that's the hardest thing, to create things that actually connect with people. Melanie Charles. I think she's the best vocalist and hip-hop producer I would want to shout her out. I really loved their music. Felicia Douglas. Felicia is in Dirty Projectors, but she's got two side projects that are amazing. I look up to those people quite a bit and their music is always super tasteful and excellent.
I'm not sure if there are [more Black bands] now or if people are just elevating those people more. But I do know that there have always been people of color and Black people in rock bands and they just didn't always get the same opportunities.
So, maybe it's like a little bit of everything. Matt Berninger's Optimistic Malaise. Coolio in Facebook Twitter Email. The GRAMMY-winning rapper takes us behind the creation of his signature song, the globe-trotting rollercoaster ride it took him on and how he views his place in hip-hop's canon. Will Hodge. Subscribe Now. Be the first to find out about winners, nominees, and more from Music's Biggest Night. Leave this field blank. Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz in 'Clueless' How Became A Blockbuster Year For Soundtracks soundtracks-film-batman-forever-clueless-waiting-exhale-whitney-houston.
From 'Clueless' to 'Dangerous Minds,' soundtracks were big business in , but the year's hits offered no clear formula for success. Jack Tregoning. The Twilite Tone. Photo by Christine Ciszczon. Jack Riedy. Diamond Platnumz. Market diamond-platnumz-talks-growing-tanzania-breaking-american-popular-music. Christopher A. Bartees Strange. Photo by Julia Leiby. It was a great experience for me, as well. But we had a good time.
She came out and did her thing, and she killed it; it took her two takes to do her parts, and she was outta there. No way. It was a great moment! That was a big moment in my life, especially considering the different things that were going on with me at the time. My father was sick, my mother was sick, two of my brothers had died; yeah, there was a lot going on, man. The record came about at the perfect time.
Coolio: I was touring in Europe when it went to Number One. And the thing was, I was Number One all over the entire planet — not just in the States. I was Number One everywhere that you can imagine! Baker: L. I also liked the fact that it was a rap song — which means more words, which generally allows for more jokes — with a melodic chorus for the hook.
The scenes of Coolio and Michelle Pfeiffer were fairly iconic, so I decided to focus on those. Fuqua: I was cool with it, because at the time there was no social media, and if Weird Al spoofed you, it meant you were popular or had a successful video. It was, funny. I guess. I should have never been upset about that; I should have embraced it like everybody else did.
Michael Jackson never got mad at him; Prince never got mad at him. Who the fuck was I to take the position that I took? It was actually years later before I realized how stupid that was of me [ laughs ]. But hey, you live and you learn. Paul wanted to sign me to some contract that my lawyer told me was ridiculous, so I went out on my own. It solidified me in the rest of the world. Yeah, Hootie had some serious staying power in FB Tweet More. Credit: Warner Bros. You'll get the latest updates on this topic in your browser notifications.
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