[Music] i've always wanted to do this you know you're never quite sure if doing this intro vocally at any given time after 1996 would have been greeted with anything other than a bit of an eye roll but now it's the 25th anniversary i get to do it guess who's coming it's guess who's coming it's check it check and guess who's coming back again who is he just your favorite dj savior
you can't hear the explosion because shadow doesn't like to hear the sound of his own voice he's like terminator x speaks with his hands but we have an opportunity right now and a rare opportunity it is to reflect on the legacy of no question about it one of the greatest albums ever made modern music in fact any generation i stand by this fan you know i am but it has traveled so
far and wide that if i think even you who is like a naturally humble human being can hopefully enjoy this moment based on what you created 25 years ago you're a futurist but we get to reflect today josh totally i mean i've always seen that album as a gift um i've always seen i as a you know fan of music and somebody who likes to say they study music in the history of music i understand how unusual
everything about the success of that record or the i don't know the just the the entire arc of the record it's really unusual and so i can i can recognize that and appreciate it sort of from a distance but then when it comes to talking about you know the the actual making of the record and some of the other stuff that goes into it and and what was it like doing x y and z it's
it occupies a different space in my head and it's not one i visit very often because you moved on i mean and by the way i think that it's actually a pretty overlooked fact amongst most fans of the record i certainly took a long time to figure this out that you had approached this from a from a place of reduced process you know i think some people assumed like that's how you made your music
but you actually were like no i'm coming in to make this record with these two or three bits of kit and it's a very deliberate decision i'm making yeah you had to you had skills beyond that you were you'd used other pieces of equipment you knew what you were doing but you were like this is the kind of record i want to make so it's understandable that you would leave that behind because it was
actually an experiment right yeah i mean it there's a lot of things i think that people may be and they're simple things but and i don't expect people to spend a bunch of time thinking about things like this because why but i mean there's certain pragmatic realities to why the record is what it is i mean for one thing i lived in davis california not exactly a hotbed of hip-hop activity
at that time so the prospect of me growing up you know i was a huge fan in the in the 80s of hip-hop music but i didn't know any rappers i didn't know any mcs i didn't know anybody who at school who said i'm a rapper you know there were a few djs there were a few break dancers at that time frame but i never met anybody that declared themselves themselves an emcee you're a partner in
crime let's get into it let's do it okay yeah yeah yeah exactly that my partner in crime in high school was a graffiti writer who did a lot of the artwork for our early releases and stuff but i just never found an mc so it was this kind of crossroads where it's like well okay i could either become like a dj who plays weddings and plays in clubs and maybe can get on the radio
like mix show radio or something that was one path another path was well i want to contribute to this art form that's given me so much in my own kind of um you know delusion i i thought well you know maybe i have a voice to offer maybe um i can contribute and amplify some of the things about the music and the culture that i feel like had gone by the wayside and that's kind of the path that
i took because i didn't really have the right flair like you know to be a club dj at that time you had to have a certain panache that it just didn't i you know it didn't it didn't it wasn't in me and the other thing is whenever i did dj i was just playing these really rough tracks that i loved but weren't dance tracks you know like nobody's really dancing to ultra magnetic mcs and records like that
or school ed i mean they're they're head nod records and those were the records i gravitated toward one of the things that immediately jumps out to me is just how on the cusp of new you were by creating something that was steeped in instant in the vintage um and the first stop on the road is this idea of reluctance being a marketing tool it's crazy now when you think about how people
hold deliberately i actually think there's a lot of artists out there that would rather be out front but there's somebody in their ear going no no this is a great marketing tool now hang in the shadows pun very much intended right and you know when you came out your reluctance to my point became part of the gravity that drew people into this project from the name i mean that says that every everything
you need to know is on the side of the can right through to the artwork to the way the videos and the granular imagery and your reluct reluctance to want to hype it hyped it yeah yeah i mean it's just really hard to dissect and and you know kind of amplify or look under a magnifying glass all the little inner workings about james and moax and the fact that i was an american
debuting in england and being known in england um yeah you just can't you ca it's not the type of thing that you can sit down you know in a board room and go okay here's how we're gonna do it that's what i mean it's like you stumbled into this thing yeah and and let's park that bit because that's going to work really nicely as we develop the conversation through the process of what happened to
the record we've got to come back to it because you were that reluctant astronaut you know who suddenly got thrust into the limelight by trying to actively resist it right down to the way you made the record which was no one was waiting for this record no one was out there going oh i hear whispers in the wind that there's this dj shadow opus coming you tucked yourself away in the glue factory or in
your apartment and you just had all the time in the world right yeah uh i did feel pressure though i mean i'm the type of person that if if there's one person in my ear being like i believe in you i'm excited about what you're doing that's all i need all i need is just one person as i don't know if you want to say a muse but somebody that's invested in what i'm doing and who was that
person initially it was dave funk funkencline and after he passed it was a couple of different a r people here and there but i mean hip-hop changed every three months back then and whereas what i'm you know when i'm doing something spacey and out there with dave klein and then the next day in our our guy a wild picture profile or whatever other hip-hop label at that time
it's it's moved on to where it's like can't you use some more familiar stuff you know what i mean like you you should make do do like this like at the time it was like nubian crackers and records like that where it was all familiar breaks and and samples that people had just used and people were trying to push me to doing that i was like nah you know james was in my ear from 93 onward or maybe even late 92
onward i don't really recall now but i delivered him a couple of singles in in quick succession then i started working on the album now what ended up happening was i had three or four or five songs done and moax was basically like okay stop what you're doing we want to do another single before we do your album and they basically ended up putting out an ep called what does your soul look
like and i was kind of gutted by that because i was like damn i just spent four months and this is the best like i feel like i was getting into a flow where it's like i found something you know what i mean i had been wood shedding and then i found some beginning of a complete thought yeah yeah and and an identity that was indelible to the music i was making it wasn't random or generic you know
so i reluctantly agreed and then i was like wow i have to start over and that was so on one level it's like yes i was in isolation but again james i knew james was looking to me i knew other people within moax and people like dj crush that i had toured with like there were people that that i didn't want to let down it's interesting that you put it in those terms yet the way
you're describing it is that you know you felt the pressure to be a team player but you weren't quite sure how you fit in just yet well there's a little bit of that also because i had this duality to my career where i was a californian dj with my crazy shadow with your crew my crew yeah yeah so it's like this split personality of like who are you in california in this emerging
bay area scene which let's not forget was coming off the back of hieroglyphics and had its own place in the world absolutely and that's only the most recent success at that moment there's a long lineage industry before that granted but james recognized to his credit because as well as being a creative and we can acknowledge that for sure given his history now he was the time was really focused on marketing
and he recognized in the uk what this was i think initially when he started his label he really wanted to be the next charles peterson and i mean he's gone on record saying that that's not a that's not me it's not a bad thing either like talking like yeah yeah and i mean he wanted to dj like him and of course giles had talking loud and he wanted to do that so his early you know
the early moax records it's kind of that hipster jazz lettering style and and that whole thing but i came into it and i would in my typical kind of california way i'd be like i don't really you know like what is all this stuff this i i mean it i respect it but it's really not me i think the term that gets thrown around and primarily in california that we've now become familiar with this i don't with
that that's that's that's absolutely how i probably phrased it i'm i'm too used to being in front of a microphone and toning it down but i i just tread very lightly when it came to anything other than my own and um like i didn't want to go out there and be like nah that's corny it's got to be this way the only thing i was concerned with was what i was going to be doing
and one of the one of the first things that i established at moax was okay if everybody's doing if all of the moax releases are like a white cover with a particular colorway of lettering and a fake obi strip on the side then my first release is going to be a graffiti picture disc like i was going to do the the polar opposite of everything in doing so you dragged mo wax into a whole new aesthetic
and became an integral part of that aesthetic but put in that one and come back to that later as well because that's another great conversation but focusing on the making of this record right now um songs that are just so etched into our lives anyone who's watching or listening to this and there's a lot of people who've been moved by this record you know did it surpr did you feel anything close
to how we felt when you first put the piano and the drums together for building steam and recognized that moment i heard that was life-changing for me did you listen to it when you were making it and go yes this is me yeah yeah um there wasn't anything on introducing that i was sort of struggling with like is does this feel authentic or or am i you know kind of pushing my own
boundaries i will say that there was at one point lyrics to stem and that was my only struggle when i think back to making the record i struggled a lot about whether i wanted to have that part of me represented on this album and on that song because it was deeply personal stuff and i i just was doing anything that i could to make it personal and make it 100 me and i had never written lyrics before or
tried to put any kind of vocal treatment down no i did not sing um but that that was my struggle and i remember playing it for x from blackalicious and kind of being like what do you think and he kind of gave me his stock like yeah man it's dope which i knew meant like nothing uh well and also you'd set these deliberate restraints for yourself these this this idea of working within this framework and
i actually think as moving as that might have been to here it would have aged better than it did in the moment i think if that album came out and there was one moment where there was this kind of lyrical contribution i don't know if we would have been able to connect to the to the overall body of work the way that we all did which was everybody was just asking how you did it and it's not like paul's boutique didn't
exist and it's not like people weren't great at sampling records but it felt like you were conducting composing and constructing everything with it with a group of players in the room like even the way you cut and and program the base on buildings theme um you know or on changeling um the way that you would wait sometimes three minutes to bring the base in you were really thinking
like like a band yeah i mean that's one of the things i mean again i've right there in the liner notes i credit all my influences and and the reason being is to say obviously there's a lineage here beyond hip-hop culture there's a lineage of music being made with a sampler and that's really what i was trying to contribute to in addition to the broader culture because by the midnight you know from the time i
started introducing and or started some of the working tracks till the time it came out i mean you had wu-tang clan which changed the game you had the chronic came out which changed the game and not only did it change the game it changed the axis of hip-hop culture to the west coast where i grew up and so so many things had changed and were changing and i to to the point
where again i just was like i just need to focus on my stuff yeah one of the things i was trying to contribute to was okay what haven't people done with a sampler well i i didn't grow up a jazz student or a music student i didn't grow up a rock kid but i recognized like wait i hear songs on the radio that are in a different time signature has anybody anybody ever done that with a sampler or with sample
based music no cool i'll try that or i didn't know but i didn't know maybe maybe major force had done it or some other group had done it but i was like well i'm not aware of it i'm gonna try that um one of the moments i'm really proud of on that level on the album is the beginning of napalm brain drags it's slower and it pitches up in tempo i literally programmed the sequences to
slowly rise in tempo the way a band does and the drummer's kind of a little the way i programmed the drums it's a little bit tentative it's not quite there yet and the bass line is a little kind of like wait are we locked we're not quite locked let's lock in and a few bars later it does lock in little things like that i felt were from james and i that's it you know
what i mean it was it was something i could do to put in there that i hoped james would catch just like i hoped he wouldn't think organ donor was cheesy because i liked it but i also felt like there was it was so cheeky that i i was worried he was gonna be like um i don't know about this one but then later he told me that was the moment on the record where him and uh i think the guy who was managing the
label at the time this guy andy just started jumping around together in the like yeah like this okay this is what we were waiting for you know i think we need to at this point just talk a little bit about the dynamic between you and james lavelle if anyone again is experiencing this conversation and you're very familiar with the legacy of mo wax and you know james has had a really long and
and and you know if you look across it very influential career from the uk beyond he's he's had his ups he's had his downs um on a human level but he's he continues to be dedicated to the craft of music and what goes into it now this was an essential time in his life and in your life and i'll just be straight like i just genuinely never knew what was at the core of your relationship together well
i mean i think what you're talking about is the arc of a relationship um or any kind of relationship right and when i first met him in 93 he found an american that knew who derek b was that knew who who london posse was the first time you heard me my voice you were rocking through the rhythm stop finger popping yeah or asher d and daddy freddy or or or any because uk hip-hop was
something that was finding its way but again this is all part of this kind of philosophy that dave klein helped instill in me and people like bambada and and flash where it's like the the entire globe of music is out there for you to re-contextualize for you to consume or metabolize and assign your own kind of hip-hop belief structure into move it forward listen absorb adopt adapt and move it
forward yeah so what james i think found in me was somebody from the states that got it that wasn't just like yo i'm all about just the bay area or i'm all about the west coast or i'm all about just just you you know us-based rap like you're in the uk you know i didn't have that attitude and and in james what i found was a benefactor i found and you know this goes back hundreds of
years you're you're a painter you're struggling you don't understand why anybody wants to mess with you and then somebody comes along and says here i believe in you go do what you do and that's all any artist needs and so for me i remember the first time i picked james up from the airport he flew into sfo i think from la actually because i think orlando had flown him into dj out here
he had a club called brass and i think it was only his second time in the states he came up to see me and i was driving my old busted 77 cadillac sedan deville he which you know again he's coming from london and it's like this is classic it's exotic yeah and i just happened to be playing david axelrod you know songs of experience and he was just like what is this what is this this is incredible who is this
where did you find this let's go there have you heard of this have you heard uh heard of this french label have you and so literally the entire you know 90 minute drive back to davis california where i lived at the time and where i grew up it was just that it was like check out this tape that giles gave me and we were just playing tapes and like rare groove tell me about you know
because i had heard of the rare groove scene and i didn't really understand what the roots of it was i know they'd fly people like 45 king out to dj and i'm like that's crazy and it was that intense love of music that bonded us and when i felt that start to waver within james for other pursuits yeah that's when i checked out yeah and and that didn't really start happening until
science fiction yeah it was crazy it was like this mad sort of strange energy of like you guys have made this incredible record everything's so dialed in but the band's breaking up and i just wonder how much that came from the pressure of you going in there making this album introducing being really the regular science fiction is collateral damage you're coming off this wave of
introducing and it's like you may as well be from the uk you may as well be full-time mo wax and you're actually supposed to be in california bringing your crew up you've heard that whole prince thing where it's like hey in order for me to win my whole squad has to work whether you're or whatever right yeah and that's the way i saw it and with me soul size was one for all i'll just say that
maybe not everybody felt that way most of the crew did yeah but i definitely started getting a little bit of like sideways glances like where are your allegiances you know what i mean yeah and meanwhile i'm you know recently relocated with my living girlfriend now wife of all these years i mean there's just a lot happening i i graduated from college when you know when you're in school and
you're doing music and you're djing you kind of have this it's almost like being on tour where there's a tour manager just telling you what to do and where to go you have a schedule you have an itinerary you kind of have a facilities around you that was all gone you know there's just a million life changes happening and when i delivered introducing and was doing a few dj gigs
in in london to kind of start to hype it up whether it was at um the heavenly social and places like that right places you're supposed to play literally simultaneously to that james was like come on we gotta like he was cracking the whip and and and trying to get me to like we were working on uncle demos you know what i mean so there was really no stopping and i think in some ways that probably wasn't helpful too
but i was up for it i mean i was i was game for it i just think that over the course of two years of making science fiction not fully being able to appreciate what had happened with introducing and then starting to see you know where like i'm working in the studio pulling these long hours i'm like where where the is james you know what i mean like either we're on the same page and and we're pulling
you know this the same direction or we're not and that was a very long it wasn't an overnight thing it was a long we were brothers and then um and then we weren't and he sort of decided that there were other he had aspirations i mean he didn't want to sit behind a desk anymore he wanted to be respected like his artists were respected but one of the things that i think has always been
blown out of proportion is that we hate each other or that you know we're at each other's throats or we can't be in the same room i mean speaking for myself i've never felt that it's so fascinating to to hear this it from this perspective because at the time being a fan of yours and and coming into your space you had to be very very thoughtful which was tough because you elicited this
fandom from people and you must have felt that very much in contrast to who you are as a person which is like you're a very chill guy and yet at the time it just felt like it was the closest thing to hysteria that someone making sample-based independent and instrumental hip-hop music could have faced i mean you had such crazy people who were sort of crediting this record and your work
as being instrumental it's it's a very well-known fact that we wouldn't have airbag by radiohead if it wasn't for introducing and and tom has said that over and over again i mean that sort of should blow your mind if you're coming straight out of college and trying to figure out where you actually live let alone where you stand i think a lot of things i mean i think the arrogance of youth
um i just think i would hear stuff like that and number one i wouldn't really buy it i'd assume it's a lie or if or just an overblown sort of pull quote for an article or whatever because i know how you know i grew up reading the enemy and melody maker yeah and obviously this is all pre-internet pre-social media i mean the other thing that i always try to educate people on a little bit
when they show an interest is that i mean point blank honestly my feeling about the release of the album was there was all this build up i was doing it for james i was doing it for myself i was doing it for this lineage of sample based music and my heroes trying to honor my heroes the record came out and then it was like all right cool go back home we'll um you know
you know we'll talk about uncle later so i'm back home in my little you know 700 a month flat like one bedroom flat or whatever in quiet little davis california just kind of feeling like wow what just happened and what i found was that i was angry i felt really angry about so much that i had learned i mean i had looked behind the curtain of the music industry i was good friends with the guy who ran
a m records which had uh taken on moax in the uk guy named osman and he revealed things to me about the way that stuff works and i thought i was ready for it and in some cases i don't think i was and i i wasn't rich i wasn't famous i didn't feel anything other than wow i worked really hard on this put everything i had into it i have no idea nobody around here knows it exists so it didn't feel real
and for some reason my response was anger and so i made a song called high noon which was me channeling that anger it's such a classic record that oh my god impossible to play in a dj set but yes all my stuff in that era is impossible to play in the teachers well i mean like i've seen people do it and waving in beautifully and i've really tried and but the number song and organ don't put
they pop but man you get to high noon and um it just makes everything else around it sound a little bit inconsequential because it's it remains to this day if i may say to me the the high water mark for that particular type of sampling and like i don't know how you made that song it must have come from raw emotion to your point because it doesn't sound remotely thought that there's any thought process
it's just one of those songs that happened really quickly and and i don't make music in that way anymore in the way that you know where i'm like forcing myself to sit down and play records i i still do on occasion um but i've hopefully added to the you know the the palette of technology most definitely you're much more well-rounded yeah the overall idea of just the idea of oh my song
should have low frequencies and i back then i just didn't you know um it was all feel i've never knew the fact that that song was born out of this kind of inbuilt anger and frustration of what you've been exposed to but then what is fascinating was because high noon came quick so we were lulled into this false sense of security that like great we've all fallen in love with this record shadow's
just going to keep feeding us but then after that i feel like it'd just be introducing that's where i feel you pause and introducing takes over right because the record did start to connect yeah and you did start to be recognized and i just always felt there was this reluctance to acknowledge that so which one is it josh is it anger that no one gives a sh that was a frustration
that too many people are asking you questions and wanting to touch you i'll tell you what it is probably an inferiority complex and the reason i say that is and you know you can only say stuff like this when you're of a certain age a little bit do you think i would have asked you that question 25 years ago i'd have been like what you're like [Laughter] i grew up an outsider i i felt like an
outsider in this and that didn't bother me at all i could care less about what people thought i was i was pure enthusiasm so whether that was meeting people like paris who was the first person to a really talented dope artist from the bay area who put me in the studio and recognized my enthusiasm and my passion for the music i mean any of my early mentors i think what impressed them
about what i brought to the table was that enthusiasm and i i knew the history of the music i knew i i wasn't coming at it and honestly i just have to say this one i think one of the main differences between introducing a lot of the music that came out that was inspired by introducing or that people kind of put as like oh here's the new dj shadow was that so many of those artists came from other
genres came into hip hop through my music and that with me a little bit because i didn't want to be anybody's fastpass fastpass around the culture of hip-hop music right and because because ultimately the fear is is this going to reflect badly on me absolutely because i ingrain i love rap just because i made an instrumental record doesn't mean like oh well i wanted to do
a hip-hop record but without any of that rap yeah yeah and honestly a lot of people thought that that's what i had done here comes the highbrow kid from california who's sitting in the library he looks like a rave kid yeah yeah yeah because i was poor not because i was trying to look like a raver yeah so so i spent so much time maybe too much time trying to contextualize for people i i
there was just so much at that time where it's like you had to prove yourself i think having spent a lot of my life talking to artists and at various points different different versions of this conversation of like the over compensation era of like how do i get people to understand my true intent versus the adoption or the construct that's been placed on this project and and what i've seen from every time
including you right now is that that is how that is just like exhaustion i mean it definitely messed with me for for quite a while and then it's that thing honestly i i think you know it's so funny because i i sat here five minutes ago saying i grew up reading enemy and in addition to rolling stone and stuff and i know how they can build you up and tear you down but when
the tearing down be i just assumed i was anointed you know what i mean because from jump in the uk it was like this kid this kid like there's a end of the year issue of either melody maker or enemy where in the critics polls it's like oasis oasis dj shadow oasis oasis dj shadow oasis dj shadow and i would look at that and on one level i could divorce myself from it and be like oh that's cool
but on another level i was kind of like man i think i'm set i think i think i i did it you know i got through like it's look it's it's totally understandable to have a temporary out of body experience when tom york is kissing your ass and the enemy are telling you that you're next to oasis in the single biggest moment of the year so you are this kind of like alien from outer space right
davis california may as well be mars right but but the interesting thing from it from an outsider's point of view listening to the album again is that you intrinsically instinctively knew what was ahead it's like you were sending yourself a message with the opening speech on building steam have you ever thought about that like if you listen to the to the words of the speech that you sample where it talks
about i made a few mistakes but i've just just cleared them up that's the process right and then i still have a long way to go you know i'm a student of the drums i'm also i'm also a teacher teacher of the drums you set the whole life up like you might freak out about this but i'm still here learning i've i don't have any answers all of my favorite artists failed on their first
failed out of the gate all of them um and some of them are really obscure and you don't know it happened but it did also in that is all of my favorite artists have shown a willingness to stay in class and build and learn and i used to love one of my favorite mcs of all time is guru because recently it occurred to me when we were talking about um i was talking about gabs passing with somebody
a gift of gab from black alicious and it occurred to me that the only emcee i had done or i had heard come any anywhere close to that kind of you know personal um just saying things in a record that are so relatable because they're so specific to him is guru and um so when i talk about the fact that i love rap and have always loved rap that's one of the things i've loved i mean i learned how to
on so many levels um relate to music through rap to think about the world around me through rap to understand aspects of myself through rap because i was growing up you know that was the music i was listening to when i was 10 11 12 13 14 you know up to up to today i just think that ultimately when i listen to introducing and and what you've kind of hinted at that you sense about it
it really was just um i think i just i wanted to contribute so profoundly and i wanted to i knew that the only way i could do that was to be me um you know hell or high water good or bad and it was just interesting it was interesting the way new york hip-hop people were related to the record or didn't it was so interesting the way bay area people related to the record or didn't and i actually always
relished the opportunity to have somebody try to pull my card in that era whether it was a journalist or uh another artist i loved because that's also part of hip-hop yeah prove yourself show yourself yeah take show and prove no one's gonna give you a seat at the table ego trip had this column called uh i think it was count chocula yeah i remember and i remember uh they wanted to
interview me right and a friend was like no dude it's a setup yeah you can't do it and i was like why man like i'm not afraid i'm not afraid of this you know what i mean i'm not a i know the culture i know it's history i know how i fit in or in some cases don't fit in i know what my strengths and my weaknesses are that is the crucial one is knowing where you don't fit in that
is so important because we assume because we're in the room that we're relatable to everything and everyone all the time and that's not just in music or in hip-hop or in any genre that's in life that's in life oh i must i'm a charm i must be relatable to you i must be relatable richard russell said something to me once which i've always held on to after he said i love it he said you know
there's something to being thoughtful with your thoughtfulness and that is really what it's about it's like i know my place in this conversation here i don't know enough over here so i better just listen and over here i'm not interested so i'm not even going to go there and also seeing other people do it badly um like you know there were it's it's really interesting it's also
interesting i remember when i was in germany the question i had over and over and over and over on and it literally almost drove me mad i mean after eight hours of being asked this question it it did mess with me i mean the question was over and over but you are white and you are in you you are doing black music it was almost like how does this happen and i just kind of my response was look i i know where i
fit in and don't fit in and i know that i'm an invited guest at this table and i know it is not for me to you know get all defensive and try to assume a position yeah exactly and and over compensate as you said before so that was something that i was just it just felt absolutely normal to me because i don't know i never felt like i missed a lesson it's not like i i sort of sprang
out of a limo and went i'm here you know what i mean like i i don't think there's a single thing you could have done in the 80s as far as like college radio mix show radio um it's interning in a studio doing sound for a doors cover band you know i don't know if i've ever even talked about this but the that end of that day in germany i was just in a hotel room and coincidentally my wife or then
girlfriend now wife was with me um and she was just kind of watching tv at jet lag or something i remember just laying on my back looking up at the ceiling and just these faces in the ceiling just sort of um i i can't explain it you know um it was it was psychedelic and i've never even done psychedelic drugs your brain was scrambled yeah it was scrambled and and uh i i'm not trying to sit here like
it's any kind of it's a real experience it was it felt real yeah yeah it felt like it was a real experience you have to justify anything to anybody look i mean no one truly understands and and i was there there's a reason why that is that album there's a reason why we're talking about it 25 years on that record shook everything up and i think that it's important to to get to a place now
that you uh you have an incredible career and you have an incredible family and by the way we're still here right yeah congrats man congrats i mean how how many times have we have we met and talked over the years i mean well into the to the at least 20. well yeah i was going to say close to 30 probably i love the idea of getting to the reality of it because you did and i give you this compliment
you did an incredible job of presenting your best and protecting the rest you you laid back and didn't whinge and didn't complain and didn't show how tough it was i mean this is a revelation to me i kind of figured over the years hinting that it went on well i remember walking down the street in this in san francisco around about end of end of 98 so two years after introducing came out and just after
uncle came out and it was somebody i had known for years fairly close with and they had this real joy in proclaiming to me or you know saying this line they said i'm starting to notice a real backlash against you oh so awful i can't even it's just so old it just i was like hey man well what's up oh you going to the show or whatever you know it was just we're met on the street walking to the same
time yeah and i hadn't seen him in like a year and he had started to kind of find his way into the industry and he he was like hey man the first thing he said was like hey man oh cool oh yeah i'm starting to notice a real backlash against you and i just kind of went well great all right i'll see you inside i mean i don't it's just i i i don't know i i don't have that in in me to say
something like that to somebody i and i also don't judge them but it it i remember in that moment i was dick in the moment i just kind of went well maybe i guess i kind of saw this coming a little bit and yeah just like any artist that i've followed for decades you have those peaks and you have those values thank god because you got to make bold creative decisions you could stand by
surely you can look back now with the body of work that you've created and the fact that you were on the verge of an 18-month tour that got cut short like like hundreds of others because of quarantine but to know that there are people waiting to see you again you can think now wow you know thank god you were actually able to regroup and become the artist you wanted to be and not the artist that
we wanted you to be i say that very deliberately right yes and i appreciate that um but there's there's no road map honestly and and um you just i mean i'm inspired by um actors of a certain age you know writers of a certain age there's no guarantees and you don't know where this is all headed and and when i say you i mean me or anybody and me yeah so i mean and i have always i don't know
where it comes from maybe it's being a child of divorce maybe it's been a product of i don't know suburbia in the 70s and 80s i have no idea where it comes from but i've just never been able to trust the good times you know when you live through stuff like that as as all of us have on some levels um i do think it made it it made me kind of be like all right you know this the pin could drop any day
yeah because there's two things that come from that in my experience personally and from from conversation one is that i don't know how old you are but i can guess probably around the same age as me you are searching for this sense of security at a time while you're trying to develop your own identity and it's taken away from you so nothing is ever safe again right it's about
survival at that point right you may as well just do this now yeah you may as well be at the beginning of time trying to find firewood or you'll freeze to death because you're a cave person right you know what i'm saying like it's like literally that base of an instinct but what you also get to do is you get to retreat from the reality of it and the good news is you get to make introducing and
develop a passion and throw yourself so deeply into it that without even realizing it you become so good people will get attracted to it the flip side of is at some point you do therapy and figure out what you left behind when you were 12. you know what i mean you got to go back and you got to answer those questions at some point but you got man you you found art right i am always going to
defer to those that inspired me because you know i can meet someone like premiere and be like um you know man you have no idea and they they're gonna you know they're gonna do what i do when people say that to me on the occasion that it happens i'll be like oh cool cool cool well so what are you doing you know they're not comfortable like having anybody put a bunch of stuff on
their shoulders about how great they are i'm not either and most of the great people that i've met that have inspired me they have a similar reluctance to acknowledge their impact and i just think that in in all i i can't speak for premier or large professor or whoever all the people that i've constantly name check throughout my career as being an influence is at a pivotal moment for me
but none of us think our best work is behind us we all think our next project is going to be the best you've ever done and if you don't believe that get out i think there's a problem and that's why to the extent that i've ever had reluctance to shine the light too brightly on my first record and some of it i think is a little bit overblown because it all has to do with a particular quote
in her magazine that got really overblown which one was it again it was basically you know imagine you and i chopping it up and we're having a good old time and we're playing music and you say to me um well what what do you think people who love introducing are going to say about this new record which was the outsider i in a moment of sort of unguarded uh feeling good yeah unguarded swag was
like they already have introducing which by the way oh hang on that has been repurposed and used in different ways by so many artists right you have to feel that way on a certain level and you're not saying my fans you're saying oh yeah my fans roll with me no no no here's the difference typically here here's the difference here's the difference i considered and still consider my fans who i
appreciate immensely um and respect i still consider my fans to be fans of the journey there's a lot of people out there who are fans of the album and that was it they weren't there before and they weren't there after it was that album and i can't control the mechanism of the way something clicks with the general public but there's a lot of moving parts none of which have to do with me or very few
yeah so i recognized that early on and and said okay there's going to be people that for them their preference would be that i make that record disappear and never never show my face again because that's how much they love that record any word out of my mouth is like nails on a chalkboard to them because it tampers with their memories of what that record is to them i get it i totally get it but with all
due respect to those people i still i'm not done i i i it was it was i cooked one meal yeah that's what i mean they loved that meal you became the artist you wanted to be not the artist everyone else wanted you to be right and that's and over time my quote unquote real fans understood that and and i knew that at a certain point i just needed to shut up and write it out and it took probably
i don't know six seven eight years i feel like um and that's not unusual either in the arc of this artist or that artist and i'm not trying to compare myself to anybody else but uh i study from those people and i i i'm always so grateful that they're there because i can look at somebody i name check constantly as someone like neil young who again 60s 70s 80s 90s 2000s you can
look and be like yeah people really weren't feeling him for this stretch and yeah he probably was a little bit too uh influenced by this and kind of but you one thing i would never personally say to an any artist is you shouldn't you shouldn't have done that you know what i mean who could ever say that like not everything is going to be a hit not everything is going to be
is going to connect you know uh the general public is more or less a straight wave and i find that i tend to be like this you know what i mean well i actually think that that's a tipping point into what you become and people trying to respect the fact that they like your new yeah so they're like i just want you to know i'm not just you're not just the introducing guy anymore i get that yeah
i get that they're do i get that that's why they're doing it it does make me sometimes wonder though because i mean again in this brave new world we're living in um sometimes i think to myself after an interview like damn i really should check out my wikipedia page because the questions were asked in a particular sequence that was exactly like the questions asked in a particular
sequence in the prior interview right and i mean that's what people do if you want to learn about an artist you you you go there or another similar resource and if something's in there that's a little off or a little like maybe embellished or something you're gonna have to answer to that forever i mean that's one of the beautiful things about this conversation is i'm so excited to have it because we talk
all the time whenever you release music and sometimes even when you don't we connect and we speak and i and i cherish that me too man thank you but but this i knew was gonna be like all right let's just pull it open because there was still so much i didn't know about that time it was a magical time yeah i mean for you to arrive in the uk with a record like that on the verge of this new labor promise
that ultimately turned out to be what it was but at the time was this glorious magical the uk is gonna lead the way in this new liberal wonka factory it's gonna be wonderful and you show up and then oasis it's like nebworth and radiohead have just dropped okay computer and the whole thing just feels like wild there was an optimism that if you weren't there in the uk at
the time it's hard to describe it's hard to understand and um yeah for us like and of course it was our age it was our time right i mean it's like oh mike d's in town he wants to go to wagamama let's uh okay cool and we're like walking in and the entire restaurant's turning around to look at us and our in our bathing ape yeah you know parkas and our you know it was like we were the cool
kids and i have to say i never felt like the cool kid i was just watching james and everybody else that was around his cliff that's what made you cooler it's like the worst part about it well whatever it was i i just you know when you're a particular age and you're you're making a mark i mean there's no greater feeling i mean i will always love that time i'll always love the feeling of
you know james was always living in these above his pay grade kind of like really nicely adorned flats with like a little garden out back and then i'd i just put my backpack on and go to the tube and go wherever to meet with wherever or be at the studio or do this or be there for that interview and yeah man it was it was incredible it was the and people would would always kind of ask about they
would try to bring up hendrix as one of the only other americans like there was a similarity in this in the arc at that time yeah and obviously i'm again not comparing on any level but it was there is an element of it that was already romantic to me just from knowing his career the album dropped and and had kind of immediate it made a wave in the uk and then it felt like about six months later that
wave came back to the states and everybody assumed i was english everybody assumed this assumed that and and there was an element of that that was fun that nobody really knew what who i was what i was i i the the one part i can't really reconcile is in my mind um at the time it seemed like when whenever people would talk about well like it's it's it stands alone there's nothing else
like it and i would kind of go well yeah there is i mean mantronics you know king of the beats like that set it off and then there's been instrumental hip-hop forever you know but again there's that duality of like kind of musicologist and and being able to look at my own stuff from an outside perspective i mean i i honestly don't know where certain aspects of it came from
no but but but i mean you know you are a vessel and every artist is a vessel and and you know you catch lightning and then and why would you sit down and and and turn that into a into an equation exactly yeah and and that respecting that frequency that that um which i i i love the concept of i i really hope it exists but um that you know jazz artists have talked about forever about the kind of god frequency
where artistic inspiration lives and you have to kind of have a calmness of mind to be able to access and an openness of heart to access i love that and um i guess one of the reasons i if i ever have come across as defensive about anything relating to unpleasant aspects of my career it's because i haven't wanted to taint that openness or damage my ability to be at peace with
all the decisions i've made because i want again in 2021 or 2022 to be able to sit down and be able to access that that ancestor voice that speaks to all artists you know what i mean and you can feel when it's not accessible and you can feel when it's you don't have the passcode and you can't get through and you don't you know the the clouds and the the rays from the sun are not conducive
to you receiving that frequency you can feel it and when i sit down to work and that happens that'll instantly put you in check every time because you that's that's not a good sign buddy like you got to get back to wherever you know that that humility or or whatever it is that you haven't been doing enough of to get to find that frequency because it's addicting and it's powerful you