feature
Indie rock shows are often the province of, as LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said in the band’s “Tonite,” “the hobbled veteran of the disc shop inquisition” — the graying, largely male species of armchair critics who listen to Sirius XMU and love to lord their music discoveries over those less informed. Not so with Car Seat Headrest: The Seattle-based band’s concerts attract a fascinating cross-section of fans. Yes, the geezers are there, but so are the moshers, frat bros, furries, and — lending hope to the future of rock’n’roll — millennials, Gen Z and even a smattering of Gen Alpha teens letting their freak flags fly.
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Car Seat Headrest’s music speaks to this multitude of generations in part because, musically, they have synthesized their many individual influences — past and present — into a sui generis sound. The band’s leader and primary lyric-writer, Will Toledo, grew up listening to his parents’ folk and country albums, as well as classic rock, r&b and soul. CSH’s guitar genius Ethan Ives lately has been listening to Beethoven, Pentagram and King Crimson. As a unit, the quartet, rounded out by drummer Andrew Katz and bassist Seth Dalby,’ have played and toured together for the last 10 years or so — circa the release of 2016’s breakthrough album, Teens of Denial, and in this time they have achieved a virtuosity that stands out among their peers.
Trending on Billboard
Lyrically, Toledo has largely avoided pop and rock tropes, like romantic love, sex and heartbreak (although drugs often figure into his songs). He prefers to gouge deeper into tough, unsolvable existential topics: alienation, familial relationships and the melancholia that comes with growing up in the digital miasma of the 21st century.
These outsized talents and a sizable amount of ambition — long a CSH trait — all come together impressively on the band’s first fully collaborative album, The Scholars, a rock opera that is destined to stand with landmark recordings from previous decades: The Who‘s Quadrophenia (1973), Pink Floyd‘s The Wall (1979); Drive-By Truckers‘ Southern Rock Opera (2001) and Green Day‘s American Idiot (2004).
The Scholars, which Matador will release on May 2, stands apart from those other epic recordings in that it is more of an existential exploration than a strictly conceptual one. It’s a musically rich story propelled by a succession of characters — some who interact and some who don’t. (Ives compares it to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film, Magnolia.) The album is set in and around the fictional Parnassus University, populated by numerous characters — Beolco, Devereaux, Artemis and Rosa, among them — and narrated by The Chanticleer, a Greek symbol of courage and grandeur, and in Old French translates to “to sing clearly.” The antique-sounding names and places seem to be a conceit to show that past is prologue. Even when songs allude to cancel culture (“Equals”) and societal and environmental decay (“Planet Desperation”), these are not new problems. They’re just disseminated now by social media, not a Greek chorus. It’s the kind of album that will resonate with young folks forced to move back in with their parents because of the economy and the parents who are housing them.
The Scholars requires a certain amount of commitment. Three of the songs, “Gethsemane,” “Reality” and “Planet Desperation” break the 10-minute mark, with the last of the three clocking in at 18:53. And yet, the lion’s share of the songs come with sticky hooks that build and progress in a way that belies their length. “Gethsemane,” which approaches 11 minutes in length, is even getting a good amount of play on Sirius XMU, and the album’s pinnacle, “Reality,” in which Ives and Toledo share vocals — they liken it to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” — could easily go on beyond its 11:14 run time.
Dalby, Ives, Katz and Toledo came together on Zoom to discuss the making of The Scholars, the ideas behind the music and lyrics, their upcoming tour and their side projects. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Sonically, The Scholars reminds me a bit of David Bowie’s Blackstar in that there’s such a symbiotic feeling to the music. You feel that you’re inside it. How did you guys achieve that?
Will Toledo: I don’t recall everything about the Blackstar sessions, but I feel like they probably worked and jammed together. I think the musicians he recruited were already kind of a unit, and they were used to improvising together and collaborating. You have that symbiosis, because that freeform mesh was already there.
For us, some of the material came out of solo demos from me and Ethan and everybody else, but a lot of it resulted from us just jamming in the studio together. We’ve had ten years of being a band, and mostly our opportunities for jamming were limited to soundcheck when we were not ready to soundcheck or practices when we were not ready to practice. This was the first opportunity where we would go in and spend a whole practice session just jamming. We really wanted to get loose with one another, fall into comfortable patterns and just go wherever the music was taking us. That resulted in an interchange — a more distinct weaving together of our voices. Whereas past records were more about solo material brought in to be played by the band.
Ethan Ives: We have a lot of musical influences in common, but we also each listen to our own individual styles of music. On this album, what you’re hearing is that we had a directive for each song. It was okay, this song needs to go to this place or touch on this theme. Part of the process this time was about throwing that to the room and then playing the flavors of music that we’re [each] familiar with to build out the song. So, maybe there was more of a deeper well of stuff getting pulled on in this one.
Toledo: What I see in myself and how I play into the band — I’m very sensitive to sensory experiences and social experiences and I do tend to automatically hone in on, here’s the part I like. That kind of comes naturally to me. I’m always picking up stuff as I go, and thinking, “This doesn’t make me so comfortable.” Or, “Ooh, I want to change that more.” What I’ve had to work on more is patience and not judging stuff right away. Because especially in a jam you want to let stuff build organically. Really, for this record I was just trying to come in and listen to how the other three were intersecting, and just as far as what I was playing, push that and weave that together. I feel like my strength is more as an arranger than as a sort of composer from nothing.
Will, are the lyric credits all yours?
Toledo: Most of them. Pretty much anything that Ethan sings lead on he wrote, and for songwriting credits we just do a four-man split — that was what we agreed on going in, because of the way that we were creating this music. For most of the songs, I would take them home and write lyrics, especially for pieces that Ethan had come to the band with. He was developing the lyrics there as well.
Before Making a Door Less Open, a lot of your songs sounded like they could be pieces of a rock opera. Is this something you’ve had in mind for a long time?
Toledo: Growing up with records like Dark Side of the Moon and Pink Floyd in general and The Who, I was always aware of the possibility of a concept album or a rock opera. I always shied away from the idea of doing it because it’s a pretty daunting concept and I didn’t want to sacrifice the song-by-song quality of things to make some sort of narrative. After Making a Door Less Open, though, that was an approach where each song was really its own world, and the record came out a little disjointed because of that. You have to magnify with a microscope each one of those songs to appreciate it. That’s an interesting approach, but I wanted a more cohesive flow to an album.
So, I felt more inclined to go in the opposite direction. I landed on a midway approach, where we weren’t going to force a narrative, but have this idea where each song is a character. That way, we can still preserve the integrity of each song and feel good about the ones we put on the album. But then there’s that inherent narrative quality that comes when you’re seeing each character come out on stage.
Car Seat Headrest
Courtesy Photo
How would you synopsize The Scholars?
Ives: Part of what I feel a sense of accomplishment about and what I feel is successful about the album is that it’s my favorite type of conceptual record as a listener. Which is that the narrative is not so rigid that it has an authorial narrative interpretation. Pink Floyd’s The Wall has a very specific meaning. That’s not a weakness, but it is a very particular style of concept. I tend more towards albums that have conceptual threads but are more interpretable or more based on abstractions. We probably all will have a different version of what we think the album represents, but I think of it as tracking the lives of a bunch of different characters to amalgamate a greater life/death/rebirth cycle. It’s a cycle that could be seen as one person’s life, but it’s really a series of different story beats made from moments in different people’s lives, in a Magnolia sort of way.
Toledo: My interpretation wouldn’t be too different. Like Ethan, I prefer concept albums that aren’t so rigid that it has to be this plot. I was hoping for a record where you could put it on and not know that it was a concept album, or that there were these characters or this backstory, and still have a full experience. We wanted the music to speak for itself. As far as selling it to someone who needs a description, I would say it’s about weaving together the past and the present and having these young characters — who maybe don’t know a lot about the past and have problems that are more specific to our times — walking through these patterns that are quite ancient or timeless. I was pulling a lot from folk song tradition in crafting these characters and their struggles. In folk songs, you can see what people have been talking about for centuries and centuries and what really has sticking power.
Seth Dalby: I think Ethan and Will definitely have a more concrete idea of where each character lives and what their struggles are. For me it’s just a place to get lost. The setting is obviously like a fantasy school, and then your imagination goes wild with these characters.
Andrew Katz: You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now for these answers. I’m not a guy that listens to lyrics. I listen to syllables and music. Asking me what an album means — you’re asking the wrong guy.
Toledo (to Katz): What would you say to yourself, if you had never heard this record, to say you should listen to it?
Katz: I would say it sounds epic. I go off of feel and how the words roll off the tongue. Even when I’m listening to songs by System of the Down, for example. They do a great job of just making s–t sound cool. I have no idea what any of those songs mean — what they’re supposed to be about. They just sound cool. I would say our album achieved that, too. It’s epic.
Will, you told Rolling Stone that The Scholars was an “exercise in empathy.” When I listen to the album, I hear a search for identity that comes with extreme sadness and pain. Does that sound right?
Toledo: Yeah, absolutely. One of the early concepts that I was working off is — it’s all these different characters, but it is also on a more spiritual level, one character and their progression through life, and even life and death. But maybe the life and death of an identity. I see this shaking off of the old and reaching towards the new, and there’s a lot of darkness and pain that comes along with that. You have to walk into the darkness to find out more about who you are. I kind of see each song as a step along that way.
Will, when the band performed the album at the Bitter End in February, you dedicated the song “Reality” to Brian Wilson. You called him “a prophet who lives in the darkness.” Ethan, you read a note about what you described as a generational divide. It sounded like you were talking about the Boomers and Gen X, but you all are millennials. Could you both elaborate?
Ives: Those things got all jumbled up for me in my upbringing because my parents were so deeply hippie that I feel like I skip a generation. I don’t want to give the impression that the whole song is purely about complaining about Boomers, but it’s a song that I picture as the main thrust of the character who wakes up one day and is like, “How did I get here? Why am I here? Why is this happening to me?” And then tries to trace back the chain of events that led things to turn out this way. And maybe there’s some regret and some reproach for other people or for an earlier version of yourself.
Will and I each wrote our respective lyric segments in that song, and I always thought of it as a “Comfortably Numb” vibe, where one singer takes one narrative point of view, and one takes another. We’re coming at the song from two different angles and meet in the middle where the emotional core of the character that I just described fits really well with the figures that Will was referencing in the lyrics. Artists like Syd Barrett or Brian Wilson, who experienced so much brilliance in their lives and then probably at some point just woke up late one morning and were like, “What happened to me?”
Toledo: Like Ethan said, we wrote our own parts coming at it from different perspectives. With the line, “We still sang songs and made merry, but deep down we knew something was wrong,” I got the sense that my voice would be as the Chanticleer character. So, when Ethan is singing, you have the voice of those people expressing this dissatisfaction and the feeling of, where did we go wrong. The Chanticleer character became for me this artist figure who has chosen to elevate the struggles of the people and, as artists sometimes do, chase the spotlight. The burden that comes with that is you have to dig into the hearts of people and find a deeper truth. I have these two choruses where they’re coming to the Chanticleer and saying it’s not enough. We need more color. We need more life. Then in the second chorus it’s too much. We can’t take it anymore.
The role of the artist —especially that Syd Barrett/Brian Wilson type — is a bit of a toxic one, because culture really elevates those who fly very close to the sun and get burnt. It lets them suffer for the sake of being that preacher. I have a conflicted relationship with it, because I loved these artists and the idea of that kind of artist when I was a kid. And I played my part in elevating that idea of artistry. Now I try to find other models that are more stable. But there is a basic truth where, if you want to dig and try to speak those deeper truths, you do get burned.
Your parents were in the audience at The Bitter End. A lot of Car Seat’s music — I’m thinking of “There Must Be More Than Blood” and on this album, “Lady Gay Approximately” — have parental or familial themes.
Toledo: Yeah, on this record specifically, but even beyond that when it comes to writing about love, I’m just not that interested in writing about romantic love and partner love. That is really almost the only type of love that you hear when you think about a pop song. I look towards other traditions, and especially in country and gospel tradition, there’s a lot more of singing about parent-child relationships. That seemed like a more meaningful thing to me to write about.
“Lady Gay Approximately” is based on a folk song called Lady Gay which is about a mother and her children. I was also looking towards the bible for inspiration and in Genesis, a lot of content is about parents and children; fathers and sons; mothers and sons. This model of love is the one that we know throughout all our lives. So, it seems like it’s more relevant and important to write about. And that became a focal point of this record.
Do you guys have any thoughts of staging this as a rock opera? I don’t know if any of you saw Illinoise, the dance musical built around Sufjan Stevens’ music. Also, I could see this being made into a movie like the animated film Flow. Given the love that the furry culture has for you, I could see the director of that film [Gints Zilbalodis] doing something fantastic with the album.
Katz: Hey, if the director of Flow wants to make a movie about our album, yeah, for sure. That would be great.
Toledo: I’m usually the brake presser as far as opportunities, because there are plenty of things that we can do, and it’s more of a question of, “What do we want to take on this year? How many things can we take on before things start splitting off?”
Right now, we’re happy and we’re busy. We’re practicing for our show, and we are going to be playing this record live, but it’s just going to be the band and some lights. There’s not going to be any elaborate staging beyond that. We figure the music speaks for itself. We would rather have something simple where we can really feel like we’re comfortable onstage. With [Making A Door Less Open], we upped the theatrics, we upped the costumery, and it was kind of a drag. There was a lot to worry about every night — a lot that can go wrong. We all prefer to keep it as simple as possible on our end and give it a better chance of being good and replicable every night.
Beyond that, we’ve got a Patreon. Every month, we’re putting out content there. I’m trying to write two new songs every month and put them out. As far as more content for Scholars, more adaptations of it, as Andrew said the right offer might come along and then we’d consider it. But as far as actively pursuing it, we’re happy with the workload we’ve got at the moment. I would say, “Let people sit with the album, come up with their own images of it — and if something else comes out of it, let it be organic.”
Are you going to play the whole album on the tour?
Toledo: It will be more or less the whole album. We might skip a song or two, but the idea is to keep that flow. Practicing for the Bitter End and earlier, we all just agreed that this album has a good flow from start to finish. It feels good as an album and it feels good as a show.
When I go to your shows, I just see so many different types and ages of people. Why do you think you appeal to such a wide array of music lovers?
Toledo: That’s one thing that’s always really pleased me about our live shows. There’s always a big mix. I think it started out with the way that I approach music. I didn’t grow up enjoying modern pop music. I trended heavily towards what my parents were listening to — so ‘60s music, older country and folk music. That gave me a backbone musically that differentiated the early Car Seat Headrest music from what other people were doing. It was a little more isolated, and I think, because of that, it took several years before it started to find an audience. Younger people connected with the emotional content, which was as a young person writing lyrics and content. I was expressing stuff that they could relate to as well.
And then, as we became a band, rather than homogenize and do something that appealed to one audience, we were all bringing different stuff to the table. We’ve always just had that approach of: cast a wide net, see what the overlap is, see what we can all agree on. And then that diversity of opinion and approach creates music that resonated with a lot of different people.
Most you have released side projects. Ethan, is there a new Toy Bastard album in the works?
Ives: There’s one that came out last summer, The War, that I’m still repping to people. I worked really hard on it and was very pleased with it. I worked with Jack Endino [Pacific Northwest producer of Nirvana, Soundgarden, L7] a little bit. He engineered a portion of the tracks, and he was fantastic. You can tell the songs that he engineered because they have a special flavor that only he can bring.
Katz: I’m working on a new 1 Trait Danger album. Who knows when it will be out? I’ve got nine songs done, but I’ve got to meet with Will when he’s ready and get him to orchestrate the story. Will’s job is to create the narrative with the crazy songs that I make.
Dalby: I don’t know if mine is ever going to be out, but it will be finished at some point.
Ives: I feel like you’ll finish it and then just put it on a hard drive and lock it away.
Katz: No one is ever hearing that music.
What are you guys listening, reading or watching right now that moves you?
Ives: I’ve been listening to a lot more classical music. A lot of the late Beethoven string quartets but then mixing them up with listening to a lot of Pentagram and King Crimson.
Toledo: I’ve been a little scarce on consuming music. I just realized that my life was kind of surrounded by movies and TV and music. Lately I’ve been trying to just cut back and enjoy silence and whatever sounds are in the sphere that I’m in. And just talking to people really. I mainly listen to our own music because we go in and practice it. Or writing and practicing the new material and putting it out on Patreon.
Do you guys ever talk in terms of a five-year plan?
Katz: No, but I like where your head is at. I see myself in a huge mansion on the water. It’s a pipe dream, but that’s where I see myself.
Ives: I feel like we have our version of that, and then the way that music and the music industry works, we always end up having a completely different thought about it 12 months later.
Toledo: For us, five years is baically an album cycle — so where we’re at in the cycle is where we’re at in the five-year plan. We don’t discuss it that often, because it is what it is. Right now, we’re basically on the final year of the Scholars cycle — maybe another two years — but it’s more about seeing where we’re at and what work we’ve got to get done.
Ray Vaughn has arrived at New York’s Billboard office for the second time in just over a week. He previously popped in and played a few tracks off his first official release with TDE, The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu, before flying out to continue his first-ever project rollout.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
As Vaughn settles in the second time around, his voice is gruff, worn from rapping, recording, interviewing, and flat-out existing. Regardless of the physical wear-and-tear, he’s chatty, in high spirits, and devoid of exhaustion. When asked if he’s feeling winded at all, he says with a laugh, “I don’t wanna go back to that f—in’ car.”
The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu is a product of years of strenuous grinding. Born in Long Beach, California, Vaughn was raised by a family of local rappers; he says his uncle nearly signed a deal with DMX before he “crashed the f—k out,” and his mother went by the rap moniker Sassy Black, hosting “Freestyle Friday” sessions at their house for friends and family.
Trending on Billboard
Vaughn’s earliest indicator that rap could be in his future came to him during those sessions in his living room. When he’d spit, people would listen. He locked in to rapping almost immediately, and at 15, Vaughn’s reputation had made the rounds in his community. A few labels even came calling, including Def Jam.
“My mom kept blowing meetings,” Vaughn says. “She just kept being like, ‘Oh, you’ll go next time.’ We was already so thorough, she didn’t even know. We was already robbing houses, shooting at people, we was doing s—t that could have got us real f—kin sentences. I was moreso like, ‘Let me go!’”
His mom had fallen down the rabbit hole of early YouTube conspiracy theories, believing the Illuminati had infiltrated major labels like Def Jam. No matter how hard he pushed, she always said no. After one particular nasty fight, she threw Vaughn out and he turned to the streets to make ends meet while still clutching onto his rap dreams.
Success trickled in and out of Vaughn’s life: he went viral a few times for various freestyles, but they didn’t lead to anything concrete. A promising moment came in 2019, when he ran into Ye’s cousin Ricky Anderson, who was managing G.O.O.D Music at the time, at a New Year’s Eve party. After Vaughn stealthily queued up his own songs to play at the party, Anderson suggested he meet with Ye face-to-face.
“He’s crazy, but he’s a genius,” Vaughn said of his meeting with Ye. The conversation went well, and Vaughn penned a few songs for Ye before arranging a meeting about a label deal. On the day of the meeting, however, Vaughn showed up to an empty room. He never spoke with Ye or the G.O.O.D. Music camp again.
“That same day I said to my manager, ‘Bro I’m still sleeping in my car, I don’t know what the f—k I’m doing!’” Vaughn recalled. His manager brought up an opportunity to record a song with an artist who was trying to get Jay Rock on as an additional feature. Two weeks later, Vaughn received a call from Top Dawg Entertainment CEO Anthony Tiffith.
“I hung up on him — I didn’t know what he sounded like, so I thought it was a joke,” Vaughn remembers. Tiffith called back, invited him to Interscope Records for a sitdown, and the rest was history.
After Vaughn’s first TDE project dropped on Friday (Apr. 25), the rapper spoke about it with Billboard.
Just to clarify, this is a mixtape and not an album.
Yes. I never wanted to call nothin’ an album if it wasn’t an album. I always was like, “With my first album, I wanna go crazy.” I’m very, very careful about calling something an album. That s—t counts. You could have 1,000 mixtapes and flop, but if you have an album and it flops? I know that’s something internally that’s gonna scratch my soul.
You don’t waste a bar on this mixtape. How did you approach writing for this project, and how do you approach writing in general?
Just make sure you keep it full of integrity. That’s the lost art form, period. Some records I don’t have bars on, it’s just a message, like ‘Pac. He didn’t have metaphors in every song. He was just very direct, and said what needed to be said, and you felt it.
I feel like nowadays we got so many people who punch in. It’s not even a cohesive thought. What is that verse about? What is this song about? Who are you talking to? Who is the audience? I still believe in that art form. If I rap this a cappella, does this s—t make sense? It’s like poetry. If you can’t say it a cappella and it [doesn’t] makes sense, it’s like rambling.
Now that you’re officially entering the game, how do you feel about your place in rap?
Once I turn into the star I’m supposed to be, where other people see the star that I am, the influence will come after. Like Kendrick [Lamar], the fact that he’s making music that slaps, but it’s still got some conscience to it. People wanna follow that because they’re like, “Oh, he’s talkin’ about something.”
Outside of the Drake and Kendrick situation, it does feel like mainstream rap is heading away from lyrics. What are your thoughts on the more party-oriented rap?
We need those type of artists too! It’s a talent in being succinct. [Starts singing]”Soulja Boy off in this oh, watch me crank it, watch me roll, watch me crank dat Soulja Boy, Then Superman dat oh.” That s—t is hard to make for people who actually write lyrics, and nobody wants to feel like they’re being preached to all the time.
When you were writing songs like “DOLLAR menu,” how did you toe that line, to make sure you weren’t being too preachy?
I feel like there’s a very thin line between being preachy and delivering a message with wittiness. I have to change lines sometimes. I’m just speaking from my experiences, mostly. This is me and how I look at it from my perspective. I don’t want people to put me in a box with Kendrick. When Cole made “Grippy” with Cash Cobain, people tried to cook him. If [Cole] had been somebody else, it’d be like, “Oh this song is hard.” The expectation for his lyrical content is set so high that if he dumbs it down too low, then they be like, “What the f—k are you doing?” So they don’t even get to have fun.
With that in mind, what are you hoping to communicate with The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu?
I’m just perfecting a pepperoni pizza before I say I have wings, salads and calzones. That is my pepperoni pizza.
On songs like “FLAT Shasta” and “Cemetery Lanterns,” how do you revisit such traumatic memories and not get bogged down by it? How do you make sure the resulting art is authentic?
I just tell it like it is — exactly like it is. I’m in a good space. I’m signed to a f—king label that’s at the f—king peak of their career. I got nothing to complain about right now. Reflecting? That’s easy.
There’s a lot of soul-baring on the project. Do you ever worry you’re revealing too much for a first mixtape?
There were songs we moved out of the way because they were too heavy. I don’t want to go too crazy, because I want people to actually listen, but I also want people to know that if you listen to it and feel something? You just witnessed the super power.
Shane Boose says that, if a piece of music can be described as “alternative” or “indie,” he’s probably going to enjoy it. “My favorite band of all time is Radiohead,” Boose, who records as Sombr, tells Billboard. “And I’m a big fan of Jeff Buckley, Phoebe Bridgers, The 1975. I listen to a ton of alternative music — it’s my genre.”
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Those influences help explain why Sombr’s two fast-rising hit singles, “Back to Friends” and “Undressed,” have not only exploded on streaming services as crossover pop hits, but have also minted the 19-year-old singer-songwriter at rock and alternative platforms that have been starving for fresh new talent. On this week’s Hot 100, “Back to Friends” leaps up 14 spots to a new peak of No. 56, while “Undressed” jumps 12 spots to No. 84; meanwhile, “Back to Friends” hits the top 10 of the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart for the first time, bumping up to No. 9 with “Undressed” close behind at No. 13.
Sombr has been on the road over the past few weeks opening for Daniel Seavey in the U.S. — watching each day as his streaming totals grow (through Apr. 17, “Back to Friends” had earned 40.7 million official on-demand streams, while “Undressed” had earned 19.5 million streams, according to Luminate) and his crowd sizes swell.
Trending on Billboard
“They 100 percent break my brain,” he says of the streaming totals. As for the crowds, “You don’t usually get to see it happening in real time, increasing every show, but being able to see that has just put it into perspective. When I’ve had moments in previous years, they’ve never been like this. And I’ve never gotten to visualize it while it was happening in real time.”
Boose grew up on the Lower East Side and attended the prestigious LaGuardia High School, where he studied vocals while tinkering with GarageBand and Logic in his bedroom. “I made the first few songs in a more shoegaze vein, and most of those songs aren’t even out,” he says. “And then I made the song ‘Caroline’ after listening to Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago album, and I’d like to think that’s the first good song I ever made.”
Released in mid-2022, “Caroline” is indeed a sparse, wrenched folk song that Boose posted to TikTok before going to bed one night, and woke up the next morning to find thousands of reactions. He dropped out of high school, signed a deal with Warner Records in early 2023, then spent roughly two years trying to get lightning to strike for a second time with a string of singles, to little avail.
Sombr, who still writes and produces all of his songs, says that he never got impatient while awaiting his breakthrough following his major label signing. “I was just making music,” he says, “and I’m a really hard worker. I like to think that, if you really put in the hours and manifest what you want, it will happen.” On the day that he made “Back to Friends” in his bedroom, he played the finished chorus back, and felt that, with this song, it was finally going to happen for him.
Released last December, “Back to Friends” is a swirl of shakers, dramatic piano chords, fuzzed-out vocals full of post-hookup anxieties and harmonies that lob out rhetorical questions on the chorus. Along with March’s “Undressed,” a ghostly warble-along with an equally outsized chorus, Sombr has reinvented his sound over the course of two songs, moving on from the hushed singles released post-“Caroline” and toward slick, slightly swaggering alt-pop.
“I think they gave me a platform to make more upbeat music,” he says of the two tracks. “Before ‘Back to Friends,’ all my music was very ballad-y — there was nothing with a beat. I was so tired of that. I feel like this is a lot more free, as far as the music I want to create. And I wanted my show to be more exciting. I didn’t want to just do ballads forever.”
After wrapping up his tour with Seavey last week, Sombr will next hit the road with Nessa Barrett, joining for a month-long European run that kicks off on May 26 in Dublin. Earlier this week, however, Sombr announced a fall headlining tour across North America that will start on Sept. 30 — and thanks to the surging momentum from “Back to Friends” and “Undressed,” pre-sale tickets apparently sold out within seconds. (“The response has been insane,” Sombr posted on Instagram. “I hear you all. I am working on upgrades and new dates. Stay posted.”)
And while Sombr says that a proper debut album is “definitely on the horizon,” he’s trying to savor this singular moment. “The last show in New York, it was the loudest it’s ever been, and I got it in the pit,” he says before letting out a quick laugh. “It’s getting wild, and I love it. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Wiz Khalifa delivered.
15 years after he dropped his classic Blog Era mixtape Kush & Orange Juice, the multi-platinum rapper decided to go back to his roots on its sequel tape and tap back into the sound that made him one of stoner rap’s most important rappers. He also brought the gang back together as Cardo, Sledgren and his stoner-in-crime Curren$y all contributed like they did during that first cypher back in April of 2010.
Kush & Orange Juice 2 also features the likes of Gunna, Mike WiLL Made-It, Ty Dolla $ign, Don Toliver, Larry June, Conductor Williams, and legends in Juicy J, DJ Quik, and Max B, among others. And while those acts are diverse in terms of their own individual sounds, Wiz was able to have them fit the story he wanted to tell and he did a pretty good job. It’s rare if not damn near impossible for a sequel to be as good as a classic, but Wiz did a pretty good job. Clocking in at 23 tracks and 77 minutes long, the Kush & OJ sequel is the perfect soundtrack for that cousin walk on Easter Sunday — as you and your family celebrate not only the resurrection, but 4/20 as well.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
And as he rolled out the much anticipated project, Khalifa went on an already-memorable run of freestyles that started last November with “First YN Freestyle.” Hopefully more rappers will hop on that wave, and give fans more music that feels fun and low-stakes.
Trending on Billboard
Billboard talked with Wiz about why he decided to take that approach, and about a bunch of other things. Check out our chat below and be sure to go run up that Kush + Orange Juice 2 this weekend.
You’ve been on a crazy run lately with these freestyles. Can you talk about why you decided to go that route?
Really just by seeing the reaction of my fans and the people who support me when I started to get into the mode of promoting Kush & Orange Juice 2, and really visualizing what that was going to feel like for everybody else. I wanted to make it an experience, and not something that just dropped overnight and then went away. So, me doing the freestyles was kind of a way to write that narrative and to get everybody on board so they understand what to expect and it got a great reaction. So, naturally, I just kept going. And it’s something that I like to do just for fun.
Did the freestyles help spark something creatively in you?
I was already pretty much done with the album by the time I did the freestyles. But I think anytime I’m able to just play around and see what people enjoy, it gives me a sense of what to do next or what to continue doing. So, it definitely served its purpose when it comes to that.
You and other Blog Era peers like J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and Drake have crossed over into the mainstream. So, now that you’ve achieved a certain level of success, does that mean that you plan on still playing the major-label game, or are you gonna go back to just making what you feel like making?
I think it all just kind of comes together, and it’s really about the fans and what they want and what people are are tuning into, and just me knowing that people digest my music for the way that I do it. It allows me to be free, but it also opens up a lot of different opportunities for me to put that in other places. So, it’s a beginning of a wave that could, you know, go on for however long.
Why do you think rappers have moved away from doing freestyles and stuff like that?
I think because clearances and a lot of people want their their stuff on the biggest platform. It’s hard to monetize a freestyle and if you put a lot of energy into it, a lot of people want it to go far, so that value has been missing. It takes certain artists to push it and to show that the value of it isn’t gone. It’s not really where you’re aiming to put these at. The people and the listeners, and their ears are there, and they’re going to discover it. I think people have to re-understand that and reimagine that.
So much has changed since you came in the game. If you were an up and coming rapper today, how would you approach your career?
I would approach it the same way. A lot of the younger artists or personalities, they know who their fan base is. They know who they’re talking to, and they reach out to them, and that’s what dictates what they do or what their next moves are. And a lot of artists are afraid of that, but there’s a lot of power and a lot of value in knowing who your consumers are and the people who want the best from you and aiming what you do towards them. And that would be my advice, or that would be what I would do. That’s what I’m doing now, is just focusing on the people who I know support and are expecting this, and really just making the experience for them.
One person that’s carving out a unique lane for themselves is streamer and producer PlaqueBoyMax. You were on his stream recently. How was that experience?
Yeah, it was cool working with Max, and that was the first time I had made a song live on somebody else’s stream. And even just with that platform of him being, you know, with FaZe and them having the reach that they do. That’s a whole different fanbase than the people who are used to me, and it was good to be able to win those people over, show them what my talent actually is, and work with somebody for the first time and create something in front of everybody that’s just super fun and super cool to me.
You floated the idea of doing a full tape with him towards the end. Do you think that can happen down the line?
I wanted to do it, but I feel like he’s already doing it, and he’s doing it in his way, where he’ll benefit off of it, which is cool with me. I’m always down anytime. If he needs me, then he’ll hit me.
What can fans expect from Kush & Orange Juice 2?
They can expect good smokin’ music, good chillin’ music, good motivational music, and good ridin’ around with the homies music. It’s definitely for the people who understand it. And it’s not just about the music, it’s about the experiences that you have with it. So, the more you listen to it and live with it, or even if it’s your first time, when you listen to it and live with it, it’s gonna change a lot. I’m really happy with that. I’m really confident in that, and I’m just really excited for everybody to experience that.
Are you performing anywhere on 4/20?
Yeah, I’m gonna be performing at Red Rocks in Colorado.
I interviewed Curren$y a couple months ago, and I had asked him if he has any 420 rituals and he said he doesn’t really have any because he’s always working. I’m assuming that’s the same for you.
Yeah, pretty much, especially at this point. A lot of people come out and visit us on those days, even if it’s family from the East Coast or an artist or whatever. They usually want to come kick it with us, so that’s usually fun. I get to see a lot of people who I just really enjoy smoking with, like Berner. It is work, but for me personally, I try to roll at least an abnormally big joint or two, and I usually smoke more dabs that day than I normally do as well.
I wanted to ask you what your favorite strains were, but on Club Shay Shay, you said you’ve been smoking your own strain exclusively for about 10 years now.
Oh yeah, it’s definitely Khalifa Kush always for like almost 12 now.
What is that like, though — having your own strain and not really having to pay for it anymore?
It’s a blessing. I don’t know if I necessarily knew that it was going to be this way. We always hoped and wished that it would be this way — and knew that it was, you know, beneficial for everybody — but to actually live in an era where we can do this… It’s awesome. I’m grateful and I’m taking full advantage.
You also mentioned the Smoke Olympics. What would be some of the events if you were to put that together?
There would be a rolling competition. I’m bringing the origami, I’m bringing the samurai skills. What else? You have to hit, like, a bong. You’ll have to make a bong out of something. You could choose what you have to make a bong out of. You have to last a certain amount of rounds, too — so as we keep smoking, there’s no tapping out. Yeah, we’ll start there.
I ran into Conductor Williams recently and he was beaming about the way you approached “Billionaires” with Ty Dolla $ign. What was it about that particular beat that caught your attention out of the pack of beats that he sent?
I appreciate it. I feel like I always gravitated towards his production because of how soulful it is and just how musically inclined he is. You could tell he knows a lot about music in general. My approach is very specific to what I know my people are gonna f—k with. And I think when I got into that pocket, it was nostalgic, but it was also something that people never expected, or ever knew that they would enjoy.
I think that combination right there kind of makes discovering some new music worth it — and that’s what people need now, and to be able to do that with people who I’m cool with, and got in my phone and I can hit at whatever time, and be like, “Yo, send me some beats,” and we could just come up with something legendary off the bat. That’s real fun for me.
You’ve gotten into martial arts like over the years like Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu. How important has that been for you?
It’s part of my everyday life as much as music is and I’m passionate about it the same way I am about my music, and I’ve been doing it for seven years now, and I feel like I’m still learning a lot of new things, and it’s still fun and it’s interesting. It’s not a chore or a job or I don’t even have a real end goal when it comes to it, so it’s fun to be on a journey and have something that I that I enjoy and that challenges me and also makes me better.
Has it helped your lungs be stronger too?
Yeah, 100 percent. My cardio is crazy, and it helped me learn how to control my breathing better and just being in good shape in general. Being able to function and and move athletically as I get older, because I’m 37 now, so I’m moving into my 40s. The older that we get the less athletic some of us get. But for me, it’s a lifetime thing of I’m always going to have this type of movement.
The Billboard staff’s list of the 100 best songs of 2005 highlights the macro-trends in modern rock from 20 years ago: veterans like Green Day and Foo Fighters were still scoring mega-hits, relative newcomers like The Killers and Coldplay were coming into their own, and bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance were helping emo reach the masses. These bands headlined arenas, earned radio play and were constant fixtures on MTV. For a generation scouring a pre-smartphone Internet, however, there was an alternative to the rock bands that were already labeled “alternative.”
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Indie rock existed for decades before 2005, but the mid-point of the 2000s was the year that blogs started becoming more ubiquitous, their left-of-center recommendations started reaching wider audiences, and artists that previously wouldn’t have believed that they could cater to large audiences suddenly started playing to them. Thanks to a “Best New Music” Pitchfork declaration or a prominent print-magazine writeup, the floodgates would suddenly open for artists signed to indie labels. This was still a few years before the mainstream fully began intermingling with the indie scene – by way of Jay-Z infamously showing up to Grizzly Bear’s Brooklyn show, but in the meantime, several artists saw their profiles balloon and their crowds swell, thanks to some of the most daring and thought-provoking indie albums released that decade.
Trending on Billboard
To celebrate Billboard’s 2005 Week, nine indie artists opened in separate interviews about the year that their lives transformed thanks to a breakthrough album release.
These artists discussed their memories of the indie scene in 2005, shared pinch-me moments about their unplanned success reflected on how the music industry evolved in the following years, and offered advice for independent artists hoping to break big today. Read through all of the conversations below.
(Ed. note: These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.)
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Philadelphia group’s self-titled debut album, a collection of joyful indie rock arrangements fronted by Alec Ounsworth’s yelping voice, was heralded as a DIY sensation by critics upon its release. Ounsworth looks back on the band’s out-of-nowhere launch, and how his feelings about the first CYHSY album have evolved.
It seemed like people were paying attention as we were playing live shows from 2003 to the album release in 2005. I was confident in what we were doing, but I didn’t think, “Everybody’s gonna love this.” I just generally don’t have much of a point of view regarding what people find attractive in music, so I was surprised that anybody showed up.
You never really know what’s gonna come of what you’re doing — you try and be honest with yourself and your work. I’m a bit of a music snob, I mean, and I was just trying to do something that stood up to my standards, you know? I really like kind of haphazard stuff — like a lot of bands, one of my major influences was Velvet Underground and some of Brian Eno’s early stuff, so I wanted to promote experimentation and disregard the minute details to a degree. So it was sloppy! A lot of the live shows especially were sloppy. But I was like, they get the idea.
I had heard here and there that people had blogs? But I thought of them like zines, essentially, and I didn’t really think of them. I was very appreciative of anybody who paid us any mind — but I hear about this term “blog rock,” and I had probably less to do with that than most people. In a way, I wish I had been digging into that a little bit more, but I sort of preferred to be surprised to go up to New York, and then there would be a show by Menomena, or Scissor Sisters, or The National, or whoever. And I was just like, “I’ve never heard these guys!” And it was just always my own first impression, never what anybody else was saying.
We actually had the first album ready in 2004, before we had a true team on board, so we did a mini-release that preceded the bigger release in 2005. I didn’t expect my voice, or a lot of other aspects, to translate on a bigger level. I was just shocked. We were selling all of these records out of people’s apartments, and I remember packaging CDs with my mom, because we were getting a lot of orders — sending stuff to to New Zealand, and to other places in the world. That’s when we started to think, “This might have some following.” I would go and deliver boxes of CDs to record stores in New York and Philadelphia, and they’d asked me what my position on the team was.
I remember trying to rush the second album. For me at the time, it was this stubborn naïveté — thinking, “Well, heroes of mine like Bob Dylan released albums all the time, we should just do that.” Some Loud Thunder came out of that mentality of ‘Let’s just keep going and push and push.’ We toured a bit on that, and I decided to take a lot of time off, five years between albums. I was struggling to manage the belief that I had in it. I wanted to be genuine — I didn’t want to go through the motions out there, and I didn’t think that was fair to people. I was easily worn down.
The five years off didn’t really help a lot in terms of the trajectory, and then streaming services kicked in. I still am learning to deal with that and trying to understand — not only streaming services, but the social media platforms kept shifting. We had a pretty reasonable following on MySpace, and then it switched over to Facebook. And Facebook is still in existence, but it’s sort of been taken over by Instagram. It’s a constant shift of, “How do we now rebuild, based on the services that have nothing to do with us?” I’m not so great at that, because I don’t naturally project myself into the digital world. It’s a little bit difficult for me, and kind of overwhelming, to get on track, particularly for this kind of band.
I think at the beginning I didn’t appreciate the first album a lot. I didn’t even really want to release it, because at the time, I didn’t know that you’re supposed to be, like, 60-to-70 percent happy with your album. It’s not always exactly what I have in my head, and I’ve learned to let things go. I have a lot of trouble being happy with what I’ve produced at the moment, and then a couple years later, I’m like, “Huh, that actually was pretty decent.” I am very thankful that, despite my judgment at the time, I made an album that I am still proud of, and I am not embarrassed at all to perform.
The Mountain Goats
Singer-songwriter John Darnielle’s musical project had been a lo-fi cult favorite for years, but 2005’s The Sunset Tree, a poignant collection of stories inspired by his childhood and the abuse he faced from his stepfather, helped deliver the Mountain Goats to a much wider audience. Darnielle unpacks the album’s place in his greater legacy.
We were on a three-album contract from 4AD — I was going to make three albums with them no matter what, and the third one was the last one on the contract. Tallahassee had not lit a fire under the world at all, and We Shall All Be Healed had been received with pretty mixed reviews. We were so proud of that record — I was micromanaging in those days, writing the press kit, committed to a sort of obscurantist vision of how to present stuff. But after We Shall All Be Healed, I was like, “I don’t really think that I’ll be doing this much longer.”
At the same time, I had written these songs that were important to me and I thought were good. But the whole time I’m making the record, I’m thinking that this is probably the last time we get to do this. When the touring started for The Sunset Tree, I was volunteering at a local animal shelter and planning on finding a day job. My assumption was that my two-year experiment in living as a musician was about to come to an end.
I say this with nothing but love for all the people who worked for me at 4AD in New York, but they didn’t know my stuff well, and I didn’t have the money to fly from Iowa to New York to have a meeting to talk about the record. So they just got the record, and they listened to it, and they said, “Well, what does this sound like?” They’re looking for RIYL stuff on the sleeve. Well, the Mountain Goats don’t really sound like anybody at that point, but they wanted to compare it to somebody. So on the promo, the RIYL was Cake, and They Might Be Giants. The Mountain Goats are something you have to come to terms with, and if you try to compare them to other things, it usually doesn’t work out. Everybody thinks that, obviously — I don’t think we’re so completely unique that you can’t compare us to anybody. But that had been the case that, for two records, people seemed not to know what to make of us.
Usually when I’m writing a record, I’m thinking about the stories I want to tell, but The Sunset Tree was half-written on tour, and I never used to write on tour. But my stepfather died, and I was touring constantly then, and tour is an emotional pressure cooker — especially if you sleep very badly on tour, which I do. If you deprive a person of sleep, their emotions come to the surface.
Pitchfork was entering their kingmaker phase. That’s when you really would lose sleep thinking, “Are they going to review it on release day, and what’s the number grade gonna be?” It makes me feel a little sheepish to admit what a big deal it was, but it was a big deal — a very good review would literally put you into bigger rooms on your tour.
The main thing I remember is the New Yorker story — that was the giant deal of that cycle for us. We heard that Sasha Frere-Jones was going to be writing a thing, and he talked to me, and he wound up writing about me and Craig Finn, and we had a photo shoot. The night the New Yorker piece hit the stands, we were in Boston, and it was an electric atmosphere for us. To have a piece affording our work some serious analysis was a giant deal, and to be in a print magazine — print still mattered a lot more than the web did at that point.
When The Sunset Tree came out, we were selling out shows, we were growing – but The Sunset Tree was not a hit. We joked about charts, but they were not on our radar at that time. We shot a video for “This Year,” which was great, but it wasn’t a hit. Now, that was different in Australia — “This Year” was played by Triple J, the national youth station, and it actually did quite well. And when we went down there, it jumped off — that’s when it was like, “Whoa, we are bigger than we think.” In Brisbane, I believe we opened our show with “This Year,” and it was a big mistake, because the room just exploded. We had no idea!
When I was making tapes and 7-inches and stuff, it was not my day job — so when I got money from it, that was a nice bonus. But the bottom dropped out of physical sales, and people would straight-up ask me, “Why should I buy this from you? It’s free.” They would say that to me at the merch table! That vibe didn’t go away, but it grew, and people began to think of art as labor, and wanting to compensate the people who make it, which is great. But there was this window then, when there was a very routine occurrence for someone to say, “Hey man, I got all your stuff off of Kazaa. F–k the record industry!” And it’s like, “I’m trying to make a living that industry, but I’m not gonna argue with you about it.”
But at the same time, I always thought that, if you put love and commitment into the thing you’re making, it will find its people who want to buy it. And I think that was true then, and it’s true now. If you’re setting goals like, “I want to sell 20,000 of these” — good luck to you. I’ve never thought of things in those terms. I always think, I’m trying to make something, I hope it finds an audience that connects with it. And then I will see how big that audience is on the other side of that process.
I’m always using that term, “a record finds its audience.” Over my entire life’s work, across making records and books and whatever else, The Sunset Tree occupies a unique position. It is the one that ends up telling me, “This is your life’s work, for at least the next 20 years.” This record, uniquely at that time in our catalog, was speaking to a certain type of situation of abuse that people wanted to hear — not in massive numbers, but in numbers that it reached gradually over time.
As an artist, this is the best thing that could happen to you. It’s sort of like a light that doesn’t extinguish, that shines on wherever it needs to shine at a given time. At that point, it has nothing to do with me. I made a thing. The thing that I made turned out to have endurance. It’s an immense blessing.
The Decemberists
Thanks to the success of 2005’s Picaresque, the Portland indie-pop troubadours graduated from indie label Kill Rock Stars to major label Capitol Records for its follow-up, 2006’s The Crane Wife. Band leader Colin Meloy shares memories from a transformative year, and how a fan favorite almost got cut from the album.
I was aware that it was going to be a big record for us — I think the momentum had been there leading up. Right after Castaways & Cutouts, everything was pretty quiet, but signing with Kill Rock Stars and doing Her Majesty The Decemberists — I was really nervous about making that record. I have vivid memories of recording Her Majesty and being really nervous editing vocal takes, and feeling like there was this incredible pressure. For some reason, with Picaresque, that had just vanished a little bit. I think I was more certain of myself, more certain of the songs and the songwriting. We were well aware that we were also riding this tailwind behind us, with what was happening with the previous records and tours.
I remember the moment being really exciting. It was this nice coming together of critical and fan excitement about the band, and then on top of that, I felt like I was at a place in my writing, and the way that I was approaching the voice of the band, where I was at the top of my game. And I think that there was this sense that there was this groundswell around us — not only just like, indie writ large, but in the Pacific Northwest. We were recording with Chris Walla from Death Cab, and the guys from The Shins were stopping by while we were recording, and other stuff was happening with Sleater-Kinney and Modest Mouse. It just felt like we were at the dawn of this moment that “indie rock” was having, but also Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and that just felt really exciting.
For whatever reason, in the early days of Pitchfork, we were on their good list — that didn’t last very long. And I look back And I’m like, How did that happen? It seems so strange now — I remember they had breathless coverage of us, and people were joking about, “They’re reporting about what you’re having for breakfast.” I think they were tapped into that world, and everybody was excited to be along for the ride, to a certain degree.
When the record came out, it was just a wild moment. The day that our record release celebration was supposed to happen in Portland, at the Crystal Ballroom, our gear had gotten stolen. We had just come back from Seattle, and Jenny had parked the van that had the trailer on it in front of her house, and she woke up that morning and looked out and the trailer was gone. They had taken the whole trailer, which had all of our gear and all of our merch. So the day of our record release was spent in this place of panic: talking to the police, and then canvassing all over town to try to get enough gear together so we could play the show that night. The record was out that day — it was, to that point, the biggest day of my career, of my life, really. I remember showing up to our show with a borrowed guitar and a tote bag with some cables in it. We did all that tour just collecting gear in every city we went to.
A lot of the songs I still really love, and I still play often. “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” became this blessing and curse. The take that we kept — because we did it all live, just in front of a microphone — had Chris Walla shouting at the end of it, just out of the excitement that we had nailed it. But when we were sequencing the album, he was like, “I think that should be a single or an EP. I don’t think you should put that on the record.” But I was defiant. I was just in this mood where it was like, “I don’t care, I want to do what I want to do, and I feel like this song is achieving that mix of folk song and nerdy musical theater. This is what I’ve been leading up to, and it would break my heart to leave it off.” We didn’t really have any idea what it would be like playing it live, or if people would like it. Once we got on the road and started playing it, it became this fan favorite, and sort of a calling card. And I was like, “See? Proved you wrong, Chris! We would have been stupid to leave it off!”
I would tell indie artists today, do as much as you can —that was the advice that we were given at that time. When you’re aware that you’re in the middle of a hotbed moment like that, try to work as much as you can, although be careful, because you can also burn yourself out, which I think we also did. But it is important to capitalize on that time. I remember those times really fondly, but be aware that critical tides change. The Pitchfork 8.7s are not always going to be there for you! And I think I was aware of that.
Even though moving to Capitol at the end of the day was a good move, there’s part of me that wonders what it would have been like if we had stayed on Kill Rock Stars and eschewed that jump to the major labels. But I think I was just going off of the bands that I loved and followed, you know? And that was what you do when you have a critical and fan groundswell — you move to a major label. You’re just following a blueprint. Maybe “don’t follow a blueprint” would be good advice? Try and do things at your own speed.
Deerhoof
After earning acclaim for their noise-pop records in the early 2000s, the San Francisco band’s 20-song 2005 album The Runners Four became their first to land in the top 10 of year-end critics’ lists. Singer-bassist Satomi Matsuzaki and guitarist John Dieterich discuss how the band’s hands-on approach has helped them in the two decades since its release.
Satomi: We were trying to make this double album, and it was a lot of just going back and forth. The Runners Four was the longest time we’d spent together up until then, and I felt so much struggle. We just disagreed on so many things.
John: Nowadays, we’re often all separate, so somebody will record something real quick on their own, and then we’ll all work on the idea that they already started. For Runners Four, though, we were really trying to get in each other’s business — the idea was all four of us would completely commit to being inside every note that’s played. We were trying to get in each other’s headspace, and it was very difficult and intense, but also really fun.
Satomi: We wanted to respect each other’s creations, and didn’t want to step on each other’s toes.
John: The industry landscape has changed completely, but the way we operated then is similar to the way we operate now — we didn’t take tour support, we didn’t take money to help us make our records, we always just did everything on the cheap and ourselves. Part of it was to be frugal, and part of it was because we wanted to learn about this stuff. When I joined the band in ’99, they had already been going for a while, but I went out to Oakland to go to recording school, to take a recording and composition program. We basically taught ourselves how to use that stuff, and we’re still using those skills that we’ve developed over the last 26 years.
Satomi: People would tell us, “You’ve got to come to Europe!” And I would go, “How?” We didn’t have any money to fly to Europe. We used to be an exclusive Bay Area band, for a long time — the indie world was very normal for us, and we were happy. I was going to school, and then had this fun band. But we became more serious around 2004’s Milk Man, and then The Runners Four we toured most of year — I think we were home one month out of the entire year. I was like, “Why am I paying rent?”
John: But we were very much a part of the community in San Francisco at that time — in the early 2000s, we basically played shows almost every week, at our venues in town, and then sometimes we’d go to L.A. for a one-off thing. We had friends that we played with a lot, and we felt like we were part of a family together. It didn’t feel like a movement — it just felt like a bunch of people who were curious, and digging weird little holes separately from one another, and curious what each other was doing. Then you would go to a show and get to see what the other people were digging up. Those relationships are really meaningful, even if we didn’t really hang out very much with other bands. We played shows, and then we went back to our holes.
Satomi: Now, there are so many artists because of social media and TikTok — I don’t know where you draw a line between what’s indie and what’s not. In a way, it’s really great that everybody can become an artist and get seen, but it’s also a very difficult time for us to to make a living from playing. We don’t get paid if somebody listens to our music. We used to go to the record store — I used to go to Amoeba and buy records all the time, and you don’t have to do that anymore. It’s easier now for everyone in the world to be able to listen to our music, but there’s this downside, where an artist cannot live without another job.
John: I think what sustains these things is community — that was true for us back then in some ways, and I think it’s definitely true now. Being self-sustaining helps, to the degree that you can, but people need each other. If you happen to have tons of money, great, be self-sustaining, congratulations! But for everyone else, you need to lean on each other and teach each other how to do things. “DIY” is such a misnomer — DIY happens by people talking to other people and learning new skills. And if your friend needs to record something and they don’t have a microphone, you loan them a microphone.
Art Brut
Led by the shout-along single “Formed a Band,” the British rock group’s winking, shambolic debut album Bang Bang Rock & Roll placed at No. 3 on Pitchfork’s best albums of 2005 list, fueling an unlikely ascent. Frontman Eddie Argos explains how his expectations for the band’s commercial prospects were quickly upended.
“Formed a Band” came out on Rough Trade, as a single — that’s the first thing we ever recorded. We recorded that to get gigs and stuff, but then it got on a CD, and then Rough Trade picked it up. It was too soon — we didn’t have an album’s worth of songs. Literally every song we had written to that point is Bang Bang Rock & Roll. I was writing the lyrics to “Stand Down” the day we recorded it. But then it came out quite slowly — it was on Fierce Panda, which is quite a small label in the U.K., and then it slowly grew through the Internet. It kept being released again — Downtown released it in America, and then we signed to EMI, and they re-released it with a double CD.
All the bands that were coming through at the time, like Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand, were all playing these big festivals, and Christian, our old guitar player, was like, “Oh, maybe we get to play a big festival!” I’m like, “Nah, don’t be stupid.” It wasn’t even on in my brain that that would happen. The first time we toured America, we were like, “Oh, this is the only time we’re going to be here,” so we weren’t taking it seriously. I didn’t even really know what Pitchfork was — I didn’t have a laptop or anything, so I was like, out of the Internet. We were just excited to make a record.
The U.K. music press is quite cynical, and I’m quite heart-on-sleeve in my lyrics — “Emily Kane” is real. I think in the U.K., people thought I was joking or something? I’ve got a sarcastic voice, maybe. The first time we played in America, people believed me, and would say, “Oh, Emily Kane was your first girlfriend, you must have really loved her.” That’s what I wanted! In the U.K., people thought I was playing a character.
My favorite bands are American — it’s the Mountain Goats, Jonathan Richman, The Replacements — but I had no idea was Pitchfork was, and it’s mad now looking back at it, because we were the third-highest album on their best albums of 2005 list, and only Kanye West and Sufjan Stevens were above us. At the time, I had no idea how big a deal that was. I just thought, “Oh, that’s nice to be on that list.” Then we played Pitchfork’s festival in 2006, and it was so hot that day, and I was so sweaty. I came offstage at the end, and John Darnielle gave me a towel and a bottle of water. I was like, “Did I die and go to heaven?”
YouTube didn’t exist when we started the band, and MySpace was getting big at the time, but that was right ahead of us. Bands didn’t have to have other jobs, like they do now. There were a lot more working-class bands, because it was easy and affordable to do it, whereas now it’s such a risk. Everything like streaming and Spotify happened over the course of the past 20 years, and it just feels different. Although I’m old now — it didn’t matter as much when I was younger, because I could live off noodles.
My advice for artists today would still be, just do it. I always think about how our guitar player Christian he booked us our first gig, and the rest of us were like, “What’s he doing? We’re not ready!” We were really hesitant, and I think, if it wasn’t for him, we’d still be rehearsing. You have to go do it, and don’t worry about being embarrassed about something. I worry about how much art gets lost because people think something is cringe. Ignore that feeling, and try not to be embarrassed.
Wolf Parade
The Montreal group’s debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, was an exhilarating mix of indie rock sing-alongs – Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner split vocal duties, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock served as producer, and the band started playing packed clubs in North America. Krug looks back on the unlikely ways that Wolf Parade measured their success 20 years ago.
I’m a really naive person, and it’s only in retrospect that I realize when things are a big deal. But I think as a whole, we could tell that something was brimming. We had been signed to Sub Pop, because Isaac Brock wanted to make our record, and the shows we’d been playing in Montreal had been buzzing a little bit in Montreal. We weren’t sure why all this was happening, but as we were making the record, I think we knew that we should try our hardest at the very least, and that something might come of it. We had Isaac from Modest Mouse, right after “Float On” had come out, and he was becoming famous and stepping up a level. He was getting used to that as he was trying to produce our record — I think it was the first record he tried to produce that wasn’t his own, and he did a great job.
Isaac wanted to record it in Portland, Oregon, and we all lived in Montreal. He was sort of working for Sub Pop as a scout, and that’s how we ended up on Sub Pop — Dan Boeckner had a band called Atlas Strategic way back in the day, and they ended up opening for Modest Mouse down the West Coast. We all knew Modest Mouse, so the fact that Isaac helped get us on Sub Pop, and then he wanted to produce our record — we understood that that was a big deal.
So we drove to Portland from Montreal with our s—tty, s—tty tour van full of our old gear. Sub Pop probably didn’t even know what was happening — they probably assumed we were flying like normal people. I remember sitting around an apartment and watching Chronicles of Riddick, and being like, “If we don’t leave now, we’re not gonna make it to Portland on time!” We took turns driving, and arrived exhausted, but we were young enough that it didn’t matter if we were tired. And Isaac was like, “What are you guys doing here?” And we said, “We’re here to record the record!” He’s like, “Oh yeah, s—t, that’s today!”
We definitely had goals, in terms of what songs we wanted on the album. We put out these EPs already, and we were just selling them at shows. At one point, we were just burning CD-Rs on a CD burner, writing “Wolf Parade” on them, putting them in Ziploc bags and selling them. But people were buying them, so we were like, “We’ll put those songs on the record, for sure!”
We had a very DIY ethos in the beginning, which wasn’t necessarily political — we appreciated the punk ethos of doing things DIY, but it was just that we were all super poor, honestly, and we were doing everything on the cheap. I remember pulling an all-nighter before a show so we could burn enough CDs to sell. It was fun times, and in Montreal at that time, that was just the norm. CDs were still a thing, and mini-CDs were a thing, where people were putting songs and 10-inches on mini-CDs. There was a small community of indie bands where everyone knew each other, we all jammed in the same spaces, and it was mostly supportive, not too competitive. Being in it at the time, it was hard to sense what was really going on — we were goldfish in the fishbowl.
But after being active for maybe six months, suddenly there were lines around the block to get into a Wolf Parade show. It was just at a little club, but we were like, “Oh, something’s happening. This is weird.” And then SPIN magazine put out a piece around that time that was just about the Montreal music scene and the bands that were coming out of it. I remember looking at that, and our picture was in there, and I was like, “Well, this is crazy.” It was all about little things like that to see that our music was resonating with people. There was no metric to really measure anything against — we couldn’t, like, check our social media numbers, and Sub Pop wasn’t emailing us and telling us, “Congratulations, here are your sales numbers.” All you could really gauge it by was print media, and how many people were coming to your shows.
The indie scene got really hyped up in mid-2000s. Do you remember how big commercial corporations started investing in indie? Like, you’d go to a loft party with The Unicorns playing or something, and there’d be, like, free Levi’s on a table. “Do you want some free jeans?” Or “Do you want these sunglasses?” We’d go to festivals, and the amount of swag that was backstage at these festivals, like Coachella and All Tomorrow’s Parties, in the 2000s was so weird, because it didn’t really align with the origins of these bands that came out of nothing. You learn later in life which of your peers came from money and which didn’t, but when you’re 20, you’re just like, “We’re all starving artists.” And then you’re like, “Yes, I will definitely take some free jeans.” Jeans are expensive!
I think for any band, you could feel the ground shift underneath when streaming took over. For me, it’s gotten more and more difficult to get stuff out there. I’m always trying to gauge whether it’s the music industry or I’m just an aging artist, and that this is normal — probably, it’s a combination of both. But it’s not such a straight game anymore — put out a record, get a good review by Pitchfork, and then you can go on tour and make money, and you’ll make a bunch of money in royalties. The way that social media is the only game in town now to get people to know that you’ve done something is kind of interesting, and kind of sad. You have to decide how you’re going to navigate that, or if you’re going to participate at all.
I would encourage bands to maybe not worry so much about getting on a label, because what a label can do for you has changed so much with the way DSPs have taken over, and having a good distributor is maybe more important than having a good label at this point. DIY has always been a powerful thing — building small communities, instead of trying to reach everyone in the world all at once. I think it’s maybe a more meaningful way to work, instead of trying to go viral on TikTok or something. But then again, what do I know? I’m not on TikTok. I’m f—king 47, so I’m very wary of giving advice to young people.
Andrew Bird
The Lake Forest, Illinois native spent years tinkering with ornate indie arrangements before 2005’s Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs earned the most press acclaim of his career. Bird talks about why the album endured multiple false starts, and why, after years of distance, he’s come around to its charms.
This was definitely the album that almost broke me — maybe it did break me a little bit. It took me three tries to get it: I was searching for something that I didn’t have the vocabulary for when I started, and then I had to grope around in the dark and make a lot of mistakes. I had two fully mixed, mastered albums that went into the garbage. And in between the first and second attempt, I made Weather Systems, which I thought was going to be this little experimental EP that ended up really working. I never had a proper producer for any of that stuff, and I think that was a good thing. If someone was too decisive during that time, I wouldn’t have made those mistakes that I needed to make.
It was a transitional time in the music industry — if you drew a graph of the ascendance of my audience and the descent of physical product in the music industry, the actual album sales, they’re totally inverse trajectories, and cross over each other in about 2005. I was not super new at that time — I’d already put out three or four records, and I’d been working and touring since ’98, on a very indie DIY level. I was very committed to that, almost to a fault — I should have probably been scaling up.
When I started off, we’d play a show and put out like a binder with our mailing list. It’s so quaint when you think about it — you get people’s names and addresses, and you’d send them postcards about the next show. It was all about making posters and going around town, and if you could afford the silkscreen ones, you’d put up really cool posters on telephone poles. And then at a certain point, you graduate to having a street team, where you enlist fans to help promote shows and stuff. It was still very grassroots. My ambitions at the time were just to pay my band, and to pay my band, I thought I needed to get 300-to-400 people to come to a show, anywhere I go. There was no world-dominance expectation.
I felt like a little bit of an outsider in Chicago, because the post-rock thing was so austere, and the late ‘90s were very anti-virtuosity. I was very fancy compared to them, and so I kind of fell in with the alt-country scene, just they were the nicest people that I found in the music scene, and more approachable. I played a lot of the shows with them, but the first band that was on a national level that I fell in with was My Morning Jacket. Jim James really championed me early on, when I was touring solo — I remember he came to a London show where I was the first of three on the bill, and he brought the whole band, and the audience was being annoying, and he just made everyone shut up. He recognized what I was trying to do, and saw the value in it, and he took me on tour with them when they were still building an audience.
Listening back to Mysterious Production of Eggs — I was kind of down on it for a while, because when you spend that long in the studio, far away from being on stage, the more the energy becomes like a bedroom, headphones kind of album. But that’s part of what’s appealing about it, too. It may not have that live energy, but there’s a lot of detail, because there are so many layers, so many attempts at making these songs. Only one of them survived every attempt, which was “Opposite Day,” because I did such interesting stuff at the barn with the loops and creating this weird melody that I couldn’t replicate again. So I just kept pulling back the layers, and then adding more paint, and then pulling back the layers. I’ve never made an album that was this obsessive. My ethos since then has grown more live and free-wheeling.
I talk to a lot of young artists that don’t want to reveal what they’ve been working on until it’s absolutely perfect. I just say that mentality is not going to work. I have this built-in aversion to that sort of codified, this-is-how-you-do-it thing. Get on stage as much as possible, and don’t be precious.
Anohni
In 2005, I Am a Bird Now scored an upset win at the UK’s Mercury Prize for Anohni & the Johnsons, which was followed by acclaim for the chamber-pop tour de force by U.S. blogs and outlets. Anohni reflects on the album’s continued resonance as a defiant piece of trans expression, and why 2005 was the perfect time for I Am a Bird Now to break through.
I knew that this was my one chance — that things were as lined up as they were ever going to be to get me through the keyhole into the daylight culture. And as a person of my demographic, or whatever you want to call it, there was a lot of support for me from from the underground and from the indie world. A lot of artists had supported me to that point, and really ushered me across that line in a way that the industry was never going to. And then the really unexpected happened when I won the Mercury Prize, and that was almost like the whim of a panel of artists and cultural figures in the U.K. that transformed my life and career with that gesture. But it was a culmination of a sort of swell of underground support for me — not really from the business of music, but from my colleagues.
A lot of the songs on I Am a Bird Now were written more than five or 10 years earlier, in the mid-90s, when I was living a very insular, creative life in New York City. One or two songs on the record I wrote later, most notably “Hope There’s Someone,” shortly before I did the record. We recorded it, and I said, “That should be the first song on the record.” Everyone was like, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah, that’s definitely the best song on the record. We should just put that first and front-load it.” And that really did make a big difference, I think.
I’ve always talked about the album as a story about a family living inside me, that everyone contains a family of archetypes, and that they’re in conversation. I remember writing “For Today I Am a Boy” in like 1995 and thinking, “I could never play this to anyone. This is the most embarrassing song I’ve ever written, the most shameful — how could I even sing this? It’s so freaky.” And then I thought, “Oh! That’s great!” It made me uncomfortable when I wrote it, and there must be something in that, so I’ll just try it. And I ended up singing that song for the whole, bio-diverse world. I ended up singing it for nature and for every living thing.
Those songs were all transformed 100 times over from the touring I did on those records, and because of my practice as a performer, learned from Kazuo Ôno, everything was always changing in my body when I was singing the songs. It was always new imagery pouring forth — that was part of the delight for me as a performer, to have that chance to just reach toward an ecstatic process.
I never thought of myself as an indie artist. I thought of myself as kind of a muse to certain indie artists, but honestly, I thought of myself as a New York artist, and my international forays had always been at the invitation of other artists, like David Tibet, who’s an underground U.K. artist who’s super subcultural. He was the one who released my first album, and his support brought me out to the U.K. to do a concert with him and stuff like that. My friendship and work with Lou Reed brought me to do some concerts in Naples and Milan, and then Lou brought me on a world tour as his backup singer, and that was transformative. And then the producer Hal Willner started to promote me, and introduced me to the broader, dare I say, heterosexual music world.
A lot of those artists heard me sing and embraced me, and as a trans artist, identity hadn’t been pecked apart in the public sphere in this kind of Roman Coliseum way that it has now, so people weren’t necessarily perceiving my identity as grounds for not listening to my music. They were just curious about the music. So I Am A Bird Now was very interestingly marketed to the general public, whereas the album I just released, My Back Is a Bridge for You to Cross, it’s very difficult to convince anyone not to market it solely to a queer audience, just because that’s the way that demographic commercial marketing has taken this ugly turn. It’s crude and myopic. I’ve been writing albums about the environment and our relationship to the natural world, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that listens to PJ Harvey or Nick Cave still listening to my music, because they don’t think it’s their lane. I find that really perverse, and it’s been mostly true in the U.S., but it’s less true in Europe.
My experience with I Am A Bird Now has been my lifelong experience – which is that, as a person like me, your survival depends on the kindness of strangers: your own family, your own community, your own church decides if you live or die. They decide if they’re going to “tolerate” you, and the extent of your freedom in the community is based on the extent of the space allotted to you. And that’s true of many minorities, but it’s particularly stunning when you’re a minority within your own family, your own like racial, ethnic, economic demographic. It’s a very specific experience, which a lot of LGBTQ people could relate to.
I would say 2005 was kind of a Goldilocks zone for something like my work to emerge, and I don’t think my work could have emerged at any other moment. It was post-AIDS enough that people were willing to entertain androgyny as a component, and even the addressing of some gender stuff. It was pre-#MeToo enough that there could be feminist concerns that hadn’t been weaponized yet. Look at where we are now politically with Trump — I mean, it’s like everyone who’s ever been canceled has been released from prison. It’s a full pardon for every canceled rapist north of the Equator.
And that’s all part of this — I Am a Bird Now was a moment on the other end of that pendulum when a conversation was tolerated, entertained and considered in the heterosexual media. Are we going to let this in? Does this pose a threat? And it was before the hibernating powers that be saw a rejuvenated opportunity to take massive power from a public conversation gone awry about the existence of trans people, to a point where a president literally got f–king elected off of like, perverted, disgusting anti-trans ads.
I feel very privileged — I had that upswing in my career when I was able to buy myself an apartment on the back of I Am a Bird Now. If that album came out today, I don’t think I’d even make 10 cents, because the tech industry hadn’t yet mobilized to upstream all of the income of the music industry, in such a way that music just became a pheromone inside everyone’s device. People in 2005 were still buying an artist’s work — there was still a transaction that was meaningful around the recording and selling of music that allowed musicians to to support themselves, and that’s disappeared now, pretty much.
I would say income is probably an eighth of what it was — maybe a tenth? You probably earn $1 for every $10 you would have earned in 2005 as a recording artist. Everyone’s just comfortable with that, and has been gently boiled in the pot, and accepted the terms of engagement from Apple and Spotify and whoever else. As musicians, we had the privileged seat in 2005 of watching that transfer of agency, and riding the last moments of an old view of 20th century agency as a recording artist, and watch that be replaced by something just way filthier.
I don’t actually talk to many young artists — my circle is pretty closed. But I’ll give the advice that Lou would have given me, which is, just don’t trust anyone that wants you to sign anything. Understand everything that you’re signing, understand what you’re giving away. That sounds very proprietary, but Lou was the one that prevented me from selling all my publishing for just a few dollars, at a moment when I was desperate. He just said, “Never, ever. Even if no one is telling you that you’re valued, continue to retain knowledge of your value.”
Whether or not it ever translates into money, according to the culture and the temperature of the era, your value is eternal. I turned down a lot of opportunities before I finally did what I did — I Am a Bird Now came out when I was 35, I wasn’t young. I was 10, 15 years older than most of the other people in my peer group who were coming up that year, and I was worldly in certain regards, but I wasn’t worldly traveling through the media and understanding what that transaction was. It took me a long time to understand how a culture eats an artist, and now I am very clear about it.
That’s what I would talk to young people about — to understand that this is not a world that has your best interests at heart. You need to consider the structures that support you, first and foremost, in any level of disclosure or spelling of interior value. You need to fully vet and understand the consequences of that, to the best of your ability, before you throw yourself into it.
I’ve become much more aware of how meaningful the music has been developmentally for young trans people, in the same way that Boy George’s music was meaningful to me when I was 14 or 15, and I’m super grateful to be seen as representation of difference in culture. At the same time, I also resent the quarantine of the messaging — I resent that the music isn’t heard because of the algorithm, because of the way that culture is contained. I got a career because a bunch of heterosexual musicians said I was a musician, and because a bunch of straight, respected guys decided that they were gonna force the issue, that I should be allowed to participate in music.
That’s what happened with I Am a Bird Now — everyone heard it at the dinner table, because it was thrust into the imagination of the entire UK after the Mercury Prize. During the tour in 2005, there would be gangs of football players singing “For Today I Am a Boy” in Spain. It was nuts — heterosexual kids were listening to it too, because it was just considered part of the fabric of the year.
I’ll always be grateful for my life — I can’t believe I got a chance to do it, because so many people of my demographic could never get a chance to do anything like that. I really was one of the very few that’s had a chance to fully express my feeling. I’m able to mirror and voice how it feels to see the world through eyes like mine. And that’s a miracle.
Okkervil River
Will Sheff’s indie-folk project spent seven years trying to find a larger audience in Texas before its third album, Black Sheep Boy, finally broke Okkervil River on a national level. Sheff explains why his group’s “ramshackle” third album was their last chance before he called it quits.
We started in 1998, and it felt like we had been slugging away in the shadows for forever. When I made Black Sheep Boy, I was in a pretty low emotional and psychological state, because it was like a permanent cloud over me. Half the time I was thinking, “Once I finished this, I’ll just hang it up, and I’ll be proud of myself,” because I knew that Black Sheep Boy was the best thing I’d ever done. At least I’ll know that I made one good record, and then went out on a high note — that was the best I could see for myself at that point.
That album came out without very much fanfare. When it came out, it really felt like I remember that my publicist accidentally CC’ed me on an email that she had written to the label with a spreadsheet of press reactions, and she said in the email something like, “This has been really hard and frustrating. I’m sorry we’re not getting more pick-up.” The spreadsheet that was included was just like, so-and-so passed, passed, passed, they liked the second one better, not his thing, passed. I was feeling really despairing, because I felt like, “If people don’t like this, then I’ll never make anything that anybody likes.”
It wasn’t until halfway through the touring cycle that Kelefa Sanneh wrote a big piece about us and the Decemberists in the New York Times, and that was when things started to turn around. It was just a wild year, because I put out this record that was maybe my last statement, and then I dutifully toured on it — we weren’t playing very well, and people didn’t seem to care. And then midway through, word of mouth made that album resurface. Suddenly, after seven years of chasing, we kind of caught the car.
I was a lonely, unhappy child who fell in with a group of artsy kids, theater and band kids, in high school. And I really felt like art was spiritual to me — I felt like it had saved my life, but I felt like there was a second part of the equation, which was that I had to prove myself in the arena of art, or else it wouldn’t have meant anything. I started Okkervil River with those same high school friends, but then they gave up on it. The drummer didn’t think it was going to be successful, and then the bassist was like, “I need a real job.” I had to hire all new players, and I was just slugging away, and I didn’t have a backup plan.
That was part of why I was so f—ked up in my head when I made Black Sheep Boy: in the pursuit of this, I had torched all my relationships, I had no money, I was not getting any sleep, and I didn’t have a place to live. I felt like I just had all this ambition and all this need for it to succeed, and I also was not psychologically getting the care that I needed to be a balanced human. Sometimes I would be like, “This is gonna make me a star,” but then other times I would be like, “I’m just gonna go back to New Hampshire and become a school teacher, I guess.” I look back on it now, and I think that relentless focus on this need for success meant that I didn’t really appreciate what good things had happened to me in my life to that point.
When I look back on it now, I’m like, “What a lucky window that we we ended up making our way through.” In the ‘80s, everything was big business in the music business, and there were bands like REM, but there weren’t that many of those bands that were really succeeding financially. In the indie rock boom, it felt like there were so many bands — because, I think, of the holdover from the ‘90s, where people were really prizing anti-corporate, alternative, independent, not selling out. And also the critical apparatus was still very whitewashed, and so a “musician” to a music critic looked like a white guy with a guitar, and really prized intelligent songwriting.
The reason that I made it was because I put in a ton of work, I looked more or less like what you’re supposed to look like, and I was doing this thing that we all were very interested in. There was the Hold Steady, the Mountain Goats, the Decemberists — and we didn’t compare notes, but we were all making vaguely literary smarty-pants rock, and we had all independently arrived and some of these values.
Now, it’s just a different landscape, and a band like Okkervil River or the Mountain Goats or the Hold Steady or whoever just wouldn’t break through in the same way, because the hunger isn’t there. The culture had a hunger, but then I watched that hunger intensify to where, suddenly Bon Iver was collaborating with Kanye West and appearing in a Bushmills ad and winning a Grammy, then being on Saturday Night Live and being satirized on Saturday Night Live. And then Zooey Deschanel was like, “I want an indie rock career, too,” and suddenly everybody had her haircut. The way people would talk about Vampire Weekend when they were first coming up, it was like they were talking about a particularly promising college basketball player. It started to seem like, instead of the alternative to mainstream corporate rock, indie rock was like the minor leagues.
I remember riding in a car with my sister, and she was listening to a bunch of songs on shuffle, and she had a song from Black Sheep Boy playing, and then right after that, a song from the Killers came on. The Killers made us sound like our record was recorded in a garage, which in fact it was. And I just felt really insecure. And so for a period of time, I was like, “I have to sound like I’m real” – like, a real musician.
And now I look back and I think the opposite is true. I love that Cindy Lee record from last year, and part of what’s cool about the record is how f—ked up it sounds. That album just goes to show that you don’t have to sound any way at all. If it’s good, it doesn’t f—king matter how it sounds. And I think that Black Sheep Boy doesn’t really sound like any other record. It’s very odd, it’s ramshackle and acoustic, and very dark, and a weird mix of electronics and acoustic guitars. It sounds pretty handmade to me. And at the time, those were all things that bothered me. And now I’m like, that’s really special.
When country singer-songwriter Chely Wright decided to come out of the closet in 2010, she knew that her life was never going to be the same. She’d made a name for herself in mainstream music circles with songs like “Single White Female” and “It Was,” built a strong fanbase in the country scene and saw an opportunity to break new ground.
“I thought I was uniquely positioned, because I am still that Grand Ole Opry-loving, patriotic, Midwestern girl who loves country music who is also a person of faith. I thought if I did this right, I could come out ‘well,’” she tells Billboard.
In retrospect, Wright was correct; her life did change, just not in the way that she expected. Fifteen years later, Wright has reinvented herself as a leader in corporate America, advocating for diversity, equity and inclusion. In her latest venture, the former country star is taking on the position of senior vice president, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and new market growth at facilities management organization ISS. She describes the role as getting a company of 320,000+ employees to ask itself one central question: “How do we use our power, position and resources for good?”
Trending on Billboard
That pivot came naturally, Wright says — after coming out, she began working her “side hustle” of speaking to organizations about the importance of DE&I. As the opportunities for work in the space grew while her touring career got put on hold thanks to COVID-19, Wright saw an opportunity to make the most of her position. “Who is luckier than me that I was able to not only continue working, but to feel such a great sense of pride and purpose and mission in what I do?” she ponders.
Below, Wright talks to Billboard about her evolution from country stages to the C-suite, why DEI work is vital despite a pushback from the current presidential administration, and what advice she would give to young country stars looking to come out today:
Let’s talk about your new role — your previous role at Unispace saw you overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, while your new role sees you heading up “corporate social responsibility.” Can you explain the difference between those two ideas?
In my last role, I was the chief diversity officer — my role at ISS is head of CSR and new market growth. On the Venn diagram of life, DEI, ESG (environmental, social and governance) and CSR have a lot of overlap. The way I look at it, CSR is asking myself and getting organizations to ask themselves the question, “How do we use our power, position and resources for good?”
That is actually harder to ascertain and actually takes more time and effort to know and understand than organizations might think. There is an entire process of really engaging with your teams, engaging with communities, engaging with your clients and putting your heads together about “hey, what do we collectively care about, and how are we uniquely positioned to get out there and drive impact?”
I think what we’ve learned post-COVID — and honestly, we’re in a world that has been significantly changed by COVID and it looks like we’re never going back — is that employees care more than ever about who their employers are, and what they’re doing to positively impact their environments and their communities.
There’s a lot of conversation happening around the concept of DEI, with the current administration actively campaigning against these policies both in the federal government and at individual companies. What is your reaction to that push to eliminate DEI efforts in the workforce?
A couple of years ago, in my last role, we felt this coming. When you look at the marketing campaign around being “anti-woke” and “anti-DEI,” it is not surprising to me that this is all happening. What I think is important is that we talk about what is happening right now, and what is not happening. If people are scared and nervous, that in and of itself is harm. It’s the whole point of bullying — you scare people, and that causes unease. In its worst-case scenario, it can set on some very negative, violent behaviors from others.
So, what I don’t want to say is, “Oh it’s all posturing and noise, and it’s not real.” No, it is real. I would say that some of it is posturing. Some of it is noise, and pandering to a base that they made promises to. And I would argue that a lot of it, based on what I’m hearing from our clients, is performance for an administration.
I’m gonna use a restaurant analogy — there’s front of house, and there’s back of house. I think the front of house, right now, is positioning themselves to make certain pieces of the administration happy, kissing the ring, scrubbing their websites of certain language. Do I think it’s right? No. Would I do it personally? No. But I understand what is happening there — no one wants to receive the ire of a very powerful person or an administration that feels like it may be punitive or retaliatory. But in the back of house, organizations that didn’t want to really do DEI or CSR or ESG work to begin with are using this as an offramp.
For those who are really committed to this idea, everyone I’ve talked to is still very interested in ensuring that their people and their communities where they work understand that they’re in it to win it. Because there is a business sense to DEI: the metrics are off the charts on how much more profitable a business is that has a supplier diversity program. It lowers attrition and elevates client retention, and if you have these initiatives in your company, it makes people want to go work for them and stay with them. It elevates that pride and purpose.
You mentioned the anti-DEI “marketing campaign” — part of that is spreading misinformation about what diversity, equity and inclusion programs actively do. A lot of people think that this is about unqualified candidates getting jobs, simply because that’s what they’ve been told.
Yes, the characterization is this concern that, for example, a black woman is going to get a job over a qualified white man — as if he is somehow, inherently, above her. That’s not what this work is, and anyone who is a practitioner of good DEI work knows that. Take supplier diversity, for instance. Supplier diversity was started in the automotive industry back in the late ’60s, and what it proved is that this work makes the vendor base more competitive and more innovative. There is a lot of myth-busting up front of hearing, “We want qualified vendors,” and saying back to them, “I don’t want anything but qualified vendors — but all of our vendors in our base look pretty straight and white, to me.”
We want qualified veterans to be part of our vendor base. We want qualified Black and Brown people. We want qualified women. It has become a minefield out there, but the principles of DEI are not going anywhere. We might be talking about them a little bit differently for a minute, but not for long.
You made a fascinating transfer from your music career to your corporate career around 2020 — what inspired that change? What skills transitioned well from one career to the next?
In 2010, I knew I wanted to come out of the closet, be informed and educated and use all of my public capital to challenge some of those myths about queer people. After I came out, I was getting invited to talk to corporations and higher ed and faith communities about my experience, and it snowballed from there. So that began my side hustle; I continued touring to smaller audiences — because when I came out I lost some of my fanbase — and spent 70% of my time making records and touring. 30% of my time was spent doing this culture work, and I loved it.
When COVID hit — and I had to cancel my tour just like every other touring musician in the world — that happened to coincide with my clients coming out of the woodwork asking about doing virtual events. With the murders of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, with mental health declining because everyone was at home, my side hustle just skyrocketed, and eventually lead to my role at Unispace.
When you’re a country singer, and you get to Nashville and you somehow make it where you’re making records and you decide to come out of the closet, one doesn’t do that without knowing that your life is going to change. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to look like, but I knew that I was nimble and I knew that I was a good business thinker. I was always mindful and aware, when I got to Nashville and I saw how damn good everybody was, that I would not be outworked, and I would not be out-strategized.
I knew the value of engaging with fans and giving them what they want, and knowing that they are my customer. I knew in 2010 that I could do another side hustle full time if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. And then ten years later, the universe tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey guess what? It’s time to make a big pivot.”
You certainly left behind an important legacy in the country scene: Today, there are more queer artists working in the Nashville scene than ever before. If you could give any advice to an LGBTQ artist looking to “make it” in the industry, what would you tell them?
I love seeing all of these country artists who have come out, it just delights me and thrills me every time someone comes out. I love that I could be a drop of water in what would become a wave. But let’s make no mistake; I still don’t recommend to anyone that they run down Music Row and say they’re gay. My counsel for anyone, whether they’re a country music artist, or going into finance, or whatever, is: Do not come out until you feel safe and able. And that process is different for everyone.
I would even go back to the advice that Loretta Lynn gave me about being a woman in the industry: I asked her once about what I could do in a man’s industry to change things. She said, “You can’t change the game unless you’re on the field.” So Loretta, right? What I took from that is that you have to do everything that you can to keep yourself on the field — take care of you first. If you’ve got aspirations to be a country singer, and you’re in a place that might not be safe, share your authentic self with safe people in your life and protect those relationships.
I’m not saying that people should force themselves into the closet: I’m saying you can still get yourself uninvited to the party if you’re not very careful about when you share your truth. The last thing I would ever want to do is to minimize the reality of what coming out is like, and to say, “Oh, just come out! It’s great out here!” I received death threats, I lost fans, a lot happened when I came out. It is a personal decision, so don’t do it until you feel safe and able. If you need support, you call me on the phone. Everyone in Nashville has still got my number — just give me a ring.
“I’ve been bursting at the seams to be able to talk about this stuff,” Chloe Moriondo tells Billboard of her upcoming album, Oyster. The singer-songwriter shifted her aesthetic across her three previous albums, from the ukulele twee on 2018’s Rabbit Hearted. to heartfelt pop-punk on 2021’s Blood Bunny to fuzzed-out, radio-ready melodies on 2022’s SUCKERPUNCH.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Oyster, due out Mar. 28 on Public Consumption/Atlantic Music Group, functions as an amalgamation of those sounds, while also featuring the 22-year-old’s most vulnerable lyrics by far. “This feels like a very special project,” says Moriondo. “I’m nervous, as I always am before releasing things, but especially because this one’s so personal.”
On Wednesday (Feb. 19), Moriondo released the second preview of the album with “Hate It,” a gleefully unhinged pop track with a creeping bass line and an obsessive protagonist (“Wanna wear your body and trade places / Everybody loves you, and I hate it,” Moriondo sings on the chorus). After showcasing a sardonic streak on SUCKERPUNCH, Moriondo lets the dark humor simmer on the track while the listener is urged to hum along.
Trending on Billboard
“It’s one of the only non-aquatic songs off the album,” Moriondo says of “Hate It,” which is surrounded by songs titled “7 Seas,” “Abyss” and “Shoreline” on Oyster. “I did stick very thematically with the ocean, water and all things aquatic in general. But ‘Hate It’ was an oddball, and it just proved to me that I’m going to continue writing murderous pop love songs till I die, I’m pretty sure. And we just couldn’t leave her off the album.”
Moriondo began working on the new album in early 2023, tinkering on songs for weeks at a time in London and Los Angeles, while also processing the worst breakup of her life. Heartbreak, and how to manage its aftereffects, serves as the undercurrent of Oyster, from the mournful piano ballad “Pond” to the reflective bedroom-pop track “Raw” to the breathtaking “Siren Calling,” which offers closure within the final track.
“It was very cathartic to be able to pour out everything that had been going on in my brain and in my life,” Moriondo notes. “It was nerve-wracking, in some ways. I kind of felt like a baby sea turtle — flopping around, confused — for the first couple sessions and the first couple songs. I felt a little bit nervous, but it also felt like an outpouring of pent-up energy and emotion that I was excited to finally be able to release.”
Not only does Oyster represent the cohesive front-to-back listen of Moriondo’s career, but the singer-songwriter says that she wants every aspect of this album campaign to feel part of a whole — and that she became more hands-on with the planning of execution of this rollout than she’s ever been.
“With this album, I’ve just learned how crucial it can be to be as involved as possible creatively, with every facet of the album,” she says. “With an album like Blood Bunny or Rabbit Hearted., I was so young, and I say this as a term of endearment, but I was still very ignorant to a lot of things. I don’t think I poured as much of myself as I could have into a lot of my previous stuff, in terms of the touring, the vinyl packaging, just the life and blood of it. So I think I’m much more connected creatively to this album than I have been.”
After releasing “Shoreline” as the first taste of Oyster last month, Moriondo also announced a spring headlining tour, which kicks off on Apr. 24 in Detroit. She says that ideas for performing these new songs live have dominated her thoughts for months, and she hopes that her shows are as freeing for her fans as making this album proved to be for her.
“The people who come to my shows, whether they’re longtime fans or new fans or boyfriends or parents of fans, can expect to experience a very immersive show,” Moriondo says with a laugh. “A lot of dancing, a lot of potential crying, and something reminiscent of the Jellyfish Jam from Spongebob.”
On a balmy night in Belém, Pará in northern Brazil, just 100 miles south of the equator and close to the Amazon rainforest, a crowd of over 250,000 attendees assembled in the Mangueirão Olympic Stadium’s parking lot for an unprecedented free concert. Amid this sea of people stood a dramatic ten-story-high pyramid stage; crowning it was Alok, the superstar DJ and producer, famed for pioneering and popularizing Brazilian bass on a global scale.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
He arrived donning a shiny plant-green suit, resembling a blend between a glossy space suit and a verdant beetle. “We are here today in Belém, in the heart of the Amazon, not only to talk about an ancestral future but also to recognize the voices and the legacy of the guardians of the forest,” Alok declared on stage in Portuguese. “Living [in the Amazon] are the riverside dwellers, the Indigenous people — and now, they will share the stage. The future is ancestral is with you now, the Yawanawa.”
Aside from being the name of his latest album, “The future is ancestral” is a phrase that represents Alok’s deep dive into the ancient living traditions of the Yawanawa people who hail from the Amazon. Their ritualistic music and powerful singing offer a transcendent connection to the forest, bridging the past and the present with each note.
Trending on Billboard
This grand international affair served as the ceremonial commencement of the one-year countdown to the COP30 — the United Nations Climate Change Conference — while simultaneously launching Alok’s Aurea Tour. The event, a manifestation of resilience and hope for the enduring health of our planet, was presented by Banco do Brasil, and received full support from the government of Pará.
The three-hour concert expanded across various segments, also spotlighting local legends like Joelma, Gaby Amarantos, Zaynara, Viviane Batidão and Pinduca, many of whom represent the native music of Pará, carimbó (a traditional upbeat style characterized by Afro-Indigenous rhythms) and tecnobrega (meaning “techno tacky” — electronic reworkings of Brazilian music), as well as indie rock singer Zeeba.
The pyramid stage itself, which took two weeks to build, stood as a towering feat of modern technology, equipped with over 100 tons of gear, a 360-degree platform, and more than 2,000 LED panels. The event’s visual spectacle was further intensified by 432 drones, orchestrated by Flyworks Drone Show, which painted the night sky with luminescent forms — celestial motifs, an Indigenous headdress, and a colossus tree, all casting a magical glow over the gathered throngs.
Alok performs in Belém, Pará, Brazil on Saturday, Nov. 23 as part of his Aurea Tour, kicking off the countdown to COP30 in 2025.
Filipe Miranda
In support of these initiatives, the governor of Pará, Helder Barbalho, emphasized the importance of such events in changing public perceptions and policy directions. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity to host the world’s largest climate change event in Belém,” he asserted to Billboard Español, referring to COP30.
The governor highlighted the dual necessity of preserving the immense biodiversity of the Amazon while also considering the livelihoods of its 29 million inhabitants — drawing a vivid picture of the “urban Amazonians, riverine Amazonians, and Indigenous peoples” who form the fabric of this vibrant ecosystem. “I believe there is no more symbolically important place for this than the Amazon than Belém. We understand that using entertainment to engage society is crucial,” Barbalho added.
But it was a profound personal journey that set Alok on this path a decade ago. Struggling with a deep depression in 2014, the artist sought solace and meaning. “I was looking for answers. I just felt a huge emptiness,” he said days before the event at the Ilha do Combú, an island located along the Guamá River. “A friend of mine showed me a YouTube video of Saiti Kaya, from the Yawanawa, singing, and it was just beautiful. I said, ‘Wow, this is inspiration. I want to go there. I want to visit them.’”
With nothing to lose, Alok booked his journey, unaware that it would require three flights totaling 13 hours, followed by a grueling nine-hour trip in a small canoe (“not a boat,” he added with a chuckle). As he navigated the river, a massive rainstorm suddenly erupted, prompting him to question, “What am I doing here?” But he pressed on, compelled by a deep need to continue.
Upon arriving, Alok experienced a profound realization. “We have this impression that we are a more developed culture and they are less developed. As soon as I arrived there, I realized that [notion] doesn’t exist. It’s different views and different goals. The way they connect with nature was something that we lost a long time ago.”
During his 10-day immersion with the Yawanawa people, Alok engaged with their traditional practices, diving into the spiritual and medicinal aspects of their culture. He participated in rituals involving ayahuasca — a potent hallucinogenic brew, made from specific vines known for their powerful psychoactive effects — and kambo, which involves applying the secretion of a frog to burns on the skin, believed by many to cleanse the body and mind. These experiences opened new realms of understanding for Alok, touching on themes of life, death and rebirth inherent in these rites.
Alok explained that the discovery of ayahuasca is a miracle of nature, requiring a mysterious combination of two plants among the vast biodiversity of the Amazon. The odds of such a discovery, he noted, were astronomically low, “one in 100 million.”
“[The Yawanawa] told me that it was a dream how they found out how to combine,” he added. “We have an enzyme in our digestive [system] that does not allow the DMT to release. What happens is that one plant releases the DMT and the other one shuts down our enzyme. So that’s how it works properly. It was a life-changing experience that [transformed] how I contribute through my art.” He explains that he ultimately shifted from commercial hits to “songs for healing.”
“For us, music is vital,” said Célia Xakriabá, an activist of the Xakriabá people of Brazil and the first Indigenous woman to earn a doctorate in anthropology from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “Many ask, ‘What’s the top hit this year?’ For my people, the most significant music isn’t the newest but the oldest, the most ancestral. [Alok] said to me, ‘Célia, I’ve had the impression of singing to millions of people and them not hearing me.’ And I said, ‘Maybe it’s because you’re singing from too high a stage. We, Indigenous people, sing from the earth.’”
Meanwhile, Mapu Huni Kuin, spiritual leader, chief, and musician of the Huni Kuin people, was discovered by Alok through his song “Índio Mensageiro” on YouTube. Mapu recalled how Alok reached out to him, not only appreciating his art but recognizing the potential for greater awareness and preservation: “He saw this project as an opportunity for us to archive our knowledge and practices for future generations — our prayers, our art, our way of life.”
Alok released The Future is Ancestral in April, a nine-track album that features Yawanawa Saiti Kaya, Guarani Nhandewa, Wyanã Kariri Xocó, Brô MC’s, OWERÁ, Kaingang, as well as Mapu and Célia, representing a total of eight Indigenous communities from Brazil to help save the Amazon; all proceeds directly support the artists and their communities.
“What we present is the voice of the forest,” said Mapu. “The Future Is Ancestral is about making people listen to what the elders used to say and speak, and the best way is through our sacred chants. We pray for the healing of humanity.”
“It’s a platform that amplifies the Indigenous voices of Brazil, which has faced significant threats. Once numbering five million, we are now only one million and seven hundred,” added Célia. “Indigenous peoples make up 5% of the world’s population yet protect 82% of its biodiversity. Together with traditional communities, we represent 50% of the solutions for the planet’s health. So, when Indigenous peoples sing, the forest sings with us.”
Aligning with the environmental goals of his album, Alok brought up a relevant global initiative to emphasize the practical importance of natural solutions, “Elon Musk launched the XPRIZE [Carbon Removal] competition. If you could create a technology that’s able to remove the carbon [dioxide] from the atmosphere, you would get $100 million. That exists; it’s called trees. You know what I mean? That’s the point.”
He continued to reflect on the cultural paradigm shift his project aims to bolster: “That’s why every time we say ‘The Future sI Ancestral,’ we are bringing the ancestral knowledge to create a sustainable future for us. That’s the most important point about this project — it’s raising their voices. I’m very proud of them. Something beautiful about this project is that many times when I work with [other non-Indigenous] artists, it’s always about ‘them, them, them.’ But with the Indigenous, it’s different, they always think about the collective.”
Governor Barbalho highlighted the strategic preparations for Belém to host the upcoming COP30 next year, underscoring its significance not just locally but globally: “We are preparing Belém to host 60,000 attendees immersed in environmental discussions, exploring solutions and tackling social challenges. This positions us to leave a tangible legacy for the environment and the city.” In conjunction with COP30, Global Citizen Fest will also take place in Belém, simultaneously, marking the first time the New York City festival arrives in Latin America.
“Our generation has a unique opportunity to create a lasting legacy for the Amazon and its people, and to improve Belém as a city,” explained Barbalho. “My hope is that by the end of this journey, we will have played our part in ushering in a new era for this generation. More importantly, I hope we leave future generations with a healthier environment and a thriving forest that holds environmental, social, and economic value.”
Alok reflected on the transformative potential of intertwining ancestral knowledge with contemporary global movements. “It is [imperative] that the population understands the importance of COP30, which is going to be the most significant one in history,” said Alok. “We are approaching [what is called] the point of no return. Just this year in Brazil, we’ve lost an area equivalent to 130 cities the size of São Paulo — home to 11.5 million people — to deforestation. The forest cannot recover by itself. People need to realize that Brazil can be a leader in sustainable growth and how we can onboard others. The population must pressure our leaders to make real changes.”
As COP30 approaches, Belém becomes a turning point in global environmental advocacy, with the help of Alok and The Future is Ancestral project. With the world watching, there is a collective aspiration that the international event will highlight the critical need for sustainable practices and mobilize concrete actions to safeguard our planet for generations to come.
Alok performs in Belém, Pará, Brazil on Saturday, Nov. 23 as part of his Aurea Tour, kicking off the countdown to COP30 in 2025.
Filipe Miranda
Disclosure: This trip to cover Alok’s concert in Belém, Pará, Brazil was sponsored by Alok’s team and the government of Pará, who provided funding for the flight and accommodations.
11/22/2024
Dot continues to shake up the game with this surprise album drop.
11/22/2024
Westside Gunn once considered slowing down.
In recent years, the Buffalo-native has suffered the loss of family and friends, many of whom were his biggest supporters over the course of his life and career. Last October, he told Rolling Stone that he was considering stepping away from music and no longer making traditional albums. He said that he wanted to get back to “dumping.”
In the underground rap scene, “dumping” is the act of continuously releasing projects. It allows artists to get creative with the pricing of their projects or feature exclusive merch and perks. Dumping also allows independent acts to make a living by releasing a torrent of material that they could then perform on tour.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Gunn doesn’t have to release music to make a living anymore, but the act of dumping helped him be more creative at a time when he was feeling down. Then there were rumors and narratives surrounding his Griselda collective as he, Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher were seemingly going their separate ways professionally and creatively. Lately, Gunn has been focusing on his pro wrestling company, Fourth Rope, but still believes his brother (Conway) and his cousin (Benny) have to come back together to remind people what Griselda is really about.
Trending on Billboard
To begin jogging the rap world’s memory, Gunn decided to drop two projects this week. First, he released the five-song EP entitled 11. Narrated by Buffalo street legend Sly Green, the EP is dedicated to his brother Big Dump, who was killed in April of this year. Then, he dropped Still Praying, a mixtape that he’s been teasing for some months that’s hosted by DJ Drama.
Gunn stopped by the Billboard offices in NYC for a long conversation about legacy, family, wrestling, and much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You said in an interview that you were going to stop making studio albums. You linked with DJ Drama to make this feel like more of a mixtape. What’s the difference between a mixtape and an album these days?
I feel like it’s different energies. Like, say for instance, people take a year to make an album because they’re developing the sound and getting shit together, and they might be going through 500 songs to pick the best 20 and all of that shit. I feel like the mixtape energy is one or two days just bang them shits out. Whatever you spit is just, that’s what it is. All my shit like that, though, because I don’t take no time to make none of my albums. So it’s kind of different for me. It’s all the same.
Yeah, that’s why I was curious because you already spoke on that and have that reputation.
I did 11 in one day. I did Still Praying in one day.
On And Then You Pray for Me, you had a mix of some trap beats and were trying to go in a different direction, to show some versatility. Still Praying, though, sounds more like traditional Griselda that people are used to.
That’s the thing. It’s not even like I do s–t purposely. It’s just the energy of that moment. When I made And Then You Pray for Me, I was at Paris Fashion Week, having fun every night, not coming in until its broad daylight. We had party after party after party. It was a vibe. That’s just where I was at in life at that moment, so you got that energy. But where I’m at right now artistically, and where I’m at in life, and just how I feel — it’s me, but it’s new energy. I don’t want to kind of sound corny on some reborn s–t, but it’s like Fly God and now it’s Super Fly God, for real [Laughs].
I told motherf–kers, can’t nobody f–k with me on almost every album since day one. But now it’s like, I know it. I went from telling y’all that shit, to now when you fast-forward and I’m more mature and been in the game and know who’s who and know who did what. It’s confirmed. I know it. I’ve been doing fashion, I’ve been doing wrestling, I’ve been doing art, I’ve been doing a lot of other things, but I was like, “Yo, let me just step back and let n—as know what time it is,” and I cooked back-to-back projects. So, that’s just where I’m at right now, like, “Man, put a beat on, and another one, and another one.” Now we’re five songs in type s–t. I can make an album every day right now.
You said that you wanted to get back to dumping. That’s what you guys were doing when you first came out, dropping a mixtape every other month.
Yeah, because people trying to rewrite history and forget who Griselda is. Griselda n—as fathers in the first place. I think with Conway doing what he doing by himself, and Benny doing what he’s doing by himself, and when they look at me — I’m at Fashion Week and I’m front row at wrestling events — n—as forget who Griselda is in the first place. I never said we were the first people to do it, but nobody took the s–t to this level like Westside Gunn and Griselda.
Nobody was on they fly s–t, nobody had big jewelry, nobody was able to f–king take care of their family. We showed you the blueprint of how to take this underground s–t to making money. Because before that n—as were still sleeping at their aunt’s house, and living tape to tape. I’m telling you, I know what time it is. All this vinyl s–t, all this s–t everybody doing, their whole blueprint came from Westside Gunn and Griselda. We showed y’all the way. It ain’t no other underground MC you could think of that paid two million cash for a house and I did that four years ago. I showed n—as the way.
But again, everybody started doing their own separate thing and living their lives that it went away from the music. When you go away from the music, now you got this man coming in and this man coming in, but they taking the formula. It ain’t even they formula, they just taking it, so in they mind now, they thinking they iller than us. I’m telling you, it’s crazy. I see a lot of these dudes, they got the arrogance like they them boys, I literally look at them like they my sons. The album is dope, but you my son.
Right now it’s back to the music. I’m talking to Benny, I’m talking to Conway, we all family. When you with somebody for 30 plus years of your life, sometimes you take a year or two away, but it’s okay because we’re real family. If anything happened to any one of us, I bet you we’re gonna be the first people there, or if anything happened in the family, we all gonna be there. It’s just everybody grown men, and we just had our little time where everybody was doing their own thing. But now it’s back to Griselda time starting now.
So, it was important for you to have them on this tape.
Yeah, because I gotta let people know this sh—t is forever. People always thought we was gonna break up. They always wanted that. People love the division because we really strong as f–k. Who knows what it would’ve been right now? I don’t regret nothing because everybody learned to be better men, too. You gotta learn from your mistakes. We from Buffalo, we never had anything, nobody taught us s–t. When you got dudes coming in the game now and getting the money, the fame, you from a city nobody never came from. Now your friends might be in your ear. We done went through it all, but now we realized, like, “Yo, we family and can’t nobody f–k with us.” We about to start working on What Would Chine Gun Do 2. We back on it. It’s Griselda Time.
Technically, Conway isn’t signed to Griselda anymore, right? But that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be making music together.
I’ma tell you like this. When we did the whole situation, it was never about money. Of course, I had Griselda Records the company, but I never looked at it as I’m the big dog when they signed to me. I promise you, man, as much money as I made off Conway in my entire life, I probably couldn’t buy my left or right wrist. I’ve never made no money off Conway. I got a couple dollars off that Shady deal, but I got a leather coat that cost more money than I made off Conway’s Shady deal. I’ve never made no money off Conway. He got 100 percent of his merch, 100 percent of his music, 100 percent of his shows — I’ve never taken a dollar from Conway, except for 20 percent of the Shady deal. There was a narrative out there that looked crazy for a minute, but I’m never gonna speak on nothing because I know it ain’t true, there’s nothing to speak on, and this is my brother, and we really know what’s going on.
If there was tension, he wouldn’t be on this project.
There was never no tension, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. People think that s–t. We can’t have people thinking that we ain’t making music together no more.
Does the creative in you wish they would let you executive produce some of the projects they did elsewhere?
No, they’re men. Where they at and where they energy at might not require Westside Gunn and that’s okay. But guess what? I didn’t look at that as like, “Oh, they saying, ‘F–k me, I’ll never work with them again.’” I’m looking at it as, they’re learning, they’re building and growing. How they going to be the best them trying to just be under me? They not going to know until they be like, “Okay, well, you know what? Damn, maybe it is better that we come back together,” whatever the case may be. We’re always learning and we never had nobody to teach us this s–t. We’re family.
It was never about money. I never said nothing about them. It wasn’t no pillow talk. It was never nothing. Sometimes we gotta go our separate ways and take time off.
It felt like you were focused more on yourself on Still Praying. Usually you’ll have a bunch of features scattered throughout, where as this time around the features started at the end.
Mind you, I made it all in that day, so I was just dumping — it’s not like they in the room with me. So that’s why Drama says, “Can’t forget the family.” The album was done, but I had to call them so I can get a verse real quick, because I’m not about to drop it without them. I sent it to Conway, Benny, and Stove. Then the joint I did with Rome, we did at Statik’s studio.
Would you rather be together in the studio? Does it really matter?
Nah, don’t matter, as long as we paint the picture — but I do prefer us cooking together in person, that’s my favorite thing to do, because that’s a part of my curation. When we did WWCD, we did it together. When we did that album with Shady, we did that in a day and a half. Both my Shady albums combined — Who Made the Sunshine and WWCD — I made both those studio albums, quote, unquote, in four days. I literally rap maybe six, seven days out of the year.
So the beats that you pick are what? Are they being made there, or sitting in a pack?
I got ’em. I got enough beats to last the rest of my career.
This is like Daringer, The Alchemist, Conductor? They send you beats all the time?
Yeah, everybody. Pete Rock, Preemo, Swizz, all the big boys and the illest underground ones too right now, tucked because I’m a curator. I got hundreds of Conductor beats.
So, when you’re ready to work you open up a folder and start going in?
As soon as I get a pack, I narrow them down. I listen to all the packs, but then I sing to a certain folder, so then I’ll go back to that folder. There’s a science with my s–t. So, then I go to the sound. Like, “Okay, who got this sound? Matter of fact, yeah, this s–t would be crazy if I get a Swizz beat. Let me see what’s the hardest Swizz I got. Aight, boom. Well, you know what I don’t got? Uncle Al, let me check on my Uncle Al batch. This project needs Al.” I just bounce around like that as part of the curation process. When I did Nacksaw with Estee Nack, we did it in person. Pray for Haiti with Mach, we did it in person. Armani Caesar Liz 1 & 2, we did it in person. I work quick, so if you’re ready to work, we going to work. When you cooking with Westside Gunn, be ready, because we’re making your album in two days.
Do you have a pack of RZA beats? I was telling my boss that I was interviewing you and he wanted me to ask if you were planning on working with the RZA more. He listens to “House of Glory” from the last tape all the time.
Yeah, that’s my s–t. I would love to. I wanna put RZA on WWCD2 because Griselda on a RZA beat is history, and that’s what I’m saying. Me, personally, I don’t know how long I’m gonna do this for. I went from saying, “F–k this sh—t” to “I got another three in me.” But I also got kids, and I also want to raise my babies. I also do my wrestling s—t, my fashion s—t, so I got other things to keep me occupied.
Yeah, but you’re an artist, too — so sometimes you gotta make some music.
Yeah that’s why it’s never planned with me. Once I get the urge, I make the project right on the spot.
That’s why with the album thing, you don’t want to be beholden to a release schedule.
I might be saying something that just literally happened right now, where it’s like, if it dropped three months from now, it doesn’t even make sense. When I’m ready to drop everybody scrambles for a week or two. Even with this project, there’s only been social media posts as of right now. Hasn’t been no street presence, no Internet presence, no singles, no videos, no nothing.
I don’t think it’s on here, but you did a theme song for TNA? “Chocolate Face” with DJ Khaled.
That’s gonna be on Flygod Is an Awesome God 3. That album is a whole ‘nother juggernaut. This how everything came together: Awesome God 3 was done and I thought it was a masterpiece. And this was the best way for Westside Gunn to come back on the scene and basically have the Album of the Year. When I was finishing Awesome God 3, I went to Paris to go mix and master it, but I couldn’t get my sessions because my engineer was in Africa, and our communication was off, so now I got studio time. I left my family, flew out to Paris to do this work, what I’m gonna do? So, I made Still Praying while I was out there. Now I went from about to mix and master one album to making a new one.
So I was like, let me have Drama hop on this to give it that mixtape feel; just me dumpin’. You could hear the hunger, and it just reminded me of Ski Mask Westside Gunn. My whole career, I drop something around Halloween. I wanted to keep the tradition, but I wanted to cook something totally different. I wanted 11 to be totally different from Still Praying. I wanted the EP to be more slow and soulful, more personal. And not to get too deep, because I really don’t even want to talk about 11 because 11 is very personal to me; people might listen to it like it’s just music, but it’s not just music to me.
My brother got killed in April, and you got him on the cover, and it says “Free Sly… for Big Dump.” When you dig deeper into that project, Sly got life, and my brother got killed, and these are two people that’s key in my life that I probably will never get to see again. Sly is optimistic, but he may never come home. I had Sly narrate 11, so people actually get to hear a different side to him. In Buffalo, Sly Green is like John Gotti to us.
Sly is the OG in Buffalo like a Bumpy Johnson?
The biggest of the biggest. American Gangster, A&E, History Channel documentary, Don Diva covers, like the real deal. It don’t get no more gangster than Sly Green. Everyday you see him, he’s in a suit and tie. If his movie came out, it’d be one of the illest of all time. He got his law degree and has been spending his whole time in prison trying to get other kingpins home. He’s was able to get the four life sentences off him, so now he has the 110 years, and he already served 33. You can hear the optimism in his voice on the project. I hope he do come home. You hear him on there talking for the first time, for real, for real, saying what he’s saying. You hear my brother, I got a voicemail with him. Keisha Plum couldn’t even finish her poem. She cried the whole time writing it. It took her forever to lay the poem down.
It’s a project I never did before. It’s a quick five-piece, but the five pieces are very special. This is so over heads that they don’t even understand what they even listening to. Not knowing my brother just got killed in April, not knowing Sly is one of the biggest gangsters of all time. I used that picture of my brother showing me something. We were always ahead of the game, that’s all we did was study, just wanting to be one up on everybody. I made it for everybody to enjoy, but it’s something that’s harder for me to listen to.
Recording that was like a cathartic thing. You had to get your emotions out.
It’s hard for me to even post the cover. This is something I still deal with every day. I done lost our DJ, Shay. I lost my aunt Michelle who raised me my whole life. I lost my granddad six months before her in the same year. I bought ‘Chelle a house and gave her the money for the furniture, and she never even got a chance to get the furniture. People don’t understand the pain I’ve been going through the last three, four years.
With all the stuff that you’ve been through with your family and even with Virgil passing, did you have to find a new energy to help get you out of depression.
That’s why music really wasn’t a big factor. I focused so much on wrestling because wrestling is my safe zone. Me sitting front row is my therapy. If it wasn’t for wrestling, I’d probably be dead or in jail. I’d be losing my mind feeling lost. My influences and all the people that’s key and instrumental in my life and who I feel were my biggest fans and my biggest supporters, I’ve lost. It’s f–ked up, because when you lose so many people, you start getting a paranoia.
That sh—t is scary, bro. You start to think about your mortality.
That’s where I’ve been at, you know? That’s why I say, before it’s all said and done, we can’t let motherf–kers rewrite our history. We can’t let Griselda go out shaky. We gotta let n—as know, this s–t was the illest.
You plan on putting out a tape called Michelle? You’ve shouted that name out and refer to Michelle Records a lot.
Michelle Records is me and Stove together.
So is it a group or a tape? Stove God is affiliated with Griselda, but he’s not signed officially, right?
He don’t gotta be [signed], he is Griselda. I’m actually going to executive produce his Babygrande album.
Another name I wanted to bring up is Mach-Hommy. You brought up Pray for Haiti earlier. Can you speak on why you guys haven’t worked together again?
It ain’t no issue. We literally just hugged each other four days ago. We’re going to make another one. It’s about timing. Even with WWCD2, they’ve been wanting to do it, but they also had their time to shine all year, too, and I didn’t. Can I get mine? [Laughs.] Benny hit me like, “Buz, when we starting? Conway hit me, “Bro, when we starting?” But it’s like, “Yo, like, can I get my rocks off, man? Y’all had yours, let me get mine off and then we going to do that.”
And then I also want to get that out the way, respectfully, because then I want to focus on what me and Stove got going on. But then guess what? I can come back and cook with Mach, I can come back and cook with Estee Nack, the people that I love cooking with.
On Saturday, Nov. 2, you’re doing something in Chicago with your wrestling company Fourth Rope. Can you talk about that a bit?
Fourth Rope comes from me being front row at every WrestleMania, every Royal Rumble, every Survivor Series, every Summer Slam, every Double or Nothing, every Full Gear. I’m at three wrestling events this week. I just left Detroit for TNA’s pay-per-view, and I leave here tomorrow to go to AEW Dynamite in Cleveland. So, me being front row, I say I am the fourth rope because there’s three ropes on the ring and I’m front row.
The first party we had was during WrestleMania, we sold out TLA in Philly. The second one we did the same thing, House of Blues in Cleveland during Summer Slam. This weekend we had the opportunity to throw our matches and make it about us and not piggybacking off Summer Slam or WrestleMania. And I picked Chicago because I go there to see more pay-per-views than anywhere else and every rap show I’ve ever had in Chicago sold out, too. I figure I mix both worlds, I already know what it’s gonna do. Illinois period is a big wrestling state and Chicago is a wrestling city.
You have your own wrestlers and everything?
Not only do I have my own wrestlers, but I have the best wrestlers in the world. I have the wrestlers from TNA. I have the TNA champ. I have Moose, Jordan Grace, Mike Santana from TNA. We also have a no-holds-barred steel cage match with the Death Match legend Nick Gage. We got the legend MVP that was with WWE, he’s our commissioner. They got the whole Usos thing going on right now with The Bloodline. So for the championship, we got Moose versus Zilla Fatu. We got a piece of The Bloodline too. We also got DJ Premier and Pete Rock. All of this sh—t is for $60, bro.
How did you meet AA Rashid? The first time I heard of him was on your albums. Sometimes, I’ll listen to a track of him talking like its a song. It reminds me of Popa Wu.
It’s crazy how I met him, because I was hustling. I had some work on a Mega Bus, taking my trips, doing what I’m doing. I was hustling still when I did HWH 1 & 2, and all of that, nobody really knew who I was yet. I was only out of the Feds for two years, I was just on my chill sh—t. I was still on my papers hustling, you know? Grinding. I was getting off in Atlanta and AA was on the bus, and I had just did HWH 2 with the Chanel ski mask on the cover. Griselda Records comes from Griselda by Fashion Rebels, so I was already designing. The jacket I had was a Griselda bomber and he was looking at it like, “That sh—t crazy.”
He was going to see his daughter or something and we started kicking it during the stop before Atlanta. He said he was into fashion too and designed and that he had some friends in the music industry. So, once we got off I handed him a copy of HWH 2 with the Chanel ski mask. If you see that Chanel ski mask cover for the first time, especially back then, it was like, “Yo, what the f—k is this?” He said, “Yo, this you? I’ma play this for some friends,” and come to find out his friend was Planet Asia. This started with me meeting AA on that Mega Bus on the way to Atlanta. Planet Asia then played the CD for The Alchemist.
That’s how you got on the radar.
Exactly, and Planet Asia is cool with Hus Kingpin, so Hus was out there and I had never been to L.A. in my life. I’m an Eastside Buffalo n—a, we never had no opportunities. Buffalo n—as never really leave Buffalo. I took the opportunity to go out there and link with these n—as.
Has it been hard to go to Toronto because of your past?
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I’m going to try again soon. I was recently in Toronto to check out Raekwon’s Purple Factory.
Speaking of Raekwon, I was gonna bring up if you would ever consider executive producing an album with him and Ghostface?
Of course, just last month it was brought up. I’ve talked to Rae and Ghost about it, and I talked to Jada about it. Them the only people I’ve ever came to and was like, “Yo, I want to do this for y’all.” A Rae and Ghost by me and a Jadakiss by me would be legendary. I wanna do something with Nas too. There’s a mutual respect with them.
I’m sure you guys remind them of themselves.
Rae has been in Buffalo with us. He’s shown us love since day one. Prodigy was a big supporter early, too. Prodigy used to come to Buffalo and f—k with us on his own since day one. I done visited Prodigy in this hospital bed. Sean Price, rest in peace, was a supporter, as well. You know, I have songs with Sean Price, Prodigy, MF DOOM, and DMX. A lot of people can’t say that. Dolph was my favorite rapper, that was my dream collab.