Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not one for the limelight I suppose.
I'm just at home all the time wearing jogging pants.
I look at the big picture and try not to create with ego.
I make popular music but I'm not necessarily a pop produce.
Internet has created the ability to connect people instantly.
I love the process of collaboration... to me it just makes sense.
When you're producing, you're really just making a series of decisions.
I love Nirvana, Weezer and a lot of pop punk stuff - Blink-182, I loved.
The thread that ties together everything I love is honesty in the intention.
You can't just plug your guitar in your computer and make it sound like an old record.
As I change and grow, different things excite me and I just follow where that leads me.
I grew up on hip-hop and crate-digging and those sensibilities are deeply ingrained in me.
I totally embrace the different transformations we've seen in hip-hop throughout the years.
Broken Clocks' is actually a song I produced for my boy River Tiber featuring my boy Daniel Caesar.
I was into skateboarding, so through skating I kind of got into hip hop by discovering it through skate videos.
I don't really generate material specifically for the Kingsway Music Library. It's just a product of the way I work.
When I go in the studio with Post, I have a really good idea of what he's going to gravitate to, what we can work with.
If you can make the best music ever but it requires bringing in a few different perspectives, I'd rather make the best music ever.
Whether it's a huge hit or sold five copies, as long artistically and creatively I can stand by what I did, then I'll feel successful.
I know people who have sampled gospel music, and then they go to clear the sample, and it's like, 'You can't take the Lord's music and make this.'
Once '0 to 100' happened, it sort of spun this chain reaction - really the first big record that I was a part of. It was a big, life-changing thing for me.
I might find out about a songwriter and start following them on Instagram. Within a day, we might be hanging out and feeling out whether we can work together.
I love music with real instruments. I'm not one of those guys that's a purist about analog vs. digital, but I love the analog approach. Sonically, I connect to that.
I'm definitely interested by a lot of things outside of music - technology, film, quantum physics - and I'm realizing that I can put my creativity into anything I kind of choose to.
Nirvana, Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins, all those bands, at their core, are just really incredible pop music and I think a lot of that stuff has deeply affected the way I approach music.
I can see that everybody has their own challenges that they are dealing with. But what's so beautiful about music is that it brings people together, levels the playing field and opens people up.
I wanted to be a great producer so I studied great hip-hop producers, but also stuff beyond that: Phil Spector, David Axelrod, Gamble and Huff. They're equally as influential to me as Dilla, Premier, and Pete Rock.
I come from the school of hip-hop where you just buy records and sample records all the time. Doing that is tough sometimes, because if you get a placement on a major record, your record could get shelved because of clearance issues.
Kanye is producing in the true sense of the word. 'Real Friends' was an idea started by me and Boi-1da. We passed it off to Kanye, and Kanye kind of stripped it down and had Havoc add some drums to it. Kanye had the vision. That's really true-school production.
I try to create something that draws you in without overthinking it. Something that resonates with you automatically that you don't have to think about. That's what the best pop is about: Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Nirvana - these guys made some of the most authentic and popular music.
The Kingsway Music Library was sort of a byproduct of all the creation I was doing. As creators, we kind of just create blindly sometimes and I couldn't physically see every idea through, so I created this ecosystem where I made the ideas available to people to download, to sample and to put their own twist on it.