You’re so dedicated to keeping your fans content with material, it’s only been two years since you dropped When Life Gives you Lemons. . . and you just now released enough content to be considered an album for most artists, yet you classify it as a double EP as To All My Friends & Blood Makes the Blade Holy. Why not just drop it as an album? What’s up next – are you currently working on another LP?
One of the EPs on there is called to all my friends that was an accompaniment to a book that was supposed to come out in august and the book got pushed back til fall and we booked this tour even we were booking it around that book and then there was another EP that I made strictly because I thought that to all my friends ep was so fucking optimistic and pleasant that I wanted to kinda make a counter to it which was blood makes the blade holy and that was about friendships gone bad and not being able to relate to people whereas the other one was about being able to relate to people bc that was coming out with a photo book that follows us around tour and now when they told us the book wasn’t coming out until after the tour was over, I was like, oh great now we have these eps that nobody’s gonna know about so I decided that, at the very last two minutes of the game, let’s throw them both on a cd together and put it out like that and even the label was like are you sure you wanna do that, it’s gonna look like a record and I was like, well we did it before with the lucy ford eps and nobody was confused then, so maybe we can do it again? And then as soon as it came out, obviously I google the fuck outta my own shit, so im looking at it and everybody’s saying, why didn’t you just call it an LP and im like fuck, I should have maybe sent out a press release or something out explaining it, but you know what at the end of the day who cares. You know what, you can call it an lp or 2 eps, it’s a quadriple single, I don’t give a fuck.
Can you tell me a little bit more about this book, what it’s about and who the author is?
The author’s name is Dan and it’s actually a photography book and it’s called On the Road with Atmosphere for Seven Years, and I think it might have a cuter title than that, let me see what the title is, it might have been called seven, and subtitled, on the road with atmosphere. It’s a friend of mine, dan who lives in los angeles. And I’d say 95% of the photos used of me online anywhere was a photo taken by him. And he’s toured with us a bunch, just so he can roll with me and take photos of weird shit on tour and whatever and obviously you know whether . . . he got a lot of photos of us and maybe not so much of us but just what we see when we tour so the book is about what we see when we tour and kinda behind the scenes kinda shit. Not a whole lot of it is about how cool we look or anything like that.
What’s your favorite track on the new eps?
Oh goodness. Umm. Well I’d like to think that the Number None might be, but not because it’s good but I would say just because it’s funny to me because I made a song about this personal story that happened to me when I was in high school and you know here I am 38, 37 when I wrote it, and here I am, 20 something years later writing a song about one of my best friends slept with my ex girlfriend? You know? Its kinda silly, and it’s selfish of me to say it’s my favorite song, but it is kinda my favorite song. It’s silly, it’s funny and I guess I kind of get off on the fact that I’m allowed to make songs about something so silly or so funny.
With all your extra eps and Strictly leakage and all those other albums you put out, how do you determine if a song makes an actual album vs one of those extra side projects?
Oh I mean, when we make the songs we make them for the projects they go on. The lemons songs are the songs that we made for the lemons album and the sad clown were the songs we made. When we sit down to make a song, we already know what we’re trying to make it for. You know there’s times where we’ll sit down and make a song, and we know we’re making it and the song just sucks, so in that sense the song will usually get scrapped or it might get set aside to get looked at again later to fix it or you know, once in a while I’ll give it to my kid and he goes and puts it on the internet.
Can you tell me about the album art? Significance of the baby bottle of the cover?
I guess maybe (fatherhood), the baby bottle is something I’ve been trying to sneak into a lot of artwork over the last ten years so there’s certain t-shirts out there or posters or different Atmosphere stuff with a baby bottle involved and I think this is just a continuation of that. You know, especially when we were trying to think of what we want to put on the cover, you know, it’s like a toast to all my friends. Well these guys all have liquor because that’s obvious and I have something that’s for the kids. And to me, it was like, some of our audience are old ass grown up alcoholics and some of our audience are brand new fourteen year olds, you know what I mean. So to me, it was kinda like a I don’t know, it was just I guess it was silly. We were just being silly. But how can you not be silly with a baby bottle?
Obviously, you’re pretty devoted to the Midwest, especially your home digs Minneapolis. I gotta say, the hip hop scene there is insanely positive and unlike any other city I’ve experienced with fellow Doom Tree and Rhymesayers clan. If you had to bounce from Minneapolis, where would you go? Are there any particular cities that you feel connected to/excited to visit when touring?
I’ve always had a relationship with Chicago and it’s kinda cheating for me to say this because that’s where you’re writing this for but my relationship with Chicago has always been about the people I know there, the good friends that I have and I always think that if I ever have to leave Minneapolis cuz the cops are after me or something I would probably end up in Chicago. I would also say I’m kind of fond of North Carolina.
Speaking of Chicago, Is Chicago your last date on the To All My Friends tour? Any celebrating in the works or is it back in the van to the twin cities?
If you don’t count Minneapolis shows in November, Chicago is last date. Well I have a brand new baby, 5 months old at home, so as soon as I walk off the stage I’m gonna need to either steal a car or taking a bus to the airport or whatever, but I’m trying to get home as soon as possible to go and hang out with my brand new baby.
What’s been the highlight of the most recent tour so far?
Well it’s only been a week long and we actually got to go home to Minneapolis yesterday for like 12 hours, to do our laundry. So I got to go home and hang out with my son, and so that was definitely my highlight so far. But other than that I would say all the shows have been great, we got to go back to Cincinnati and we don’t get to go there often, so that was definitely a highlight. We got to go to Indianapolis and we don’t get to go there often, so that was a highlight. You know, I guess I could say that about most of the cities we’ve been to already. But a lot of this tour, aside from Chicago and Madison, you know, a lot of this tour was based on cities that we don’t get to go to a lot. And so if you look at the schedule, you’ll see we have two shows in Missoula, Montana, we have a show in Spokane, we’re going to Boise. We’re going to a lot of cities that we don’t get to go to a lot and that a lot of rappers just don’t go to at all.
For those who aren’t familiar, how would you describe/promote your fellow tour Mates Blueprint, Grieves, Budo & DJ Rare Grooves?
I would say Blue Print is the kind of rapper that’s very personable like his words strike a chord with people that’s very intimate and I don’t say intimate in the sense of like cuddle, intimate but I mean like, what he has to say is relatable to on so many levels that it turns into like, it’s almost like you know him, like a friendship, and he’s just a great rapper, on top of it. And grieves I would say is a I don’t know what to say really, that dude has got so much in on it, I think grieves is gonna end up (had to take other call). . . I think what Grieves is doing on stage is really intense for somebody that you may have never seen before, you know there’s gonna be a lot of kids that have already seen grieves and whatever but for any of the atmosphere fans who have never seen grieves, it’s a pretty intense show and the pace of it and what they’re doing conceptually is so much fucking fun to watch, I don’t want to give anything away by talking about what they do on their set but I would say the potential that the both of them have combined is amazing I really think a lot of people are gonna feel these guys.
What have you been listening to lately? Any new artists we should share with our readers we should be listening to that we probably aren’t? What’s your favorite album of 2010 thus far?
Pauses – oh man. I would say my favorite album of so far is still the Roots album, the how I got over album. But I’ve recently been getting into there’s a band called Local Natives. See, I don’t know what other people are listening to anymore, because I just a lot of times I don’t really get a chance to spend as much time researching new bands and shit as I used to. I have a teenage son and he’ll turn me onto new music or else my wife will. Because she’s a little bit more tapped into the music scene, especially locally, but also just, nationally. So a lotta times, I’m taking my cues from them. Sometime in the last year or so maybe, the Scarlett Johansen record came out that I thought was pretty cool. There’s a band called Mumford and Sons? I thought they were kinda cool. Umm, fuck. I don’t know what else.
What’s the last show you went to as a fan?
Repeats question – oh my god. Yo Gabba Gabba.
What was your weirdest fan interaction that you can recall?
Oh, I have no answer to that. I have no idea. I have a pretty regular series of weird fan interactions. It’s like all the heroes of rap that I grew up listening to, when you go up to them and tell them that you like their shit, you just basically give em a handshake or a pound and you say something like yo dope, you’re dope or dope shit or it’s an honor to meet you. But the kids that meet me have a tendency to come up to me and tell me some of their deepest darkest shit. And I think that you know obviously the relationship that I have with a lot of these people is strictly based off the music they here so I think that a lot of them feel like they can relate to me, and that almost like I’m a safe person to talk to. You know we all have like these weird dotted lines that we set up between ourselves and our friends even, or ourselves and our parents where it’s like you know you want your parents to see you in the best light possible where if its somebody like me, if you’ve got 3 minutes to talk to me you might spill some shit because you realize that dotted line doesn’t have to be there because I’m gonna leave and there’s no way for me to embarrass you, there’s no way for me to and you know you got to talk to someone that you think might relate or maybe you think I’m older now and I might have some wisdom I can bestow upon you, I’m not sure exactly what it is. I would have been scared to go talk to KRS-One about my parents’ divorce you know what I mean? But I get a lot of kids that come up to me and want to talk about real life shit. I don’t know if weird is the right word for it, but it’s intense. I have a lot of those types of intense types of interactions.
Last year you went on a tour to promote the re-release of your classic album, God Loves Ugly. If you could do it again with another record, what would you pick and why?
Probably Lucy Ford. Just because, when we put that record out we weren’t really popular enough to tour a lot a lot. And so there are a lot of ideas and sounds on that record that never fully got to be realized on the stage. I think that if we were to go back to that record and do a treatment to those songs similar to the treatment we did to the God Loves Ugly songs I have a feeling we could really come up with some crazy shit. Especially considering the songs on there like as pretty and weird as that Santa Claus songs all the way over to a song like Aspiring Sociopath where it’s like really slow and brooding and dark. I just feel like there’d be so much room to tinker around and fuck around with those songs.
You collaborate with hella artists both on your own albums and on others . Are there any artists out right now that you’d love to work with but haven’t had a chance to yet?
The Fat Boys.
If you were to cover one artists’ material all night, who would you pick and why? On the flipside, who would you choose to cover your work?
I would cover Tom Petty, I would do a whole set of Tom Petty songs. And if I could get anyone to cover my work, Kermit the Fucking Frog. I would love Kermit the frog to get on stage and do an Atmosphere set.
Gotta say, I love your work with Murs in felt. I actually spoke with him a few months back when he dropped Fornever. I asked him about your works and he said he thinks this is it. Is there any chance we’ll have future Felt collabs or is this really it? What was your favorite album of the three? Who’s your fave muse Christina Ricci, Rosie Perez or Lisa Bonet?
Murs says that every time. He was just trying to make good press, he’s an asshole. Lisa Bonet – (fave muse), she’s my favorite actress, but Rosie Perez was my favorite record.
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