Interview with Jamie Lidell – Totally Completely Exposed

April 16th, 2010

Friends!

As some of you already know, a few weeks ago I had the good fortune of interviewing Jamie Lidell for Planet Magazine. Jamie’s music has been majorly inspirational to me over the years, so it was kind of a big deal for me to meet him… The official interview just went live, and you can read it at Planet-Mag.com.

A lot of the music-geekier material was unfortunately left on the editing room floor for the official interview, so I wanted to post the complete joint here for those of you that want to learn a bit more about Jamie’s process and general awesomeness. Enjoy!

Jamie Lidell’s new album, Compass (out May 18), might just be his most ambitious effort to date. While his signature blue-eyed-soul is very much in attendance, we now hear elements of Americana, folk and even punk rock creeping in — thanks in part to co-production from Beck, and contributions from a host of heavy-hitters including Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor and Feist. Despite this seemingly broad variation in style, the album is grounded in a way that Lidell’s music has never been before. Having found new love in his life, Jamie’s songs now exude a certain maturity and a reconciliation between his many musical identities. In the breadth of a single track, we can hear heavily processed beat-boxes, staccato horns, and stitched-together soundscapes, alongside constant streams of infectious hooks — it’s a difficult sound to pin down, yet somehow it blends together perfectly. I recently caught up with Lidell at the Standard Hotel in New York.

Alan Wilkis: I first became interested in your music with an interview you did with WIRE magazine, maybe five years ago? You had this quote about how you had gotten tired of the electronic music “space race,” and you wanted to get back to writing songs.

Jamie Lidell: Yeahhhhh, right. It’s a bit of an ego-crushing thing, because you can get a certain level of status, and you know how to get a high score on a certain kind of game, you know? But you can end up playing that game ’til you die. And I was like, “Man, there were other games in the arcade.” And I don’t want to be getting high scores, anyway. I just want to be playing. It’s cool how that kind of fell off, you know. I think in general people kind of got less interested.

AW: In what sense? In electronic music?

JL: Yeah. That “interesting” kind of, like, you know… it’s a shame in a way because there was a pioneering spirit that was going on, and that Warp [Records] was really well-known for. The more adventurous, the better.

AW: Definitely. And in Berlin where you were, as well.

JL: Exactly. Although the Berlin club scene, in fairness, ended up getting swamped by minimal techno. And it was like, “Really? That’s what happened?” I’m sorry guys, but we caned the minimal techno scene back in ‘95, and it was only a little fringe then. It was okay… It’s gotta have the FUNK! Where the hell’s the funk?

AW: Absolutely!

JL: If there’s no funk, there really is nothing to do except be… impressed? It’s like watching a movie that’s all special effects. How many of those do you wanna watch? That’s about getting old, as well, dare I say. Because a lot of kids will watch the effects and be like, “Fuck man! Shit is in 3-D?!!” And more power to them. I don’t care to judge, it just isn’t for me.

AW: I’ve listened to “Compass” five times now, and I feel like a lot of that spirit, the electronic side of you is creeping back in, but the songs are thoroughly well-written as well — and they’re cohesive.

JL: Right. This one’s very much about ME, more than the last two albums, because I worked with Mocky so intensively on the last few, and I was very much the cowriter of everything. It kind of made me, I guess, “lazy” is a word? I came to rely on him more as a stabilizer to me, like my foil. I’ll go out on a limb with an idea, and wanna follow through, but I’ll always run it by him. And in a way my musical identity started getting, not dictated, but…

AW: Evolving together?

JL: Yeah, it was evolving together. When I started this album, I was nervous, like, “Who am I gonna get to help me?” But at the same time, I didn’t have a plan, you know… Beck called me.

AW: How did you guys get together in the first place?

JL: He caught wind of my solo show somehow, because he’s just…

AW: He’s got his ear to… like… everything?

JL: He does. He’s an Internet junky. He really loves his shit. Anyway, I opened up for him in 2006 for a whole tour. He was really into my show and genuinely really loved it.

AW: Did you guys ever share the stage?

JL: He invited me onto his stage quite a lot. He wanted to do duets with me, and he wanted to work with me during that time. We actually did go into the studio for a bit in LA. He was working on something that never came out in the end, just a weird idea. He wanted to print songs straight to vinyl, so he hired a studio, and we were printing shit straight to vinyl like, “Okay, ready? Hit Record!!!” He had a crazy tight ass band, all his session L.A. freaks… Anyway, I had just moved here [New York City] in about February of 2009. I was thinking about making a new record, but I didn’t really have a plan. Beck called and said, “Hey, I just wondered if you wanted to get together? If you wanted some production assistance on a record, if you’re gonna be making something new?” The fucking timing was insane…

AW: Like the thought had just occurred to you?

JL: Literally, though! It’s kind of spooky.

AW: Was that prior to the Record Club project that you had done with him?

JL: Around about the same time… I went to L.A. just to hang out with him and work in his studio, just to see how we got along as a writing/production partnership kind of thing. He has a lot of particular ways of working, and they’re really inspirational insofar as he’s very spontaneous, very quick-witted, as you’d imagine. He doesn’t miss a beat in terms of style. He just has such a huge pool of music swimming around in his head. He can pluck from eras and pluck from…

AW: I kind of imagine that you’re the same way.

JL: Well, it’s a little bit different with me, because I’m not so studied. He really knows how to PLAY the shit. Whereas I can’t.

AW: Do you play any specific instruments?

JL: I don’t, really.

AW: But you play gear!

JL: I came from a techno scene, so the machine and the electronics are my instruments, for sure.

AW: And your voice, obviously.

JL: Yeah, the voice is my instrument.

AW: It’s like the most clichéd thing to say someone’s voice is their instrument, but you really maximize the potential of the human voice.

JL: Yeah, right. It’s true. I enjoy it. Anything goes with the voice for me, so it’s cool… So, we had the first session in L.A. It went great. I had three days and we did four songs. That’s actually Beck CHILLING. We could have had six songs going if I had…

AW: Good god. How much had you written prior to that?

JL: Nothing! I started with a tabula rasa.

AW: WOW.

JL: It was a little intimidating, I gotta admit, going into Beck’s home studio. He’s got all his gear, his engineer, and I’m coming in like, “Hey… uh… let’s make some music…?” So I didn’t really have that much to say. And we had scheduled another meeting after that a few months down the line. I had a tour to do in Europe with my band. And my head was kinda thinking about that. Then I got back to New York and time was running out, and then the deadline for us meeting got moved earlier. So I was really against the clock. I had basically a month to write everything. And I thought, “Man, I’ve got to write the whole thing. Why not? If I can do four tracks in three days with Beck, I can do that.” I had a lot to draw on, a lot of these journals and things… The thing that was so amazing about working with Beck is that he ups the ante a lot.

AW: You’re gonna bring your A-game. Jesus.

JL: And that’s what I was doing. Playing sketches I’d done off my laptop to Beck. And Beck’s kind of a weird fan of mine. His son was super into Multiply and I think that brought me closer to him, because his son was like super into it. I was already in the house. And I just wanted to impress him, in a very of basic way. I came with the best songs I could write at the time, and as quick as I could get them together.

AW: Which were the first tracks you brought to him?

JL: All of them. All the tracks I wrote ended up on the album. The only track we wrote together was “Coma Chameleon,” which is pretty much a Beck song… He wrote the lyrics, I kind of wrote the melody. I played the drums, a lot of the bed tracks. I would go into his little music room and just start smacking drums, and playing pianos, and his engineer would be cutting shit as I was doing it… So I’d come in a bit despondent, like, “I don’t know… what do you think?” And the engineer would be going, “Well, we’ve got this.” And it would be like “Duh-duh-chik. DUH-duh-chik.”

AW: [laughs] Like, “I did that?”

JL: This looping pedal that he had… I started making a lot of those crazy loops. I was just overloading it, and it sounded horrible, but amazing. I played a simple beat to it, and all of a sudden we had the riff. He hit a little guitar thing, and that’s a Beck song for you.

AW: It’s like you’re creating material to sample, and then treating it like a sample.

JL: Yeah. He just gets raw material, jumps on it, loops it up, takes another thing… So you can roll with it more. Then he flew in the horns later, whilst I wasn’t there.

AW: What was your songwriting process like?

JL: It’s always different, track to track. All the songs, this time around, I just laid a quick bare track down, anything that would get the ball rolling. Beatbox, drum machine… Literally like no thinking. Just kind of in the kitchen like [makes funny sounds]… And then obviously the lyrics were more, you know… except for “She Needs Me”, which was me just completely ad-libbing… So, that’s it. I had a lot to draw on. It was a lot to do with me having new love in my life. The album is a lot more personal than I’ve ever dared to be before. I just feel like I’d gotten into this habit of maybe trying to generalize in lyrics. Take a theme that’s kind of personal to me and…

AW: Make it more about everyone?

JL: Yeah. This one’s a lot more personal. This is me kind of baring all, completely exposed.

AW: Self-discovery? Finding something out about yourself?

JL: Just looking in the mirror in a different way. Being like, “Really? Do you hate that about yourself or is that okay? What’s wrong with sharing that?” If you’re not going to give, I mean, what’s the fucking point? I think I’d started to… not water it down… but think about the end result and craft the song to fit something that I wanted to project. And it all got a bit contrived in a way. So this album, I stopped contriving anything. It was just like, “Okay, I’m feeling this. What would make me feel it harder?”

AW: I wanted to talk about, not just Feist, but the other people you worked with. How did you wind up working with James Gadson, and the other guys on there?

JL: So the timeline goes, first L.A. session with Beck. I went away. Had a month, wrote, came back. And during the second L.A. session, which was quite long, we had Record Club booked. We did that at Sunset Sound, where they recorded “Exile on Main Street”, “Purple Rain”, and shit. So it’s like for me, it was like, “GOD…” A legendary place. And then in walks James Gadson, who I’d been watching play with Bill Withers on the road with my saxophone player. And we were laughing like…

AW: HE’S THE COOLEST GUY EVER.

JL: He’s just the coolest drummer, you could imagine. Just incredible. He’s the sweetest, warmest, most talented… just how you wanna be when you get older, you know? Enthusiastic, open-minded, but no ego on him. He just wants to make good music.

AW: And he clearly recognizes when someone else is good!

JL: Yeah, we were loving playing together… Of all the production help that Beck put into the album, I think he putting me together with Gadson and helping sort out the Oceanway session, and like obviously writing with him… That was a really pivotal moment, having that extra pressure all of a sudden. I had just done sketches, and suddenly I’m going to Oceanway, top studio in L.A. with Gadson! And Feist was in town already, and I know her. I worked with her on The Reminder, doing the backing vocals on “1, 2, 3, 4″ and a bunch of the songs… She’s just an amazing musician. One of those feelers, just like, “Let me try something on this.” NAILING it… World class! She’s playing guitar, she’s singing. She just wanted to muck in and get her hands dirty musically. So Beck was there, and she was there, James Gadson, Nikka Costa… and then Pat Sansone from Wilco.

AW: Yeah! And Autumn Defense.

JL: Yeah, I mean he’s amazing, Pat. We worked together on the Record Club. And I’d known Pat before because he’d kept coming to my shows… At last I said, “PLEASE, I’d love to have you involved in the record.” So he flew in the parts via email, and so did Gonzo [Gonzalez], which was amazing. Pat would just send me this impeccably-recorded stuff from the Wilco loft: bass parts, wurlitzer, mallets.

AW: He would just send you the files?

JL: Yeah he’d send me a yousendit-style gigabyte.

AW: And you would send him pieces to work with, and he would lay it down remote?

JL: Yeah, exactly. I’d take it as far as I could, and I’d say “Pat I need your help.” And he’d just NAIL this absolutely beautiful shit. Sometimes I had to erode it, cuz it was too fucking good, you know what I mean? It sounded like… pristine Steve Reich shit. Counterpoint… and I ended up running it through some really awful machines.

AW: All of the sounds that I hear on the album are treated so carefully. Even if it’s a sound that everybody knows, there’s something a little twisted about it.

JL: Yeahhhhhhh. Well, that’s a lot to do with Chris Taylor [of Grizzly Bear] as well. I mean, I’ve gotta give Chris a lot of credit.

AW: How did you connect with him?

JL: I’ve been a Grizzly Bear fan… I was just crazy in love with that album [Veckatimest], like, “HOW is it done?” When we worked together in the Grizzly church, he’s working with the bloody computer on a guitar case, couple of monitors… This whole makeshift studio, and I’m like, “Well, where do you make your records?” and he’s like “We do it like this.” He’s working with very little, and achieving a LOT. He’s a really talented guy. It started off in Brooklyn at the church where they record. We would just try and nail tunes, get to know each other. I had to learn to sing in front of him, which is always a bit intimidating. It didn’t really work out so great… none of the recordings we did there actually made it on the record. But going to Canada, I knew I needed him to come out to that. My manager hooked up a session at Feist’s lodge. Just a brilliant place. And it made it come all together. There was Oceanway… so much amazing rhythm stuff from Gadson, but a mess as well. Nothing really complete…

AW: Are you the one editing it all together?

JL: Yeah.

AW: And are you mixing it as well?

JL: Chris Taylor really was the mix engineer, but I really was too. I know what I’m doing, and I could have mixed the record, in a way. But I really wanted Chris. I mean, he’s TRAINED in that shit. And I’m NOT. and I HATE mixing. I absolutely hate it, but I’m very stubborn. I felt really bad for Chris, because I think he didn’t really know that before working with me. I’m really not easy to please. But at the end of the day, we were a really good combination.

AW: I think it’s those challenges that really forge a strong working relationship.

JL: Yeah exactly. The tension. We’re both perfectionists in different kind of levels. The thing that is really hardcore, and I’ll always respect Chris for is that it was so exhausting, and I was really demanding. When we mixed the record, it was twelve days, for 14-hour days…

AW: A sitting-over-his-shoulder kind of thing?

JL: Exactly. One block of time. If we didn’t eat macrobiotic food, we just couldn’t even stay awake. We just were eating the cleanest food.

AW: Is that a normal part of your diet, now?

JL: It is a little bit. I try, although I just ate a brisket sandwich.

AW: You gotta live a little.

JL: Yeahhhhh. It was great… Chris is amazing. So prolific. He’s a real feeler… I mean, you say, “Did I edit everything?” The song “Compass” is a good example. We had two days at Oceanway, and the second was a day that I called for. I knew I wanted to do “Compass”, but it wasn’t really a song, it was just a ukelele sketch. So I was trying to get everyone on the same page… We just kept recording for hours. It was just like these crazy jigsaw pieces.

AW: Well it does feel so free, but in a good way.

JL: Yeah, I was overwhelmed. So he [Chris Taylor] just was like, “Fuck that.” Slam that up against… Lego-style. Ch-ching. And he made an edit of the song that was kinda sweet. It made me think it’s possible to get this guy finished. So I took that, and re-worked it… I needed to create these artificial bits of terrain. I did a lot of work at home in my little cupboard studio.

AW: How’s living in New York? How does being here influence you musically or otherwise?

JL: I love it. New York’s amazing. It’s influencing me because… well obviously, I couldn’t bring all my studio stuff. Which was a blessing, because in Berlin I had all my shit in a big room. And to be honest, it was overwhelming, you know?

AW: Too many choices.

JL: Yeah. I grew up with this one sampler and a computer, and I did a lot of shit on there. You don’t have any choices. It’s just like, “what ELSE can I do with this?” You’ve only got two colors in your paintbox, and you’re just like, “If I mix this one with this, in this crazy way…” You come up with styles, and then you end up getting some money and buying all the colors of the rainbow. And then you just end up making boring shit.

AW: Right. It’s like the guitar player with 1000 pedals.

JL: Exactly. What are you really playing? But yeah, New York’s been amazing. I like having that limitation, although at the same time it would be a dream for me to stay in Manhattan and have a proper studio that I can really let loose in.

AW: I saw [in your promo video] the Quincy Jones picture. Is there a story involved with that, or was it a chance meeting?

JL: Yeah! Right you noticed that! [laughs] I met Quincy. It was Montreaux Jazz Festival. We were playing, and the promoter of the show was a really interesting character, and thought that I was a bit of a charlatan or something… I just got bad vibes off him. But when we played the show, he was like, “Not bad. Something about you I like. Do you wanna meet Quincy Jones?” And I was like, “Yes, I do!”

AW: Ha!

JL: It was Quincy’s birthday, and he was trashed. He was… pretty drunk.

AW: Nice.

JL: I came up and met him, and he was like, “Where you from?” I was like, “England.” And he was like, “What?!” “I’m from England.” “WHAT?!!” He was freaking me out a little bit. And then he got me in a fucking headlock. I went down to speak to him close to his ear ‘cuz he couldn’t hear me, and he grabbed my head and was like, “You’re from England? Well I just spoke to Amy Winehouse, and I told her to get off the drugs, man. ‘Cuz you know my daughter…” and he just goes on this crazy personal story with me. I wasn’t expecting this… I’m in a headlock with Quincy Jones… It was SUPER weird. My tour manager was on the spot with a camera. And I’m just like, “I’m with Quincy. He’s amazing… And kinda crazy.”

AW: Wow. That’s a keeper.

JL: It is.

Entry Filed under: April 2010, Video