Hello there,
Welcome to your weekly free edition of The New Cue. Today we speak to DJ Shadow about his brilliant new record Action Adventure. We do the asking, he does the answering, it’s just a classic example of one human speaking to another human.
Enjoy the edition, and tell your friends about it if you like it and then make some more friends and tell them too.
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… DJ Shadow
At the end of October, turntablist supremo and crate-digging don DJ Shadow released his excellent new album Action Adventure. After a run of collaboration-heavy records, it’s a return to the pioneering samplist patchwork of Josh Davis’s early work, this time the hip-hop beats and synth hooks tinged with an 80s neon filter. A few weeks ago, Josh spoke to Niall on Zoom about how the new record came together and much more.
Hello Josh, how’s it going?
Good. How are you?
I’m good too. Thanks for doing this. It’s gonna be easy and breezy, I promise.
Cool. This is only the second interview I’ve done for the album so far.
That’s good, you’re not talked out then.
I’m not. But then on the other hand, I also don’t have my talking points down quite yet.
When you finish a record, do you usually know what you’re going to talk about?
More often than not, I kinda know what the general tone of the questioning will be. What I’m always amazed about is how much a press release really will steer the questions. I’ve become a lot more sensitive to that and when I’m approving the press release, I’ll be like ‘Don’t use this word, don’t use that word’, because I know people will fixate on that word and that will set the tenor of the viewfinder of the record in a way.
With that in mind, what was the most tiresome campaign you embarked on where you had to bat away something that had been set?
Oh man, the worst by far was The Outsider because I did this interview with this magazine called Urb, which had always been really supportive, I had been on the cover a few times and whatever. The journalist came to the studio when I was working on the record, so it was still months from coming out. Famously on that record, the talking point was that I had gotten to this hardcore Bay Area specific sound of rap, even though there’s only a handful of tracks on the record that are reflective of that, and I was playing one of those songs and the mood was very light, one of the MCs was there, this crazy, huge personality and he was laughing and joking and the journalist was like, ‘What would you say to your fans who hear this record and this doesn’t sound like Entroducing…’. I guess I was in a good mood or in a joking mood, and I just went, ‘Fuck ‘em. They already have Entroducing…, this is something different.’ That quote ended up being the pull quote of the article which basically made it sound like I’m like, ‘Fuck my fans’ and that set the tone for the entire campaign in the sense that there was this fan pushback and press pushback on this idea that I was intentionally trying to provoke a negative response and it became really difficult to overcome.
Don’t trust journalists, very nasty breed.
Well, I mean, I grew up reading NME and Melody Maker and Soul Underground and all kinds of magazines from the UK so I kind of knew, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen in the States.
Tell me about where you are at the moment, I can see a lot of records.
This is my studio. I’m in the Bay Area, Marin County.
How many records have you got in that room?
There’s a lot of 45s, 45s are are smaller so they take up less space. But between the 45s and the LPS... 40,000 maybe?
Wow. Just a medium sized record shop then.
Oh, yeah. Most of them are elsewhere.
When was the last time you saw someone else’s record collection and you were jealous of it?
All the time. But it could be 500 records, size is totally irrelevant. One of my best friends, who I consider a leader or inspiration when it comes to collecting and I have a lot of people like that in my life, he’s very much like, ‘You can have 100,000 shitty beat-up records, it means nothing. I’d rather have 200 really interesting, fascinating personal choices, records that mean a lot to the owner or are unique or fascinating in some way’. Another friend of mine has been collecting and had a record store for over 40 years and he’s approaching 80 now and watching the way he let certain things go and holds on to other things, I see somebody that for almost 80 years has enjoyed being a collector in every facet, whether it’s acquiring, letting go, he’s enjoyed all of it. That to me is the key. Years ago, I realised, ‘OK, I don’t want to go to record shows and get no sleep and be really vexed the entire time about what am I missing out on and running around and getting all sweaty and uncomfortable’ I just kind of went, ‘That’s not where it’s at’. I’d rather just go to a thrift store in my own time, look at something and go, ‘This seems interesting, it’s a dollar, I’ll try it’. Doing that a few thousand times, you end up with a pretty unique and quite personal collection.
Last time we spoke was for a Q podcast just before Covid. What’s changed musically for you in that time? It seems like your approach has moved away from the collaborative vibe of the last few albums.
Yeah, if I saw you at the end of 2019, to be completely honest, on that trip I probably had Covid. Even though it didn’t really kick off until March of that year, I was super sick. I ended up having to postpone my flight home because I just didn’t feel well enough to even leave the hotel. As we now know, it was already floating around at that time, people just didn’t know what to call it, but I came home, had to abort my tour which was quite devastating, it dramatically affected the course of being able to promote the record and all that good stuff. For a long time, I really didn’t want to listen to anything contemporary, I just wanted to listen to music that made me feel good. In the press release, there’s a little blurb about a collection of mixtapes that I ended up acquiring and they happened to have been made and broadcast in the mid 80s. It wasn’t just rap, it was also a lot of contemporary R&B and dance music at the time that they blended together. People think of the glory days of hip-hop as being sort of starting in the late 80s and continuing through the mid 90s or so but music from the mid 80s, which was the drum machine era, you very rarely hear it on the radio, you very rarely hear it synced in commercials or in movies or anything like that. It predates a lot of the stuff that became more popular and I think more mainstream and accessible later, like post-disco pre-sample eras still trying to figure stuff out. I fell in love with a lot of the songs on that tape or on those tapes and a lot of them were familiar to me but I hadn’t heard in years and I I found it really inspiring. I just wanted to listen to music that didn’t have any connection to what we were all experiencing. I felt like music that was coming out in 2020/2021 felt somehow tainted by this awfulness.
Did that lead into the sort of music you wanted to make too?
In a way. I think it’s artistically kind of bankrupt to sit here and say, ‘Oh, I wanted to make music that sounded like it came from a different time’, or was only thinking backwards or only looking backwards. I don’t personally think the record sounds like that. I still like to keep up and I still like to be aware and keep my ear open to new developments or new ideas. But it’s like if you take a glass of water and you have all these different types of food colouring, you can put in one little tiny drop and totally change the complexion of the water. Even if it’s predominantly 20 drops of orange and you put one little drop of green, it totally changes everything. That’s how I think about these little tiny influences from the past mixing with what I feel in general is a progressive, forward-thinking ethos when it comes to make the music.
Yeah, it definitely still sounds like a 2023 DJ Shadow record.
That’s the hope. I would say, of all the records I’ve made since The Private Press, this was a record where I didn’t have to answer to anybody else’s ideas, or egos, just 100%. me. That was really refreshing, actually, because the last couple of albums I’ve made have been quite collaboration heavy. Coming through the pandemic, I also felt like, ‘Well, I really have nothing to lose by just making a record that’s completely personal and completely me’. I think we’ve all seen what there is to lose and in the grand scheme of things, making a record is a blessing and a luxury. So I tried not to think too much like ‘am I making a huge mistake?’ or anything like that, I just made the kind of record I wanted to make and the kind of music that felt good for me to listen to and felt therapeutic for me to work my way through.
As someone who is held up as an influential artist and who inspired a new way of making music, have you had moments where you heard something and you were like, ‘Whoa, that sounds like me’?
All of us in Mo’ Wax, when I would be in London, we would all be together, in our early 20s, talking about music, looking at the music press that had come in that week. We saw ourselves as upstarts, we didn’t want to fit into any scene, we didn’t want to make it easy for our listeners, or our fans or followers. We didn’t want to do the predictable thing. And when trip hop became a term, we all derided it and turned our nose up at it and just thought it was not anything we wanted to be a part of. When you started seeing compilations come out like ‘This Is Trip Hop’ or ‘The Sound Of Trip Hop’ or whatever, and we play it and just kind be like, ‘This is embarrassing, this is just terrible.’ I was just reviled by it and I don’t know how much of it was inspired by my stuff. I usually heard stuff that, frankly, reminded me more of maybe Massive Attack or Portishead or maybe Nightmares On Wax or something and that’s not to denigrate any of those groups because I like all of them. But I feel like I can’t really sit here and claim that a lot of people were listening to my stuff and making generic versions of it.
Out of all the guests you’ve collaborated with across your career, who impressed you the most watching them work?
One that comes to mind quite quickly is Thom Yorke on the UNKLE album. This is somebody that I had a lot of respect for. OK Computer had just come out and I had done some touring with them and knew their music quite well. We did a song together called Rabbit In Your Headlights. He wrote it in the studio and was very deliberate and serious about it. When he was ready to record, he just sort of went, ‘Okay, come on, let’s go’ and he did it all in one take. He held this really long note at the end and James Lavelle and I just looked at each other in the studio and just kind of went, ‘Wow, fuck, that’s it’. We had goosebumps because it was just a very cool thing to be in the studio and be a part of.
On a rap basis, I’m almost afraid to single one person out because there’s been so many. I also have to think about people I was actually there for because in the modern era so often that’s not the case. Working with Run The Jewels is a lot of fun. The way El-P writes and the way Mike writes, it’s just interesting to be a part of.
What advice would you give to a young wannabe DJ Shadow emerging today?
Be yourself and we don’t need another, whoever your hero is, x. That was something I always felt strongly about, even when I was just starting out, was as much as I love my heroes and as much as I love name checking them and crediting them for being an influence and teaching me how to do XY and Z, I never wanted to imitate. I wanted to learn from them and then add my own personality and my own flaws and whatever else that makes me who I am. What we need is whatever you’re going to bring to the table, that’s what I usually say.
Congratulations on the record. How did you feel when you finished it?
Satisfied.
Satisfied?! It’s better than a ‘satisfied’.
I mean, this is my eighth or ninth record, depending on how you look at it, and God knows how many singles and mixtapes and whatever else. It’s been a long time since I finished a record and walked out of the mastering studio and was kind of ‘Job well done, let’s go get a pizza!’ or something. There’s so many internal checkpoints along the way when I’m creating the music that it’s more of a daily ‘I’m happy, I’m sad’ rather than a big one at the end. There’s good days and bad days in the studio. My daughters are going to college this year, but at 17, 18 while I was working on this album and they’ve grown up with me being in the studio and making music and are savvy enough now to be able to tell when something’s not quite right or I’m quite moody or in my own head, trying to figure out how to unlock a combination of problems on a track. They’ll talk to me about it and they’ll ask me, ‘How did it go today?’ and I’ll say, ‘I can’t figure out what’s wrong with this track’ or ‘I spent eight hours on an arrangement that I just scrapped’ because it’s not working and it’s hard. Then there’s other days where I’ll be like, ‘Good, I feel like I overcame the hurdle on this track’. It’s just a different process the way you work now and so I feel like there would be a pretty massive failure on my part if I wasn’t it bare minimum satisfied when the record was all said and done.
ND