You have no idea what you're passionate about until you give it a shot. If I hadn't been given a guitar or a camera or whatever, I'd be doing something different.
When you are 10, and you are with friends making music or playing sports or doing whatever, I would say, enjoy that and try to keep that as the model for as long as you can.
There is something about me that is collaborative, that wants to get the best performance out of somebody else or to hear something that somebody else has done that's good and to try and make it great.
Seattle isn't known for a particular production sound, so that leaves a lot of great producers in Seattle doing kind of their own thing. And I think, for me, I was probably enough removed from hip-hop that my style was even a little bit weirder than that.
Rick Rubin is super intriguing to me because he has become this god producer in completely drastically different genres, which very few people have done.
I would love to be one of the few artists that hits a point of success and can go back into the studio and make another album that matters and relates to people and not go back in and be super tainted by this whole thing.
I think most producers and MCs are constantly in this competition, but it's usually with yourself. It's usually wanting to be innovative: wanting to catch yourself when you're doing the same thing or throwing out the same art you've already done.
I don't think I would be here in an interview if YouTube wasn't in existence, if social media hadn't been developed, or if these platforms for artists to promote and develop their own careers hadn't become available.
I bring up 'The Heist,' and you can almost cut that record down the middle between songs where the beat came first and the words came second, and songs where the words came first and the beat came second. It can start with a vibe, a beat that drives a story, or it can start with a story and then trying to identify the tone to tell that story right.
Any time we have the opportunity to play in a more intimate room, there's such a huge aspect of our set just built for that. And beyond that, we just love being that close to our fans.
