Exclusive: RJD2 Signs to XL, Ditches Hip-Hop
"I've gone rap free in 2006," claimed RJD2. The Columbus-by-way-of-Philadelphia producer spoke to Pitchfork earlier this week in about his currently-untitled third album, which will be released on the indie- and electronic-centric label XL, rather than RJ's longtime home of Def Jux. And instead of the sampledelic hip-hop/electronica of previous albums Deadringer and Since We Last Spoke, the new album was recorded with live instrumentation played entirely by RJ himself.
"Rhythmically, I feel like there's a continuous thread that would run throughout everying that I've done, and I'd like to think the new stuff still has that kind of emphasis on the rhythm section and groove," RJ said. "[But] there are a lot more songs in major keys. There are a lot more vocal harmonizations. I think it's a lot prettier than anything I've ever done. And it's all live. There's, like, one or two samples on there.
He said that, since he began, he wanted "to make pop music. The same shit everybody listens to: the Beatles, your Led Zeppelins, your Tears for Fears. And there are new groups: Elliott Smith or Dungen or Queens of the Stone Age. These are all groups that I feel make-- at the end of the day-- pop music. They do it with their own flavor and their own thing."
RJ learned to play most of the instruments on the record when he was in high school: "I went to a music school, a vocational school, [for] high school, where I had to take composition and music theory and keyboard lessons and play in a jazz combo." The idea for the new record, however, came to him during the recording of 2004's Since We Last Spoke, when he was "using samples that got more and more minute.
"I was looking for single note pa**ages that I could sample and then take apart note by note and then change the pitch and combine all of the notes just to build a chord, and it was just ridiculous. I could spend five hours going out buying records and then another three hours going through those records in hopes of maybe finding one tiny little guitar pa**age that [could] work. But if you already know what you're looking for, then it's like, 'Maybe I should spend a month getting my chops up on guitar.' So that kind of started me along, and plus, you have sample troubles or whatever, legal things.
"It's kind of like moving to a new city. Sometimes it's not one little thing. It's five reasons [that] all hit you at once: 'Hey you should move.' And when so many fingers are pointing you in a particular direction in life, it's kind of hard to feel like that's not a sign."
The musical move is not the only one RJ has made. Though he said there are "no problems of any sort" with Def Jux, he decided to shop his new material around, given its general non-hip-hop direction. A friend set up an interview with Kris Chen, who was at Domino at the time. "I liked Kris, and I felt really comfortable with him. He ended up moving to XL, and their direction and their vibe I really feel comfortable with, because it's got one foot in electronic music and one foot in rock music." When explaining that his agreement with the label is a full-blown contract rather than a single-album deal, RJ said, "I might be over there for a while."
The record itself has yet to be mixed, but the recording is complete at this point. There are no guests on the album, and there were 39 songs recorded for it, to be whittled down to 13 or 14. RJ was tight-lipped about specific details like the record's title and tracklist. "Not that it's a big deal, [but] I'm one of those guys that, if it changes, I feel like an a**hole. In the next two weeks to a month, I'll probably be mixing, and I should have the tracklist finalized and an album title."
He does have a tentative release date for the record: "Hopefully next year sometime, February/March/April-ish. If we're looking at May, I think that's kind of late."
RJ plans on touring in support of the record. "I have a lot of delusions in my head about how it's going to work. I had the idea of making a group where there's a drummer and then me and then two other people. I need two people that can play guitar and keyboards and sing harmony lines. [I want] an overload of keyboards and synthesizers on certain songs and then just a Brian May overload of guitar harmonies [on others]."
He is even looking forward to reworking some of his old songs in the new format. "That's where it gets fun. I've got all these DJ routines worked out for the old shit, and that's there to be used at any time. I want to use everything. We'd learn the new songs, and then, once the new songs are done, I basically want to work backwards, see if there are certain parts of old songs that could be learned. I want to play with the extremes of having a group. I'm a folk musician at the end of the day. I'm not particularly skilled at anything, but if I have one strong suit, I feel like it's arranging. Arranging a live show would be fun."
When asked whether or not he was finished making sample-based records for good, RJ said, "I don't know. If you're into apple pies for the last couple of weeks and you've been buying pies at the grocery store, it's kind of stupid to say, 'I'm never going to eat a cherry pie ever again.' So I don't want to make those kinds of a**essments."
He did say that he has "severely cut down on the freelance thing. I just feels sort of slutty. I started to feel like I was just contributing to this LEGOLAND music [where] Producer X sends a beat CD to Rapper Y, and Rapper Y goes through it and he finds beats and writes a bunch of sixteen bar verses and eight bar hooks. Sometimes, by the end of record, it just feels like everything is interchangeable. And sometimes it literally is."
He also had some harsh words for his own previous solo albums. "From an engineering standpoint, they're f***ing jokes. Deadringer was made on an ADAT, and it was mixed down on a Behringer mixing disk. This would be the equivalent of talking to Richard Simmons and being like, 'Okay, I'm trying to get healthy. I worked my way up to the Arch Deluxe for lunch, and I'm only having two sundaes. How am I doing?' And then with Since We Last Spoke, the whole thing was done in Pro Tools. From an engineering standpoint, I think the record sounds like it came out of a computer, and I don't like that."
According to RJ, "the two most important records that happened from 1998 to 2003" are D'Angelo's Voodoo and the Poets of Rhythm's Discern/Define. "The Poets of Rhythm really broke a huge barrier for me. Up until then, I was like, 'Nobody's [making] modern recordings that sound half decent. Even when you've got a good song, it sounds like shit.' And the Poets of Rhythm got me kind of geeked, [like] you know, it's possible." Thus, for the new record he is "using Pro Tools in the same way you would use a multi-track recorder. I'm not using any of the features in it."
Finally, RJ has not ruled out the possibility of collaboration in the future, though he would prefer "to do an integrated Nelly Furtado/Timbaland kind of thing. I feel like the watershed point for me is if the rapper would be willing to have me sing the hook. Not that I necessarily want to do that, but that's the kind of situation I want to be in, [where] somebody really trusts me. I need a buddy, a Pharrell to my Chad Hugo."
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