Pushkin, Pushkin, Welcome to Broken Record Season two. I'm Malcolm Glado, Rick Rubin, Bruce Headlam and I are back eight more weeks of conversation with some of the most talented musicians in the world. We're gonna talk to them, they're going to play for us, and we're starting with an insane two part interview with a mere Quest Love Thompson, drummer for The Roots, a hip hop band from Philly that it has become The Tonight Show's house band. Quest is also a producer, a DJ, and an all around musical polymn. I sat down with him in Manhattan after a taping of The Tonight Show. Rick joined us by a sky from a studio in Hawaii. We didn't think we talked a Quest for nearly three hours, but he kept pulling us in story after story. Afterwards, I texted Rick all caps that went well. First off, Amyra, thank you so much for joining us, Thank you for having me, Thank you, Reck, and I've been looking forward to this all week. You first of all, you guys, you know each other from how far back from life? When did I first meet you? Rick? I think I have a vague action, but I want to see if you have the same one as me. I think around Voodoo time two thousand ish. I believe I met Rick somewhere in La I think it's two thousand. Okay, I'll tell you my recollection was. We met in the lobby of a hotel that had very high ceilings. It was really dark, and it was at some sort of a big show festival on the East coast, maybe Tibetan Freedom Festival, in the hotel in the lobby. Okay, yeah, okay, could that be yes? I think that's correct, Yes, you're right. DC. It was on like second album of yours, it was, I know it was early third album, but it was about fourth album time. I remember we tried the first time we tried to do Tibetan Freedom it rained out, so instead I was one of the lucky few people that got to see Radiohead at the nine thirty club. Really instead you went to well, no, no no, I mean they were, you know, like it was like a lightning storm threatened the DC portion of the Tibetan Freedom concert. So instead, you know, everybody's going home and radio Heads like, wait a minute, we're going to be the nine thirty clubs. So it's a pretty Good Relation Prize. Yeah, yeah, no, it was great. I wouldn't have had it any other way. We're going to plunge into things musical. Okay, you're so in your household growing up, so your dad has an extraordinary record collection. Yeah, I understand it. So what do you What are you listening to as a as a kid? All right, so I grew up with three very distinct record collectives. My dad was into what I would sort of jokingly say is the yacht rock of his day. He was into Mathis streisand vocal groups like he had pet sounds, so you know, seeing pet sounds in my house. As a kid, I was just like beach Boys whatever. But once I got older and realized, oh, their harmony game is bar none. Then anybody like flaunting harmony to the next level like my dad was on it, or vocals to the next level because he was sort of like a Nat King Cole type. Mom was more funky and hip, So any album cover that had like Marty clairwig that like, you know, Miles Davis, Bitch's Brew or Santana's album covers like those those oil really funky like abstract oil painting covers like she would buy records like a like a crate digger or a record collector in my day, does like you look at the cover, Oh, this monkey gotta be something like that's how she collected I got famous Ohio players. Yeah, anything funny? So funny you say that because I get a copy of Honey when I'm six years old on the corner. It's like, uh, this is January twenty, nineteen seventy six, Happy fifth birthday, Mare, We love you very much, Mommy and Daddy. And I'm like, that's the way that album coming. I'm like, yo, like, do you guys realize what you gave me? Like it? For those who are not on it's it is a very very beautiful, very very NEI. But they were just like we saw this high art and that's the thing, even though I didn't see it as Slation's like, oh my god, who's this one? Yeah, Like I'm you know, I just saw a theme of Okay, everyd Ohio player's album cover looks like black playboy. My sister. My sister at that time, blending in with her middle school friends and eventually her high school friends, you kind of sort of have to adapt to their taste. She's bringing home Bohemian Rhapsody, She's bringing home Bowie, She's bringing home fal Cat. Like my dad and my sister have very similar tastes. My sister is like one of the biggest yacht rock fans. I know, Rupert Holmes, Ambrosia, like all that soft the Captain ands Neil, all that stuff. And the main role in the household was don't touch my stereo. So I'm not allowed to choose what I want to hear, so I have to be forced to listen to what they want to hear. You were held hostage by yacht rock as a child, I mean, you know, I think from the age of three till about nine, you just take in everything that they give you. So I mean I pretty much had an adults knowledge of music by the time I was ten years old. Like I was reading Rolling Stone. I often talk about seeing the Prince Dirty Mind lead review, the Yoko cover story of Rolling Stone, her first interview after John was assassinating, and I knew it was a big deal even at the age of nine, that Prince got a four and a half star lead review and Rolling Stone, because in my head, I was like, wait, white people don't know this guy, Like, how do he get the lead review on the artwork and all this stuff, and reading the how glowing it was, I was just like, this is a big deal. So I really had an adults vocabulary with music by the time I was ten. Do you have any memories of records of like specific events, like the time that you the first time you saw so and so I could. I have a bunch of them, but I want to ask you first of yeah, oh man, the day that Songs in the Key of Life came out, that that could have been a national holiday. I mean, the world stopped. It was like war the worlds. We brought the record and like the entire family even like I'm coming over and listened to it, Like my mom's sister came to the house and we're just sitting there listening to this record. Now again, I'm six years old, so you know, I'm not understanding anything about Stevie Wonder's genius period and the fact that you know, from seventy one, you know that the streak was happening, and I didn't know Malcolm Murciso like his producers and none of those guys were But I just remember like how they treated that album as an event and there was a booklet inside it, and these fonts are really weird and is he drowning in donuts? And just everything about that album was like an event. So I mean, did any one of the did you appreciate it as an album? Or do certain songs even today kind of stand up really because of Stevie Wonder, I'm not an album guy, and I feel so ashamed to say them front of you, Rick, because I know that you create great singles. I'm just now realizing as a DJ now, and I mean, like in the last three to four years, like, oh man, the single does matter. I'm suddenly seeing be what I should have known thirty years ago when I first started. But I've just seen albums as peaks and valleys and statements. And you know, for me, it was I always felt as that, as though, any how my creates should be like, Okay, well he starts off with a slow song here, and he slowly rises here, and then the jazz fusing songs number four, and then the high end songs are here, and then he a little bit here and side threes a little slow, and then the breathless race of the finish at the end. So I always took it as complete statements, which is why I'm one of the few people that I was elated with Journey through the Secret Life of Plants, which everybody included my dad. Once that came out, He's like, I'm not buying me. He stopped record binging after Journey through the Secret Life of Plants because yeah, but for me, that was my dark side of the moon. That was my put headphones on, close your eyes and imagine, like what's happening and you hear all this panned noise and everything. And I didn't know about pop hits or you know, why is it all instrumental? That sort of thing, Like, what's your version of that kind of event album from your childhood? Is there one? Do you have a version of the of Sons in the Cave Life? Well, I can remember that particular album. I can remember getting that album and Chuck Mangioni at the same time, so they must have come out in the same year, I imagine. And I remember I had a little keyboard although I couldn't really play anything, and trying to play along all the different parts on the record, just on the keyboard, just try to have some understanding of what was going on. I can remember the first time I was in a record store and I saw, Now, this is sort of it's late for this because the record came out much earlier. But I remember finding the MC five and first seeing that first album cover and then listening to it and thinking, well, this is during punk rock times, like, wow, this is it's kind of like punk rock, but it's old, but it has that energy. It has like a frantic energy, and that really excited me. And that I can remember, Okay, is there anyone else like the MC five. It's like, well, it's not exactly like them, but then it leads you to Iggy and the Stooges, and I can just remember these moments of revelation of hearing a new I can remember the first time I heard their Moones and just didn't have any point of reference for it. I have a slight confessor to make. Yeah, I hate to say this. I finally listened to the entire Ramones album start to finish eight days ago, and I'm so mad that it took me so long to do it. What led you to do it? Okay, this is the lamest thing ever. So I'm kind of at a creative fork in the road right now. As far as DJing is concerned, because a lot of the collective music I play feels to a specific audience, and I'm trying to figure out more creative ways to bring them out because of course, like you know, the people that like the music that I like are older, they have kids. They're not coming out at two three in the morning. I'll say. In the last year or so, I've been doing Saturday afternoon Djay Sunday afternoon DJing so that it's family friendly. Parents can come and relive their club days and the kids can have It's it's my version of re hip hop, because hip hop's supposed to be a community based afternoon sort of thing, that sort of thing. And I did uh an ice skating rink. I knew it was going to be a lot of kids there, and I was like, all right, well, let me make sure that I'm playing kid friendly stuff whatnot, and not just happened to just look on the internet. I was like, all right, adult music that kids seem to like as well. And of course briskly I can't pronounce it, risking bop was listed and I was like, yeah, because they always sing that at sports at sports events, and I didn't have it, so I downloaded it and I saw that, oh, all the songs are under two minutes and thirty seconds. Two minutes and thirty seconds. And as a songwriter, as I spoke to you before, like not focusing on singles, I'm now obsessed with people that have had successful singles under three minutes, because it's one thing to do these well thought out, you know, introspective, eleven minute free jazz stuff. And the roots are such artists, but it's like, can we do judy as a punk? Can we make an effective song with bare minimum in three minutes? Can we be just as effective? So now I'm trying to study minimalist effectiveness. So it's like as a writer, it's why I'm obsessed with commercials. Always been obsessed with commercials because they tell a story in thirty seconds, you know, And if you are a writer and you know how hard it is tell a story, you're you put the person who writes to brilliant commercial at the top of the list. The only reason why I'm obsessed with this is because now that I work at the Tonight Show, we have to write eight second jingles, of which you have to have narrative of what the title is. Writing eight second songs is sort of our version of commercials. So how often this is a question for both you as producers, how often do you say to the artist you're working with, make it shorter. I never do, unless unless it's boring. It's like it's really every piece has the length that it wants to be. I have a question for you. Yeah, okay, so fight for your right to party. Yeah, I'll say the last four years. I read the original demo version with extra verses in it, and YadA, YadA, YadA. So I'm asking this mainly because I just read the Beastie Boy book. So in your head, how did you have that much discipline to know what to reduce? Like, you're famous for reducing stuff, taking taking elements away. So honestly, in that case, I don't remember it ever being longer than that. Well, there's like an extra verse in there that was taken away, So I wonder I'd love to hear it, because I have no recollection of it ever being longer. In those days, it would be unusual for us to shorten anything. Really, Yeah, and then you weren't thinking like, okay, three minutes and thirty seconds. Ever in my life have I thought that? So you don't have Clive Davis ears and not in the least I'm I'm but you're so bullseye with it. Like it has to do with growing up where I grew up and listening to the Beatles. So the first formative music for me was the Beatles, and those were short pop songs. So I had that formula of goodness in me from the time I was a little kid. That was just all I knew that was good. And when I would hear something that felt like anytime, it felt like it got boring to me, right, it was too long, but some you know, I like ten minute jams too well. I mean, one of my favorite groups is Trouble Funk, and if you listen to their music, it just goes forever. Right, He's being seriously modest right now, but like he literally the most revolutionary thing that he brought to the world of hip hop was he literally invented the three minute song. Like before him, even a song as as sticky and friendly as the message like grand Master Flast and that was still eight minutes Planet rock because you're thinking of the club and keeping the groove lasting a long time. That sort of thing ll like when we got Ello's record, Yo, these songs are four minutes long, Like we never even fathom that you could have an effect of hip hop record or song to be three minutes and fifty seconds. Like just seeing those times on the Deft dam thing, I was just like, this is weird, what's going on here? But to you, that was just anyone else. It was just based on growing up with the Beatles. That was it. It wasn't. It was not at all premeditated in any way. It was natural to me. And when I would get you know, I collected twelve inch twelve inch vinyl at that time, because every hip hop record came out twelve inch pretty much. That was the main format of the day. So I would get these, you know, Jimmy Spicer records that were nine minutes long, and it would be or twelve minutes long, and it always seemed like they weren't made to listen to, they were made to dance to. They weren't. They weren't long in service to the song, right, And I've always wanted to work in service to the song, whatever that is. And sometimes it's the whole side of an album. Sometimes it's three minutes, but usually just take someone so long to learn that lesson. And I think it just has to do with where you started listening to Farrow Sanders and longer, more experimental pieces. I started listening to the Beatles, but again before I knew what I was listening to, just what I gravitated towards the Beatles and the Monkeys when I was a little teeny kid. No, I'll admit that, or selfishly or whatever, like I was definitely creating stuff that teenage me would want to. I didn't know what a pop hook was or none of that stuff until you know, even when we got our first real hit four albums, and there was fear that I might ruin it because I wanted to show our drum end bassed London influence, and it became a thing of like, yo, it's just too radical for the song, like, well, this ruin it. But even then my answer was like, we're not a pop group, so it doesn't matter, right, Like, we're never ever going to get on the radio in this lifetime, so let's just do it. And then it backfired and worked. But even then I didn't know why the song worked and the elements that made it work It wasn't until I started DJing. Like, if you look throughout history, every great producer has done a lot of hours djaying somewhere. Rick has done it, Jimmy Jam, Doctor Dre had hissed it suation. The reason why he's so good is because if you played the wrong song, the club might get shot up. So imagine djaying under those tense conditions. So it's almost like you have to have a winner out of the game. It's a hip hop version of that famous statement, the prospect of a hanging in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully. This case is the prospect of a shooting in the club. Yes, concentrates the djaying wonderfully. Yeah, well can you? This is the other thing that I've always been obsessed with, and that is that when you get immersed, as the two of you are in music, what happens when you listen to music that's not your own? Can you turn the critic off and appreciate it with your without passing judgment, or are you actually producing the song in your head as you listen? Who first? I can do that with records, I can't do that with concerts. In concerts, I become the same man, God, they got to turn the high head up. Sometimes at actual shows, I'll run back to the guy, no, the sound guy. Oh my god, I'm such a fan. Good you start up to high at more, just say a little bit and then run Like I micromanage many a concert records. I do that with Prince a lot. I'll say that with Prince. I'll do that. You'll do what was critiqued as you listen. I'm harder on him than I am on anyone else well, because it's like Prince is my DNA, and I've always felt as though it's usually when you upgrade your situation, like if you the artist that I like, Uh, let's take Risen from Wu Tang. People will speak with great reverence of the first five Wu Tang projects from Enter the thirty six Chambers up until let's say, uh, iron Man the ghost Face album. And that's because they had limited resources inside of his apartment in Staten Island. But it's like once they upgrade it to that plus studio in La for Wu Tak forever, that's when they started beeting a difference from the fan base with Prince. The same thing when he was in his bedroom with like very limited equipment. That's where like the most creative shit ever happened. And you know, I mean, I'll allow a pass for the record plant as well. He was in that zone there, but once he got to Paisley Park, then I started noticing, like, ah, man, I bet you he used like sure fifty seven microphones on the drums and used an SSL board and then I just started like dissecting machine and the cleanness of it all. And you know, it's hard for me to separate that. I occasionally do that with Stevie Wonder as well. I do it with everything pretty much anything I hear. I'm always thinking, oh, I wish it was more like this, or like like I just imagine it sounding different, and it's hard to turn off the producer brain. It's one of the reasons I really like listening to classical music and jazz, because I don't have that same feeling listening to that music, but listening to hip hop or listening to rock music, or more often than not, I'm producing in my head. There's one example which would be fun to talk about because you're involved, is the D'Angelo Voodoo album to me, is absolutely perfect. It's the first time I can remember listening through to an album wishing I had something to do with it because it was so good. It was just like, oh my god, this is everything I want an album to be, and it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. Such a scary time period, man, because Virgin wasn't seeing it that way. Oh man, there you know, there was a lot of Okay, when will you guys actually start the real record now and stop messing around. We're looking at each other like, this is the record we tell us how you got involved with D'Angelo and that elf. I met di'angelo and Eric Abadu coincidentally on April Fools nineteen ninety six, I'm on tour with the Fujis and the Goodie Mob. It is the sole Trade Awards weekend. One year before the Biggie tragedy. The Fujis were just beginning there Crest into the Stars with the Score album. So there was a lot of playful sort of tension between the two groups. You know, by this point, the Roots become like such a well oiled machine live and like, Okay, we gotta kick their ass tonight. We're in La we gotta do it. And I remember getting on my drum set and seeing I didn't know who Erica was, I'd assume at the time that was his girlfriend. You know, she had the tall head wrap onorn. But I knew D'Angelo silhouette because he was like front. I could see his silhouette front and center behind the lights. And I remembered that I dismissively talked myself out of playing on Brown Sugar, his previous album, because at the time I was just like soul singers in the nineties, whatever, I'm not doing this, you know, R and B guys like nothing about sol singing had moved me from any nineties offering the same way that it did when Otis writing and Stevie Wonder Lou Rawl's like soul music. They were like, yeah, he wants you to drum on this record, and I looked at him like I'll pass. And then I got Brown Sugar and was like, oh my god, this guy could be the one. And so I've been trying to figure out how to get back in his good graces so I can be there for round two. Now. The thing is is that because of this rivalry thing we have with the Fujis, the show was a certain way. But when I saw DiAngelo. I decided to call an audible and basically have have a conversation with Jess him, which meant that I was now about to throw my entire band off, because what I would normally do for a particular intro of a song, I'm now saying, all right, I'm gonna do this very obscure prince drum roll and see if he gets it. So I'm doing the Prince drum roll instead, and my band's looking at me like what are you doing. You're just trying to impress the age, right, but they didn't get that, you know, and I'm just calling this song like so they're they're looking at me like you're thwarting and throwing off the entire show. But the only person that mattered to me in the room that night was and when he heard that intro, he stood at attention. It was like yo. And when I seen that, I was like, yeah, I got you, motherfucker. And then and then like that whole show was the first time that the drumming I'm doing for now started to come to life. And again throwing my band off, like why are you playing like a like a drunk three year old, like why are you playing off rhythm, why are you? And the thing was I had to put the bait on the hook and throw it out there, and once he grabbed it, I was like, nope, not leg but like this is how I'm and a drum from now on. So he got it. They were mad as hell at me that night, but he got it, and you know, I felt good because then all the Fuji's records skipped, so they had a bad performance that night, so we won. But yeah, after that, then he knew that was the African communication thing, like I had to use my drum to tell him, okay, we speak the same language. And he came to Philly to do a song on her album. It was the last day of recording and we had like seven hours left, so we just continued to play and then it was like, well, come by next week, come by next week. And then the fourth time I'm at Electric Lady Studios for what will be a five year tutorial and education and probably one of the greatest creative periods of my that was my becoming an adult. Just every day like I was YouTube because I was still doing these mammoth grateful dead like tours with the Roots, spending all my off days at Electric Lady with him, but mostly traveling the world, collecting any and every videotape performance of some vintage Al Green and nineteen seventy four and Graham Central Station in nineteen seventy six, and bringing it back to Electric Lady so we could study it. And then after we watch it like two or three times, then we come and then play what we just watched, and after four hours of messing around, suddenly he'll change the key and I'll say, hey, what you doing now, No, keep on playing the rhythm justin and then suddenly the morphing of a new song starts. And that's pretty much why Voodoo took five years to make those twelve songs, because that was the slow, arduous process of digging and digging and morphing and digging and morphing and coming up with We had a similar experience with the first Beastie Boys album, which took I think three years to make, and it was the same reason. It was like it wasn't yeah, It was just like looking for these inspirational jumping off points and then messing with those in the studio to make it an interesting track, and then we would write to it. But but that would happen. It happened over a long period of I can remember I might have told you this story before, Malcolm, but I can remember being at a different session and Mike d calling me really upsets, like, how come our album's not done yet. It's like, you can't rush it. It's like, you can't, it's not it's not right. It comes when it comes, you know, it's not a it's not automatic. So it reminds me of that experience of that sort of what's the jam session process like for that time period. Who's the person that's like, hey, let's program something, you know, this particular way and backwards masket or even like the starts and stops in like the new style or just okay, that's another life changing album for me, by the way, Licensed to Ill life changing, the world stopping, life changing. So but it was done with the same sort of precision you're talking about. And then it would have been more often than not, it would have just been me and an engineer in the room working on the music for a long time until I had something that was exciting enough to even feel comfortable playing for the band, you know, like it had to the music really had to be right first, and so many of the drops and things, it was all rooted in the vocals. So we would first there would be the the basic track, which would be either samples or it was really loops then because there was no sampler yet, so it was either loops or direct djaying in parts program drums. I would play rudimentary like guitar stuff if it needed to be there, and we would get the tracks to that point. Then we would usually write the words which would happen over a while, and we were always collecting lyrics, Like me and Adam Harvitz would go out to danceteria pretty much every night and just goof around and try to make each other laugh, and if the other person laughed, it was usually a usable line. And just always like little tiny pieces of paper with scribbled notes on them, and that was like a comedian. C very much was like that, and it was I would say that we were as inspired by Monty Python and Steve Martin as we were by anybody doing music. It really was about inside jokes and making each other the laugh wow, and then the things, the drops you talk about, would happen. After the vocals were done. We would all of us line up at the console and everybody was before automation, or at least before automation for us, and we would each man a section of the console and then we would play it and do different drops and experiment and like, and you'd learn the song almost like learning musical parts, wow, so that you could do the same drop every time. And we would try to get through the whole song with five people standing at the desk doing muting or rides, and just like live automation. That was pretty much how we made all all those that also run DMC as well. At that time. We'll be back with more from Questlove after this break. We're back with more Questlove. Wait, I hate to jack your podcast. I have one more fan question to ask him. Please, no, no, this is what we want you to do. I don't think you you don't get enough accolades for going back to Cali. But what I specifically want to know is the scratching on going back to Cali is probably the loudest example of scratching loud, as in could skip your record if your needle is weak loud. Yes, why you know, I don't know if you remember, not remember so long ago whatever, But what was the logic behind that it was such a game changer for not a major single for or a fan favorite of LLS, but it was such a major production. The boom of the eight oh eight and the loudness of the scratching was unusual. What made you do that? It was just it was just trying to push the limits of what was exciting about the Music's like how can we make the eight to oh eight bigger? How can we? You know? And the scratching was also like almost I never really thought about this for but it does sort of relate to voodoo and how it's kind of sounds almost slowed down, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah, and that like that's more speaking to my inability as to DJ than necessarily a real choice. You know, I've I've always loved it, but I mean the engineers that house engineers ever try to talk you out of things, Like I've done a lot of things where it's like, no, you can't do that, and you'll upset the system and the record will skip it. Yes, from from the very first from my punk rock band recording, I can remember everything that I wanted to do, the studio telling me you can't do that, and we did it anywhere any when it sounded really good to us, even though you know it was a mess, right, okay, it was really Again, it's not about for me, it's never been about doing it right. It's always about I'm just trying to feel something. I'm playing with it until I feel it. And sometimes it's more interesting when it's not smooth or I don't know. Sometimes it's interesting when it's when something's really wrong, like if a vocal's really too loud, can be interesting sometimes. In the case of the D'Angelo record, I remember thinking, I can't believe that this guy is such a great singer with such a beautiful voice, and the vocals are so understated and quiet, almost like it was an afterthought, and it was brilliant. It was like it was It was the opposite of what you'd expect from the greatest soul singer of his day. It just went the other way, right. Wow. My question for two of you is, when you're doing these records set in retrospect become iconic, when do you realize they're iconic. I read a Pitchfork Perfect ten review of Voodoo, of which they dissected it and analyzed it and painted in such a different light that I didn't realize that, oh, oh god, this IE's about to get like a second round of accolades because suddenly, like the hipster community is discovering it. And then you know, all of a sudden, cats from Animal collect cats from Dirty Projectors, and then like all these groups they're coming up to me, like yo, man. Voodoo came out when I was eleven, and Da Da Da and I hit a d like, yo, dude, white hipster Brooklyn bands really like Voodoo. This is crazy. And the thing was, it was like when we were first done and I have my copy of it, like before the world had it. My assistant at the time was like, ugh, this sounds horrible. I was at a restaurant and I was like, yo, I got the new D'Angelo and they gave it back to me by like song two. Ah. Man. It was just like I was so scared of because I felt like, oh man, I'm the co pilot and I ruined a marquee star of another label, Like they're really going to kill me for this. So I didn't feel that the first go round, and it really wasn't until ten years later, once the reissue came out, and once I started hearing other people's views of it that I realized like, oh, okay, maybe we did make art. Like he still refuses to believe. Not that he's just mind blown, but you know, he's not on the internet every day and that sort of thing, so he still doesn't have an ankling of a clue that he created a master work. He still doesn't know. He'll be mind blown that I'm gonna tell him, Like, Yo, I talked to Rick Ruve and he really loves Voodoo Get out here, man. You say that like that's that's gonna be his reaction, not like really loves it like in the greatest of all time, Like it's it's a short list and it's right there. Hey, you're preaching to the requirement grit. Did you think that way the very first time you heard it? Or did you absolutely something absolutely? It just took me by surprise. I can't say I wasn't a fan of the album before that. I just didn't really listen to the album before that. This album caught me right from the beginning, and it just right away it didn't sound like anything else. So the same thing that alienated the people who didn't like it was what drew me to it is that I'm listening to something I don't have a point of reference for, and that's really exciting, and I look for those experiences and it was a great It was a great version of it too. It's not it wasn't weird for the sake of being weird. It wasn't different to show, oh we could do something different. It was different because it was cool as fuck to be different. Do you do you remember me when you're talking about the process of putting that album together and you said you were bringing back bits and pieces from your travels and wanderings and things. Do you remember some examples of those Back then? It was again, I was YouTube. The first time I went to Japan, I spent all my money in sort of the video district. So I came back. I went to Japan with one Kipling bag of my clothes. I came home from Japan with four Kipling bags and three of them all VHS cassettes. I mean, that's the first time I saw Soul Train in twenty years. So when we were studying all the Algreen performances on Soul Train in on a midnight special, we noticed that al Green always had a trick. The trick was, you know, he'd always tells band he gave a signal which instantly brought the band down to a whisper, and we thought that was the most exciting part of That's the exciting part of it. That's when the women starts screaming or whatever. So we were just taking bits and pieces of like, okay, so when we do this record in concert, do you do then we're all going to take it down to a whisper. So we were just taking notes from any and everything that we saw. Band dynamics with Al Green, band cues from Prince who's notorious for this means that in the back means that, and the hip means that, that sort of thing. Every James Brown clip, I mean, I came back with over fifty hours of and then at some point it just became like Electrical Lady just became the hangout spot to watch these things. So suddenly, like other artists are coming in and watching and watching and watching with us and watching with us, and of course like virgins like what do you mean they're not in the studio, Huh, they're doing what They're still in the breakroom watching TV like that sort of thing. But we had to refuel ourselves. So we get there four in the afternoon. We wouldn't start a note until maybe eleven o'clock at night because we had to fuel up and watch these performances over and over and over again and talk about it and then go in there and recreate it and then morph it into what we feel it into our thing. And this went on for years, went on for five years between ninety six and ninety eight, a core of the music was done and then I mean he's very meticulous with the vocal process, so all of late ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine was just all vocal. We never thought this album would be finished. I mean his follow up record of fifteen years. So that's to give you. That has to give you perspective if you had a moment in your similar period in your career where there was that level of intensity and absorption with one artist. Well, more like what he's saying, there have been times where an album is taking a long period of time and during that process we work on a lot of other things. And that goes back to like that first Beastie Boys album and BRN DMC's Raising Hell and Hello Cool Jay. Those things were all happening, often overlapping, and it's happened many times since then. Where I'd be doing pre production on a Chili Peppers album while finishing a Tom Petty album would be really normal to be happening. When we come back, Questlov breaks down the production on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. After this break, stay tuned, we're back with more of our conversation from Questlove. The way you're describing this process is so profoundly different from the life of a writer that I have to ask these questions. Is it not extraordinarily stressful and anxiety producing to have a project stretch on and on and on for that length of time And I'm assuming you're getting an angry phone call every two days from the studio? Is this not true? Someone has to pay for all of this. During that period, budgets just were limitless, at least for my particular situation. The clients that I used just they knew what they were getting. I mean, we just got lucky that these albums went platinum or whatever. But these were like art records for what was commercial at the time. We were the opposite of that. No one. I mean, of course, the good folks that Virgin Records would have loved for Voodoo to come out in ninety seven, ninety eight or whatever, But I mean it came out in the time that it was supposed to. I've never had that. I mean, you were a label as well, So did you ever have those? You know, Okay, I gotta put my cap on and be the label CEO and never no, my I always thought that my job in the label was knowing that the music was the most important thing. And as long as we're working on making the best thing we can make, there's no better gift you can give to a label than an album that's going to be meaningful. And whether that's a year later, we don't have a chance to redo these things. So it's like when we feel like we're making something forever, a statement forever, you really want to get it to at least the best that you can in that moment in time. You know, you may listen back to your work from twenty years ago and think, oh, I would do that differently today. It doesn't mean better or worse, but just the work is a little bit like a diary, and that it's a reflection of where you are in that moment, and that's the best of your taste in that moment. I mean for me, it's I say like it's done when I get goosebumps, and when each song gives me goosebumps and it matches my I'll do like a vision board, if you will, inside of my notebook. PET. So usually when I start a record, I start off with a blank slate and there's twelve spots. In my mind, I'm thinking, okay, side one is four songs, and side two is five songs, and side three is four songs, and side four is four songs. And as we're creating this stuff, I'm kind of going back to that songs in the Key of Life event listening living room moment that wore the worlds looking at the stereo moment. As each song is created and I start placing, like, okay, I would put this third song on side two, I would put this. So when I I create stuff, I guess I'm in the mind state of us listening to songs in the KIV life, analyzing the order of the songs and those things. And once I place or have places for those blank spots and that's done, then I feel like, Okay, the mixes have to give you goosebumps and whatnot, and then I feel like, Okay, we've reached satisfaction and this is its songs in the Cave Life, by the way an album. Do you feel about that album the way Rick feels about Voodoo? Is it beyond approach for you? You know what, Stevie Wonder Michael Jackson are the two artists in whom, whenever I'm asked to do these like your top twen albums at all time whatever, I consider them more events. Like It's like Thrilling Off the Wall will never wind up on the top ten all time list that I ever compile, because a borderline think of Thriller as a social experiment more than I do great collection of nine depressing songs. I mean, but you know what's interesting, Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, and I think I've an idea of how Quincy Jones operates as a producer, because what I'm noticing is, first of all, each song has somewhere between a minimum of forty tracks, sometimes to sixty eight, so it's almost like three tape machines. But what I notice is that for each song, my guess is that Quincy used what I'll say is a ropodope approach with Michael, which was, Okay, give me all your ideas, give me all the ideas he got, give me all the ideas he got. Literally every song on Off the Wall, which we sort of note as a instant classic, is one minuscule step away from becoming like the worst dated disco album of all time, because literally on each song there's like, Okay, we'll do the disco kanda, you know, track of the day on like work at day and night that would have killed the song. You hear like like disco calls. You hear way too many verses. You hear like weird synth, oh God, burn this disco out. The last song that closes the there's like some weird fire effects and synthesizer patches not needed. So basically it's I figured he let everything out, every idea out, and then Michael trusted him enough to pull Rick Ruben, which has reduced it all Right, we don't need this, we don't need this, we don't need this. It's weird because on Rock with You, Benjamin, I forget Benjamin's last name, the string arranger, there's lush, lush strings on Rock with You, in my mind like, oh, some Barry White shit. They should have rolled with that, but he took it away. And now I see why. You know, in hindsight it would have distracted from the song because the strings were so beautiful on Rock with You that it would have taken away from the song. I would have been paying attention to the strings and left the song alone. So that's what I mean about like being a smart producer, Like I wouldn't have had that knowledge. There's nine takes of She's Out of My Life, of which the version we all know is the least crying. He would have he did, like by take six through eight, I'm like, why is Bruce Swedeen letting the tape? I'm hearing Quincy like console Michael. He's like, I'm sorry the song and everything. And I would have been like, yo, I would have milked it for everything. I would have chose like take six where he's really crying his eyes out, and I would have ruined it. But he knew exactly what to take away from it to make it perfect. And that's the type of discipline that I wish to get to one day. Yeah, one day I'll learn. One day I'll learn that's part one of mine and Rick's conversation with question nine. Part two is in your ed Now listen as he gets behind a kit to break down his drumming for us and tells us maybe the greatest Barack of Bottle story ever. Seriously. You can listen to the songs featured and discussed in this episode at broken record podcast dot com. Broken Records produced by Justin Richmond and Jason Gambrel with help from Mielobel, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Jacob Weissberg, and of course Rick Rubin and Bruce Hammond. Our Broken Record theme song is by the great Kenny Beats. This show is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gradwell.