Graham Webster: How did you get into music and production?

RJD2: I went to a vocational music school in high school for traditional music training. I always bought all kinds of records. You know: hip-hop, rock, whatever. I became a record collector and I kind of stumbled into DJ-ing, and that just led into production.

People have lots of genre names for your music. What do you prefer?

Oh I don’t care. I think that instrumental hip-hop sorta makes sense, at least in terms of the descriptive. But it’s got a lot of syllables and that makes it a little laborious, you know. Beat music, instrumental hiphop, whatever. I don’t really give a shit, you know what I mean?

Do you have any feeling of why Deadringer would have been a cool thing for somebody like me, someone who spends a lot of time with rock music or mainstream indie rock and all its fringes?

I get the same kind of rush from like a King Crimson groove or like listening to John Bonham as I do from Public Enemy or Big Daddy Kane or something like that. I think that at their heart, rhythmically and sonically, a lot of rock music and good rap music embody the same thing on an instrumental level. Why you might like it or why you might think it’s cool? I mean everybody likes a break from the norm. You know, for the indie rock kid who is probably listening to some rap music or some electronic music, or maybe even some really ignorant shit like The Diplomats or something, it’s probably refreshing once in a while, ‘cause it’s the complete opposite of what you’re used to listening to.

Some of these tracks sound like they could be played by a regular band. Is that what you were going for?

Oh, yeah. When I was in high school, the thing that you didn’t want to do was bite other people’s styles. Coming up with your own thing is not nearly as prevalent now, but back then it was a big deal. There were all these, I hate to say, like, secret codes, but it was its own little underground rule of ethics—everything from what kind of drums you sampled to where you sampled them and what machines you bought and all this stupid little shit. And because of that, I’m stuck in this little thing of constantly assessing what’s going on in terms of the status quo of rap music and hiphop, and saying, “How can I make something that’s relevant, that recognizes this, but has left the center of it and is really off, doing its own thing?” So at a point I realized: that’s something that nobody was really trying to do, at least at the time, was approach it like a band. Take samples and use the tools that you would use just to make a rap beat, but approach it like you’re arranging a rock song.

It sounds like this might be a little more active on Since We Last Spoke. Was this change on purpose?

I think I just got better with what I was doing, you know. I was shooting for Since We Last Spoke with Deadringer, but I’ll be honest. I kinda—I lost steam at a point. I wasn’t as disciplined. I would say 95 percent of making an album is discipline, and with this record I was really a little more hardnosed with myself. I said, “You’re definitely going to record way too much material. Record as much as you can, and hopefully 50 percent of that is all that’s gonna make the album.” And I really tried to make sure that every single song was very contoured. I wanted it to be the kind of thing where there wasn’t four bars or eight bars that you could cut out of any of the songs and still have them make sense proportionally. I didn’t want there to be any fat or dead weight. And I feel like Deadringer, at points it— [he lets out a gaspish, frustrated sound.] I think some of the songs sound like they’re kind of arranged like a band would, with bridges and choruses and all that kind of stuff, and other songs just backtrack into sort of ambient beat music, which isn’t what I ever wanted to do.

If there was one track that you could have redone or left off of Deadringer what would that have been?

Probably “Silver Fox,” or “The Proxy.” I don’t think that they’re executed as well as they could have been.

How do you come up with one of these songs? Are you going through stacks of vinyl all the time looking for samples, or do you conceive of melodies first and look for samples to fit them?

Usually things start with a sample. The new record was a little different. I got a little more focused. With the new album, it’d start with just a beat. Everything I do starts just with drums and some kind of loop or something—just trying to make something that sounds good to possibly use on a rap record, or maybe not. And then you just kind of expand on it and keep building on it. And there’s a cycle that I usually end up getting into. You have your main piece. Usually it’s something that’s more rhythmically oriented, and then maybe you try to fi nd something melodic, like a high-end flute or guitar or vocals or something, or just a melody that’s gonna fit over the rhythm, and then you go with that. Then you say, oh, well, maybe you wanna have an alternate section where the melody stays the same but the instrumentation changes. So you just keep piggybacking off each other, bouncing between what a band would call, I guess, a riff and a melody. Once you come up with a new melody for the riff, you change the riff. And once you come up with a new riff, you change the melody, so on and so forth.

I know you’re playing some of the instruments. What instruments do you play and what do you have on the live stage with you?

The instruments that are live on the record are keyboards, guitar and bass. Mostly keyboards. And there’s one of the songs that I’ve done on tour, but I’ve been touring with myself, and I feel like adapting everything to a band is an all or nothing thing. But I’ve been doing one of the songs. I have two DJ setups, so four turntables and a sampler, NPC, and if I’m doing the song, I’ll have an acoustic guitar.

What kind of people do you see in the crowds?

It’s a lot of indie rock kids. The average fan is somewhere between 16 and 23, young white male, probably the same thing that you’d get at any other indie rock show.

So you don’t get the hip-hop crowd as much?

It depends on the bill. If I’m touring with a whole bunch of rappers, then maybe there’ll be more hip-hop kids, but if I’m touring by myself that number goes down. A lot of traditional, just normal rap fans, I don’t think that they’re so inclined to go see a DJ. Something like what I do is a little foreign to your average rap fan, at least in terms of live. Before I had seen a tour of somebody like Shadow or Prefuse, I don’t know if I would have gone to see a DJ or somebody like me touring. I probably would have been more inclined to go to a club where I’m gonna get my local DJ playing rap records, you know.

You mentioned DJ Shadow and Prefuse 73. It’s obvious that DJ’s don’t just throw down beats for MC’s anymore. Do you think that this has something to do with like the future of DJ-ing becoming something that emerges on its own?

Honestly, you know, I’ll be frank with you. There’s a very simple sociological reason that there is a lot of music like this out. There’s a lot of kids between 22 and 32, maybe, that grew up listening to hip-hop, some of them being from the suburbs, some of them being from the city. They grew up liking rap music, and none of their friends rapped or whatever, but they liked the beats, or they bought records. DJ culture has always been something that is attractive to the more introverted end of hip-hop culture. It doesn’t really attract the fl amboyant, nutty-ass, “I want attention,” psychologically adjusted, whatever; those are rappers. At a point, equipment got real cheap. Around 1997 or 1998, samplers and computers and home recording equipment shit got real, real, real, real cheap, and it just got hip. And I think it was the combination of the gear getting cheap and these kids. If there were more rappers, and if everybody grew up in a city environment, where they went to a school where a lot of kids rapped, I think there would be more kids trying to produce for MC’s, and trying to be a rapper’s DJ. It’s one of those things that’s kind of grown as a sociological necessity, if you will.

Do you think an audience grows for it at the same time?

I think if anything’s done right people are going to buy it. You could see somebody juggling monkeys, and if it’s fucking interesting, that’s going to sell records. On the fl ip side, I knew a lot of people that, throughout the 90s, became more and more disenchanted with hip-hop. When Bad Boy got popular and Puffy was on the radio sampling Diana Ross, the west coast had its comeback and things got ignorant again, I know a lot of people that were like, “Oh, well, I like the beats but I just can’t buy rap music any more ‘cause it’s all bullshit.” And I think that that, from an audience perspective, created a climate where people still wanted to hear the beats but they didn’t want to hear a bunch of bullshit.