Ramble On – Rjd2 Interview @ Neumos 4/11/10

Rjd2 soundcheck at Neumos

Posted by Todd Hamm

{Check out also our review of RJ's new album The Colossus here}

At about 6:30 the band is soundchecking. The four members are wandering around stage twisting knobs, tapping keys, testing mics. With a guitar slung over his shoulder, Rjd2 has his back turned to the empty Capitol Hill venue, working some effects from "A Spaceship For Now" out of his MPC. The guy behind the keyboard is breathing the backup vocals for "Exotic Talk" through a modulated microphone, and the drummer is pounding out some tricky fills from RJ's vast catalogue of tricky drum breaks. The experience is like walking into an exploded diagram of the artist's body of work; bits and pieces of his catalogue strewn everywhere on stage, ready to be pulled together at the right moment.

After a minute or two, RJ notices me in front of the stage. "You here for the interview?" he asks. "We're gonna make some noise for a minute first." They jump into the middle of "Since We Last Spoke", the title track from his second album. The instrumentation is beautifully arranged live, and when the musicians lean closer to their mics to hum the refrain, it sounds like wind howling through Neumos as it bounces from speaker to wall and back again.

The sound is broken by a member of the venue's sound team giving instructions over the PA fed through their stage monitors, and once again they're changing levels, replacing speaker wire and moving about. Satisfied with his equipment on stage for the time being, RJ runs upstairs to the sound booth and changes out a chord or two, then backstage, then behind the bar to grab something--this guy is everywhere. After a few technical difficulties, he finally hops behind the turntables and cues some stage-rattling bass tracks, then mixes in some loops and taps out samples. He's making beats on the spot.

As the opening act, Bus Driver arrives to soundcheck, RJ cuts the sound and gives the thumbs up to the sound team. He approaches. "You want to go backstage?" he asks me, and I follow him to the green room. On our way downstairs beneath the stage proper, we pass several musicians hard at work on the venue's pinball machines, killing time. We hang a right into a room lined with couches and folding chairs. He yawns. "This is day number 55," he says of the tour as we sit down. After the show, he's scheduled to fly home to Philadelphia for the rest of the month, then it's off to Europe to play more gigs for a couple of weeks. This show is his ninth sell out in a row.

He's on the road to promote his fourth album The Colossus, a release that's melded styles from across the vast spectrum of his career, and received favorable press. "I had the idea of doing a record that would be as far reaching as possible, stylistically speaking," he says. "And so I would kind of be filling these roles, you know? I would go into sample-based, MPC mode and do a song like that; finish that. Then probably move on and do something of some other sort, like eletro-y or soul oriented or whatever, and I would end up going back to these things. For me, making a record--specifically this record--is a lot like putting a jigsaw puzzle together in the sense that once you get things down, you start having to look for songs that will play a different roll."

He talks as fast as you would imagine someone as busy as he is would, and his points are frequently accented by lively hand gesture. I tell him one thing that stuck out on this record was his sense of humor. "It's not a conscious thing as much as I just don't take what I do that seriously," he explains. "A record and a show are time to have fun. I guess to put it clearly, I don't have a lot of ego or pride as far as what I do as an artist." He adds that he tries not to think about his relevance in the music world. "In a way, it's assessing your own popularity...it's a dangerous thing. I make records first and foremost to please myself, because it's something I enjoy doing."

RJ with the band

The bass from Bus Driver's soundcheck pulses through the ceiling as I ask about The Third Hand, the soft rock/funk precursor to his current release that, while accomplished in musicianship and technicality of songwriting, left fans and critics alike puzzled as to the direction of his career. Despite what many journalists stated at the time, the album may have been more of a return to his roots than a departure, as he began playing the guitar long before he hopped on the decks, and actually still does most of his songwriting on the keyboard before it's transcribed elsewhere. "I stopped reading reviews," he laughs. "I read three: one was really good, like four and a half stars in the [Associated Press]; then Spin and Rolling Stone both wrote pretty unfavorable ones. I knew there was going to be a bit of a challenge in rolling out that record, I just didn't realize how big that challenge was going to be." He explains that he stopped reading positive critiques as well as negative ones. "It's an emotional roller coaster...If you care about one, you gotta care about the other. It's not a fair place to put yourself to only pay attention to the good reviews."

He begins to stretch, hinting that show time is near. Leaning one direction with his opposite arm extended over his head, it looks like a lat stretch. It almost looks like he's going for the high-five. I hesitate for a moment, but refrain. "Every record that I've made has really in so many ways been referential to the previous record," he says as he stretches. "The fact that a portion of Since We Last Spoke was not sample-based--it was live--was directly referential to Deadringer being a sample-based record, and I knew I had to branch out. The Third Hand was kind of a culmination of that pursuit, and the point of it was to do as much as I could on my own. The Colussus was referential to that in the sense that I wanted to do the exact opposite and collaborate as much as I could. I'm not working on a big picture, but the small picture has everything to do with what's relative to my immediate future and immediate past."

At this point we get up and wander back toward the stairs. He tells me  the show will be his best yet, and to expect costume changes among other things. I shake his hand and wish him luck before wandering back upstairs and onto the main floor where the first few members of a sell out crowd are beginning to leak through the door.

I failed to bring my own video camera, so this clip comes courtesy of macberns on youtube. Photo credits however, go to your boy.