AVC: Do you have an iPod?
DJS: I have, like, four. One is a first-generation, and I just keep it around because it looks funny. I have this pipe dream that someday Apple will come calling for it because they didn't keep any themselves, and it will be some artifact that people will care about.
AVC: You said hyphy was the most important thing going on right now. Why?
DJS: Well, undoubtedly civic pride plays a big part. It's good to see my region doing well again, because ever since Tupac died, it's been dark. So to me, it's exciting. The funny thing is, about a year ago, Christmas 2005, I was waiting at a stoplight in Vallejo, and these kids were getting out of school, and it was raining, and they were wearing the hyphy attire, and they were all growing dreads. And one of them was walking across the street doing this little turf dance, going "Turf Talk and Keak Da Sneak," and singing the hook from "3 Freaks" because it was getting radio play.
That's what I'm talking about. You know, rock guys are always like, "Why are you jumping ship?" And I'm like, "Well, you guys didn't support me anyways, so why should I fuck around with you?" I mean, I'm no different than anybody else. I want people to hear my music, and hyphy gets radio play in the Bay. People make records, send MP3s to the key DJs in the Bay, and they have a chance of hearing them on the radio that night.
AVC: Were The Outsider's lyrics written by the people who sang or rapped on them, or did you collaborate?
DJS: In the case of Nump, he wrote everything, but he was writing it there in the studio, so he consulted with me. Everybody is totally unique when it comes to how they work, and that's one of the things I find exhilarating. Nump, Phonte Coleman, E-40, those are all examples of people who wrote with me there in the room, and every once in a while would be like, "What do you think about this?" And nine times out of 10, I'd be like, "Yeah, that's cool." In the case of Nump, a couple times I was like, "Oh, but you know what would make that even more fresh, is if you said this." And then there's people like Federation, Q-Tip, and Christina Carter who basically did everything, and I was like, "That's great, fine, don't need anything else, thank you."
I would say the song I had the most input on—and it's probably the simplest lyrically because of the structure—was "You Made It," because that song was really, really personal to me. I wanted to make sure that the lyrics were vague enough that anybody could put their own context to it, yet personal enough to me that it made sense.
AVC: There's more live instrumentation on The Outsider than you've ever used before. In the past, when your tracks were more sample-heavy, did you build the songs around the samples, or did you look for samples that approximated some sound already in your head?
DJS: The way I look for samples, I just keep looking until elements reveal themselves. "Artifact," from the new album, is a punk track where the elements don't come from punk records. I made a track that I wanted to feel like a weird punk hybrid, but I didn't go looking through punk records to get them. That's why making music tends to be really, really time-consuming.
One of the things that I find frustrating is that any time on any project, if I say, "This song features live instruments," or "There was a guitarist on this track," people generally assume that what they're hearing is basically new stuff, re-sampled. A song like "The Tiger" off the new album, which features a couple of the Kasabian guys, that is one of the best samples I've done, and the only thing that isn't a sample on there is the main guitar line, which is actually kind of a vamp on a sample that was in there already. So that's an example of what I'm aiming for.
Since I love music, I really appreciate live instrumentation, but it's just not my medium. So I try and work with samples to make it feel more live. I think my peers have tended to say what they appreciate about what I do is that it sounds so real and organic, and it's through a lot of little techniques. Like on "Napalm Brain," from Endtroducing…. When drummers lay into the groove, the first couple of bars, they drag a little bit. So I programmed that song to work the same way.
Now as far as using live instruments on this album … After working on The Private Press, I started to feel a little tired of not being able to write music on the spot as I felt it. A really good example of different disciplines coming together to form a real natural-sounding whole is "You Made It," because there's samples, there's live instruments, and a string arrangement that I wrote on the synthesizer but was recorded live. The drums are sampled, but to me, they sound really live. I didn't hold back from using any of the disciplines that were available.
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