AVC: Your second record deal was a solo album. What happened with that?
LF: That was the beginning of Food & Liquor. It was going good. You're building an album, you're working around as a solo artist and learning new and different things. And you get Jay-Z coming in to be executive producer, and you get all this other stuff coming in. Preparing yourself to be a solo artist. And toward the end of that deal, [label head] L.A. Reid got fired. We're wrapping up the album, actually doing final track-listing versions, and L.A. Reid gets fired, and the whole project gets shut down. There's no more Arista Records. We get hit with, "Do you want to go to Jive?" and first right of refusal, and things of that nature. That's what it was. It wasn't the music. It wasn't anybody's fault. It wasn't the A&R getting fired, it was no, they closed the whole record company down.
AVC: How autobiographical is "Kick, Push"?
LF: Not at all. "Kick, Push" isn't about me. It's about this kid by the name of Ken. He's not even a kid, really, he's in his 20s. That song is his life exaggerated with maybe a few stories of a few other people, and then some stuff I fabricated. I just added some of the stuff that I knew from being a skateboarder into it.
AVC: How has the skateboarding community responded to that song?
LF: They love it. The OGs love it. The new kids, even the kids who weren't skaters, who became skaters because of "Kick, Push." Of course, you've got your detractors for anything that you do. You've got a few skateheads going "You don't keep it authentic," and this, that, and the third, but for the most part, it's been good with people like Tony Hawk and Steve Williams.
AVC: There was a dis song about that.
LF: You mean from Team Ice Cream?
AVC: Yeah. How did that make you feel?
LF: Regular. For every person who says something good, who says "Kudos," there's always someone else who says something bad to bring you down. It's expected in the world.
AVC: It's almost a form of validation. You know you've made it when people start doing dis tracks about you.
LF: Yeah. When you start creating opinion, and you start creating difference of opinion, you're doing something. People are actually sitting down and critiquing. A lot of the stuff people hate, they really don't. They only look at the outer shell. They don't really get into it. Nine times out of 10, what happens when you start really looking at something, you start understanding it, no matter how vile it may seem. If you just look at it objectively, why people do certain things, you'll be like, "Wow, that makes sense." It could be something like the atomic bomb. If you look at why they were making the atomic bomb, you can see that point of view. "Yeah, that makes sense." A lot of people just look at the outside, that it's the atomic bomb, so therefore it's bad.
AVC: Because of the way the song took off, do you feel like you became a spokesman for skateboarding?
LF: Yeah, but I always shunned it. I'm always at the top of skateboarding royalty, I'm with Tony Hawk and Steve Williams, and with these people and this company, but I was often like, "Yo, I don't want to do this photo shoot with a skateboard." What really killed me was that people were trying to pigeonhole me, and magazines would get mad because I didn't want to do their photo shoot with a skateboard. Then when the album came out, people forgot about "Kick, Push." The rest of the album had nothing to do with skateboarding. And they said, "Oh, now we see why you didn't want to be the spokesperson for skateboarding." The album had nothing to do with skateboarding. It was just little things like that.
AVC: What about "Kick, Push II?" What was the genesis of that?
LF: "Kick, Push II" started out as a mix-tape record. I actually did it for MySpace. Where it was just supposed to be like, "Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?" How can I put it? It was like booster packs, extensions. Like, once you've beaten the game and played every level, it's like a new level, instead of making a new game. It's carrying on the storyline. So "Kick, Push II" is actually, like, digging into the characters. It gives you more of an understanding of why. You just got this blank story of the one character and what he goes through, and you're introduced to his girlfriend and his crew, and then "Kick, Push II" gives you more of a personal understanding of who those people are. It wasn't meant for the album. It just turned out we should put this on the album at the end of the day.
AVC: Are you a fan of Dungeons & Dragons?
LF: Not really. I've never really played it. [Laughs.] I understand it, though, what it is.
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