How do I use my platform? How do you join in a way that is useful and not distracting and not shining a light on you?
— Ryan Lewis
I think most producers and MCs are constantly in this competition, but it's usually with yourself. It's usually wanting to be innovative: wanting to catch yourself when you're doing the same thing or throwing out the same art you've already done.
I don't think I would be here in an interview if YouTube wasn't in existence, if social media hadn't been developed, or if these platforms for artists to promote and develop their own careers hadn't become available.
Rick Rubin is super intriguing to me because he has become this god producer in completely drastically different genres, which very few people have done.
I didn't grow up listening to hip-hop since I was six.
I bring up 'The Heist,' and you can almost cut that record down the middle between songs where the beat came first and the words came second, and songs where the words came first and the beat came second. It can start with a vibe, a beat that drives a story, or it can start with a story and then trying to identify the tone to tell that story right.
For me personally, to hop onboard and use the amazing success and blessings in my life to pull off something like the 30/30 Project is awesome.
Some songs go super-quick; some take a really long time.
In 1984, my mom gave birth to my older sister, Teresa. Due to a complicated delivery, she needed a blood transfusion, and at that moment, my mom had HIV+ blood put into her body.
I guess my job has always been to build the music, direct the videos, to do all the things that usually fall behind the scenes.
The process is so much longer than the result for almost everything all of us are doing.
You have no idea what you're passionate about until you give it a shot. If I hadn't been given a guitar or a camera or whatever, I'd be doing something different.
I have never been wired to be front and centre of spotlight and ready to dance.
There is something about me that is collaborative, that wants to get the best performance out of somebody else or to hear something that somebody else has done that's good and to try and make it great.
Any time we have the opportunity to play in a more intimate room, there's such a huge aspect of our set just built for that. And beyond that, we just love being that close to our fans.
Coming out of the Northwest and that environment to shoot hip-hop videos, it's a little atypical of a place to be, you know.
I graduated in 2009, which - if you think back to where the economy was at that time - was an interesting time to graduate.
I have an AIDS ribbon tattooed on my arm.
I'm not trying to make beats that are better than somebody else's. I'm trying to make beats that are genuine to me.
When you are 10, and you are with friends making music or playing sports or doing whatever, I would say, enjoy that and try to keep that as the model for as long as you can.
I would love to be one of the few artists that hits a point of success and can go back into the studio and make another album that matters and relates to people and not go back in and be super tainted by this whole thing.
Seattle isn't known for a particular production sound, so that leaves a lot of great producers in Seattle doing kind of their own thing. And I think, for me, I was probably enough removed from hip-hop that my style was even a little bit weirder than that.
The music industry is transforming fairly rapidly.
I'm the only person in my entire extended family that plays an instrument or sings, really. Which is kind of weird. I don't know where I got it from.
When artists who are not associated with the typical infrastructure get recognition, that becomes a cultural movement.
I love history, cultural and religious studies, philosophy, photography and traveling.
There's an open door now more than ever to be making any type of beats that you want.
