London Is Burning
at Vinegar Hill House
What’s been inspiring you lately with your clothing?
I think aesthetically I know how I wanna look. […] I have an in-house design team. I design all this stuff and then they get together and sew it for me and like, “this works, this doesn’t work. Try this, try that.” You know, Prince William and Prince Harry, they don’t shop at Walmart or like, Louis Vuitton. Their shit gets made in-house.
What about that idea of patchwork—you’re a unique sampler and collaborator. You’ve sampled old stuff like Marvin Gaye, and then on this most recent album you approached Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara. So how did you approach her? Because that’s something that she’s never done before.
Well, I think collaborating is a very spiritual thing. It’s like having a friend. When you do something with someone it kind of lives forever if you want it to… So I had seen a Tegan and Sara concert in L.A. And I was like, “Wow, this is very interesting. It’s so dope. I like everything about it.” And I’m that person [that] when I hear stuff I wanna learn more about it.
So I wanted to reach out to Sara. And at the same time I was talking to Warner Brothers and I knew she was on the label. And I wanted to cut another record, I sent her this thing… I wanted to take her out of her element and just let her live on this track, cause the track is very funky. Rick James has his protégé on this track, and it sounds great, and I just needed a girl who was gonna have that fight with me. The song is about communication battles. It’s about not picking up the phone. It’s about a lot of questioning, uncertainty—and she did an amazing job. I don’t do collabs for the money, I don’t do collabs for the art of radio.
Can you tell me a little bit about the album you’re making now? You’re working with members of the Budos Band, people you’ve met through Mark Ronson… How will it be different than what you’ve done before?
There’s no Pro Tools, no laptops, no phones. There’re only instruments; only players; only musicians. And we’re all recording into tape machines and old-school mics. It’s like when guys performed on a record, that’s what it means. Like a James Brown performance, he did that all in one take. Like, today, we have rap, rap, rap, stop. Rap, rap, rap, stop. Sing the chorus, stop. With these guys, they only have one track for that. So I have to do it in one take. My performance has to be good, we have to be satisfied with me recording for three minutes straight, and that’s gonna be the song. All that energy I put into those three minutes is the song.
I read that for “Lighthouse” you had to work with a vocal coach. What was it like working with a coach for the first time?
It’s like getting an ass whooping from your mom. Like, “You can do better. You can do better.” [makes ass whooping noises] It’s about learning right from wrong. Like, “You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong.” You get to this really frustrated point, like, your voice is one of the most amazing instruments and if you learn how to use it you could be like Marvin Gaye or somebody.
How much control does Warner Brothers have over your music now? Is it different than before?
It’s not different, actually. I’m still hands-on. I’m still interactive. I gotta update my Tumblr, my Hypebeast blog, my Twitter, my Facebook, all that stuff every day by myself. Some of it stays un-updated sometimes because I’m so busy on other stuff. But you almost have to be delusional to control everything. You know, I’m not just a control freak. It’s like, you know, Warner can’t really come in and tell me anything. I signed there so they can sell my records, and that’s it. They really appreciate my input, what I want to do, how I want to do it, how I don’t want it to get too big, where it feels like it’s out of the fans’ hands. I have to have this emotional, personal relationship with my fanbase. We’ve been working on that, it’s good. This is how artists are built. There’s room for failure, but that’s what makes the artist perfect, you know, when he fails and comes back hard and boom.
Has failure changed you as an artist?
Oh, I failed a lot. I got booed on BET. It was the Spring Bling show, five years ago or something. I don’t know, maybe because my outfit was weird, but it was like a setup, really. It was a talent show where they had judges and you could get booed and shit. So they already threw out three acts and I was one of the acts. And they had this whole huge audition they taped, and 5,000 people lined up to audition. Only six people could make the show and the three people who were included didn’t have to do it, but we still had to fake in my audition as well.
That’s… weird.
Yeah, it was written into a script. I went on and did my songs and everyone was like [makes booing noise] on live TV. It was like that [makes sound of screeching brakes] moment, like, “Wow. Just to get booed on TV, what are you going to do about this? Oh my god. Everyone back home is going to see this.” As soon as I walked off stage there were cameras in my face, people asking “How do you feel, man?” “Oh, it’s all good, man. You know, I don’t think the crowd’s ready for me, or they’re not ready for what I’m about to do.”
How’d you bounce back from that?
2011. Theophilus London. This month I’m in L’Uomo Vogue. I’m in fuckin’ Nylon. I’m in Details magazine. To give my mom a L’Uomo Vogue, huge, thick magazine, like, Beyoncé on the cover, and all the words were written in Italian. And I’m standing there in some Jordans like, “What’s up, this girl is good.” Or to even be on a huge billboard at the beginning of the year, before my album was out, I signed a deal with Bushmills. They put us on these huge billboards all over the city, all over the train stations. I got a shoe coming out with Cole Haan next month. Man, you know, that’s how I bounced back from that. •