“Choosing happiness is a hell of a process”: Thundercat on funk, losing friends and getting fired by Snoop Dogg (maybe) | music

It’s an overcast Thursday afternoon at the end of January, and Thundercat is telling me about the time he tried to interest Snoop Dogg in Frank Zappa’s work in the mid-1970s. He explains that he was never the Thunder at that time. He was still Steven Bruner, the hired bass player, who grew up in what he calls a “Rick James-level dumb band” backing the revered rapper, filled with L.A. jazz luminaries who would later contribute to Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly: Kamasi Washington, Josef Leimberg, Terrace Martin.” Unfortunately, their jazz compositions were sometimes considered surplus to requirements. At one point, while Broner was playing a solo on stage, Snoop approached him and bluntly declared: “Nobody asked you to play everything.” Which“.

So perhaps it was in the spirit of horizon-expanding that Broner took it upon himself to play Snoop’s “St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast,” a complex, marimba-heavy slice of jazz-rock from Zappa’s 1974 album Apostrophe, which switches time signatures three times in less than two minutes, and contains lyrics about a man stealing margarine and urinating on a bingo card. “Yes, I hit him with a roller coaster,” Broner laughs. “He was smoking, and he almost ate his cigarette, saying, ‘What is this?’” Hell It is happening? I said: My feelings exactly. I think I spun the wheel after that and left the band: She played Snoop Dogg Saint AlFonzo breakfastMy job here is done, and I have no more work to do“He thinks for a moment. ‘Or maybe I’ll be kicked out. ‘Get out of here, my friend, you’re too weird.’ I have forgotten. “It was a great moment.”

This becomes clear when we try to discuss his upcoming fifth album, a sort of Thundercat-like tale, which includes one of the impossibly eclectic cast of musicians he’s worked with throughout his career: he’s supposedly the only person in history who can claim to have played with Ariana Grande and Herbie Hancock, been a member of an early 2000s boy band (No Curfew, briefly big in Germany) and thrash metal institution Suicidal Mule. You get the impression he wasn’t very happy as a member of the first band: “I’m a working-class musician, man, and that’s what it meant to me when I was 14.” However, he spent nine years on the latter, working his way through songs called Widespread Bloodshed and We’re F’n Evil. (It’s worth noting that he was also working with Erykah Badu at the same time.)

He seems puzzled when I ask him if he can think of any musical situation in which he might feel uncomfortable while playing. “Whatever brain disposition lets you know you’re in a dangerous situation, I don’t think I do it,” he says with a shrug. “I think consistent performance has allowed that to not be a problem for me. What’s that saying? ‘Luck is just preparation met by opportunity’?”

Additionally, Snoop’s story also involves a dramatic and improbable collision of types, which is Thundercat’s stock in trade. He says his transition from all-purpose sideman to solo artist in the early 2010s seemed strangely natural to him, perhaps because the music he began making was as strange and eclectic as the list of artists on his resume. His solo albums thus far have led a winding path between funk, jazz, electronic pop, yacht rock, hip-hop, psychedelia, punk, and chiptune, among others, all lavishly embellished with the kind of extravagant solos that upset Snoop Dogg.

It shouldn’t really work, but it does, perhaps because the strange stylistic cocktails never seem forced, but a natural extension of his impossibly Catholic tastes. Over the course of the afternoon, he moved from unbridled enthusiasm about Leon Weir’s mid-’70s masterpiece of cutting-edge soul music, to explaining the Lydian mode, to displaying a clearly encyclopedic knowledge of Chick Corea’s work, to earnest discussion of Limp Bizkit’s “truly innovative” oeuvre. He believes his musical tastes go back to his parents, who are both musicians — his father plays drums with the Temptations — and ardent believers that music categorization was merely a marketing tool, an idea that has clearly seeped into a very deep level. By the time he was a teenager, he was as fascinated by Slipknot and Korn as he was by the Billy Cobham and George Duke albums his parents played, or the jazz artists he and Washington would sneak, underage, to see in Los Angeles clubs.

Thundercat is clearly a pop star unlike any other, though you don’t need to know his backstory to know that: you just have to look at him. Today in London, despite having recently arrived from Los Angeles, he is dressed in an eye-catching style: baggy shorts, a shirt with a kind of 19th-century military brocade, sneakers decorated with metal skeleton toes, and pigtails of dyed hair held back from his face by a pair of oversized silver handles featuring snarling tigers. Perhaps worried that this might not look attractive enough, he donned a massive metal shield bearing the logo of the cartoon alien cats from which he took his name. He’s an obsessive fan of anime, comic books, and sci-fi, and fills his chat with references to manga and video games, some of which are so obscure that I have to look them up when I get home.

He told me that his “greatest moment ever” was landing a cameo role as a robot-handed man in the Star Wars TV series The Book of Boba Fett. “I can use that in an argument every time someone gets too loud and grandiose: ‘Hey, you can’t talk to me like that, I was in Star Wars!'” He nodded. “It wasn’t one of those moments where you never meet your heroes. You can’t ruin Star Wars for me. Some of the characters and some of the principles upon which they were created are timeless, and continue to exist. The conflict between darkness and light, what is considered dark and what is considered light; Power, which is basically like flatulence.” He notices my puzzled expression and smiles. “It’s all about how you choose to use it, man. “Maybe as a weapon.”

But he didn’t stop in London to discuss Star Wars. Broner has a new album out called Distracted, which sounds like interesting work as usual: smooth piano ballads that border on house riffs, A$AP Rocky raps over a beat that harkens back to hip-hop as much as it does Lil Yachty and traditional indie duo The Lemon Twigs also in the supporting cast.

Not for the first time in his career, the eclecticism is so transformative that it’s initially easy to miss just how tense and sad many of the songs are: 2011’s Golden Age Apocalypse mourning the drug-induced death of his friend and collaborator Austin Peralta; His 2017 hit Drunk delved into his problematic relationship with alcohol, while Distracted’s predecessor, It Is What It Is, was consumed with grief over the death of his “best friend”, rapper Mac Miller.

He says it was particularly difficult to make It Is What It Is – “there was a lot of trauma attached to it, a lot of pain” – exacerbated by the fact that it was released at the height of lockdown. “I’ve heard releasing an album compared to postpartum depression – you have such a connection to this thing because of how obsessed you are with it, and then you put it out and then there’s this kind of weird feeling of loneliness. And because of Covid, ‘This Is What It Is’ came out in complete silence, like: drop the album and go sit in the dark, see if you can make the pain worse.”

“There was so much going on at the time this album came out, and I had to sit through it, I couldn’t… I almost threw up thinking about it. But in the end, when I look back, I’m so grateful for the opportunity to sit down, because having to get up on stage and deal with it night after night, saying goodbye to my friends over and over again, would have been another painful experience.”

Instead of touring, Bruner took stock. He gave up drinking and began training for boxing with such dedication that “even the coaches ask what I’m doing sometimes: ‘Hey, are you training for a fight or something?'” he lets out a bitter laugh. “And I said to myself: ‘Do you mean World War III, because it seems like it’s going on?’

He says the new album is “a kind of memoir, a processing of my thoughts,” and it seems to relate to the soul-searching he undertook in the wake of the release of It Is What Is. There are songs about his capacity for self-sabotage, about failed relationships, and about his suspicions that some of his erratic behaviors might be the result of ADHD, even though he has not been diagnosed with the condition. “I think this is a byproduct of the environment, as is the case with most diseases,” he says. “We have cell phones, we have microtransactions, and you use your brain in 30-second bursts, and you’ll adapt to that even if you don’t want to. And even if it’s something that’s diagnosable, it’s like, I’m 40, and I’m not dead yet. And I don’t know a creative person whose brain isn’t like that. It comes with the territory. So I think it’s somewhere along the lines of a superpower.”

The album also pays tribute to the late Miller, who appears on “She Knows Too Much,” a song the duo recorded in Malibu a few years before Miller’s death. No, Bruner says, it wasn’t strange to return to recording and hear his late friend’s voice echoing throughout the studio again. The songs about Miller’s death on “It Is What It Is” are consumed by an almost paralyzing misery: “It’s so hard to get over it, I tried to get over it, and I’m stuck in between,” he sings on the title track.

But She Knows Too Much — an upbeat, funk-infused song that finds Miller in his first flush of mega-fame, reflecting on his newfound fame with witty, earthy phrases — provided a reminder of when they made it happen. “That was the funniest thing ever,” Bruner says. “It was funny, I remember it viscerally. I like to describe Mac almost as if he was one man. When I would see him, I would somehow feel like we were supposed to be in suits. Like crazy, weird, high-brow crap. And bluffing! That’s what we were going to do. It’s just a clear picture of who we are.”

A distraction is an “optional sound of happiness,” Bruner says. If it sometimes seems overwhelming or frustrating, well, “Choosing happiness is a hell of a process.”

In fact, he seems happy, joking about his new album having to compete with Cardi B’s — “I gotta make myself fatter, I gotta get a BBL” — and excited about an upcoming visit to Paris Fashion Week.

It’s strange, he says: for all the changes his career has undergone, he doesn’t seem any different from his early days when he was officiating weddings, or later, when he was suicidal. “My main memory is thinking that if I stand still for too long, I’m going to get hit with a beer can. And I think the same principle applies. In fact, I think that principle applies to every stage of life: Stand still for too long, someone will hit you with something.”

And with that, he shook my hand and headed off into the London dusk, his waistcoat rattling slightly as he walked, heads turning understandably as he passed.