If there’s one thing you can count on about RJD2, it’s that he’s never comfortable. The longtime producer, musician, and DJ dabbles in various styles, then jumps back out again, samples, borrows, clips, mashes, composes, constructs, deconstructs, and constructs again. And the result is always fresh, whether he’s crafting a sweeping instrumental, a rap collaboration, or what could easily be mistaken for a soul record straight out of the 1970s.
So at first listen, Dame Fortune, his newest LP, feels like a deep breath. It’s reflective, calm, and it sounds like home. Which is fitting, as this was RJ Krohn’s last album in Philadelphia before moving back to Columbus, Ohio. Philadelphia is evident all over the LP, from Son Little’s soulful voice present on “We Come Alive” to the strings on “Piece Of What.”
In the lead-up to the album’s release on March 25, Krohn spoke to UPROXX Music from his house in Columbus and discussed everything from the nature of home to how he puts a track together.
Martin Rickman: You can really hear Philly in this album. Is that something you did consciously?
RJD2: I can’t say that I did it intentionally, but it would be disingenuous to say that I wasn’t conscious of it. I don’t come to making records from that thoroughly thought out place. It’s much more instinctual. But I think it makes perfect sense that you can hear Philly in the album. Being in Philadelphia for 15 years and then knowing that I was leaving, it might be coming out more than it did at other times.
This sense of home is something I’ve grappled with since I bought my first house back in July. What does home mean to you? Does a sense of place matter? Why the move back to Ohio?
The reason for moving back was for family. We’ve got a 4-year-old child, and being close to family was a thing that was increasingly a priority. That was a primary reason for the move back to Ohio. So that she can grow up near family. As for what is a sense of home, that’s a tough one. There’s a part of me that feels like the more times you move in life, the less one becomes attached to even the idea of a home. When you have a kid, your feelings and emotions are conditioned to make every decision based around them.
So your sense of place is attached to that, to making your kid happy. That’s home to you. Taking care of this person you brought into the world.
Yeah, yeah. And for a long time Columbus felt like home, then Philly felt like home. And you spend enough time on the road, it is kind of the cliché of wherever you lay your hat is home. That’s kind of how I feel about it.
So much of your work is grabbing influences from so many different places. I’m curious about your process.
In terms of how I bring things together, for me, basic things go in key and in time. That can be a relative thing, and there’s a level of precision in each of those. That’s the driving force. Secondarily, the more I make records the more I learn to tear down my conscious mind and let my unconscious or subconscious mind take over. I really try to work from a place of instinct rather than a place of calculation or strategy.
When do you know that you’ve heard something that has to get in there after you’re tapped into your subconscious?
For me, most of it is more or less throwing stuff against the wall. The hardest part of making records has always been having something to start with. Once something is on paper, established, or on tape, from there it becomes a binary situation of this goes in, or it comes out. But when there’s nothing, that’s the hardest part for me. The beauty of why I gravitated in so much of my early career to samples was because there was source material in front of me. It was the easiest way to get through Step 1. Then Step 2, you can make it as complicated or as simple as you want. You have a lot of say in how that process unfolds. Nowadays I try to force myself into working on one specific thing. Sitting in front of a drumkit, or a keyboard, or anything. What am I going for? Once you get past that question, and you don’t let that occupy your mind, all the rest of those pieces fall into place.
How do you battle writer’s block when you have it?
I just try to get away from it when I have it. I don’t try to fight through it. Go do something else. Go read a book, watch a movie, listen to records, or just get away from music. Find something more physically demanding. That’s really my process is to deal with it by not dealing with it. Come back to it at another time. I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but maybe it’s writer’s fatigue.
Or writer’s exhaustion. Sometimes you’re just too tired to hear what you need to hear or recognize the inspiration that’s around you.
Absolutely.
Everyone collaborates differently. How much of a partner do you let people be? How do you select people you want to work with? What do you learn from them?
It varies on both the song, and the person I’m collaborating with. I kind of let those two things sort each other out. I’ll work through a song until it starts to, at some point in time, the process comes to a close naturally. Sometimes I have the lyrics and the melodies, and a version of the song has me singing. Some times that song will be a standalone piece. Other times it will stall out, and at that point those song wants to be a vocal piece. In that scenario, I look to other people. If I feel like a song is the right fit aesthetically for a guy like Jordan Brown, I’ll go to him. I didn’t like how I sounded on “Piece Of What,” and Jordan is awesome at taking direction. He’s the kind of guy who is valuable, and was able to make the song better.
I’ve heard it mentioned sometimes that you’ve gotten out of hip-hop on your later albums, which makes me laugh because whose decision is it that hip-hop is any specific one type of music? There are plenty of songs off Dame Fortune that have hip-hop elements to them. People could rap over these tracks.
I generally try not to jump in the waters of having a big, all encompassing statement about hip hop anymore. It’s something I’ve gotten myself into trouble about in the past, even though I was just expressing my opinions. I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth. But I do agree that there’s a point in which there were so many manifestations of hip-hop. You can turn on country radio and hear people rapping. Anything pop now can somehow be traced back to hip-hop at some point along the lineage. That’s not a good or bad thing. It’s not a judgment. It’s a fact. It’s an assessment on the landscape in which music and producers are moving forward.
People were saying that about me and to me as an insult, but there was a part of me that took it personally, especially when it was people who didn’t spend any time making hip-hop records. But at some degree, the landscape of hip-hop has vindicated people like me. When I hear a Kendrick Lamar record, or I hear Kanye West rapping on a loop with no drums, and it’s just organs, piano and a choir, these are things that I feel like show that producers of hip hop records don’t need to aim at the same thing for 20 years straight to provide they’re motivated in relation to the genre.
It’s all about what you’re using. Music is music. You’re composing, or putting things together. It doesn’t need a genre, necessarily.
The other thing is my trajectory. I made rap records. I traced those building blocks, and that was something that was super important to me. It was stuff that was in the DNA of rap records. Then I started taking about the components of it, and when I started taking that forward, for me to get my bearings, it was tough because I didn’t know where I was. I went back and forward in time, and now I’m somewhere where I’m just in my element. It feels right to me.
Starting your own label had to complicate things, but at the same time, it changed how you looked at and made albums.
It changed how I made the record because I have complete confidence knowing that I can release whatever I want. Once that becomes internalized, you get farther and farther away from any kind of mindset that would lead to second guessing myself. You lose that “would a label be worried because there isn’t a single?” or “would my label allow me to put a record out like this?” It comes back to that instinctual space we talked about earlier. The longer you spend not thinking about it at all, the more you internalize the nature of not thinking, and simply doing. It’s so good for the creative process.
You’re stripping the “why nots” out of things. It’s just creation then.
In my experience, I feel like the benefits of it become exponential. The longer you spend in that space, the less time you spend doubting. It’s been seven or eight years without even entertaining that line of thinking of “will a label have an issue with this?” It’s a cumulative effect. It breeds a particular brand of confidence, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m confident in everything that I do. I still get uncomfortable. You have to be. But you’re basing your feelings on a quality basis, and not on a genre or a style.
There’s a quote you’ve said before that “you should try everything once even if it seems like a bad idea.” You want your quality to stay up, but you want to take risks.
That’s the place where creative thrives. That threshold of technical ability and creative risk. I don’t want to be in a place where I’m doing the same thing over and over.
Looking back on the whole experience with the Mad Men track (“A Beautiful Mine”), is that experience something you’d do again?
I would have no problem doing that kind of thing again, and I’m also aware there are some people who were only aware of me because of that song. The worst thing that can happen there, though, is that something becomes aware of what I do through the Mad Men theme. Even then, I see no downside to that.
Do you have a different relationship to the song now that it was played every week for like seven years?
[Laughs.] I guess I feel like the novelty wore off. Other than that, not really. I’m proud to have been associated with the show.
Is it time that Son Little gets a little bit more shine?
I absolutely think it is. It’s his time now. He’s got a really packed touring schedule coming up. He works hard. I don’t think anybody deserves it more than he does. I’m incredibly happy to see all of the success that is coming his way.
