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Dye
Correspondent & Expert
Joined: 16 Nov 2003
Posts: 5146
Location: Planet Home; Buenos Aires, Argentina
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 Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 17:17 |
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COOL new LONG interview!
Hello Jamirotalkers,
Love interviews?? This one is great!
JAMIROQUAI
The light and dark sides
Staff reporter
Tue, 28 Jun 2005
From pretty girls in fancy cars to kicking Bush out of office, Jamiroquai talks about the light and dark sides of his new album 'Dynamite'.
'Dynamite', has quite a different feel to 2001’s 'A Funk Odyssey'. It’s got a harder, edgier sound. How did that come about?
Jay Kay: Well there’s been more writing done on the guitar for this album and I wanted to bring that rock-funk feel to some of it because it’s a great thing to perform live.
I’ve done more writing on the guitar with Rob [Harris, Jamiroquai’s guitarist since A Funk Odyssey] this time. It was just a bit of fun as well. I think we wanted to do something different... and it seemed like a natural progression.
Did that change the way you recorded the album at all?
Jay Kay: Well, a lot of this stuff has gone into ProTools [digital production software] as opposed to being just recorded live which is how we’ve always done it.
We felt that we just had to give it a little bit more of a sonic edge and that sticking it into the ProTools would just tighten everything up more. It’s just a punchier sound than having it as a pure live sound.
You can play with it more in the computer and it makes it easier when it comes to arrangements. You can take a segment out, stick it somewhere else, lengthen verses, shorten them, it really is a quick and easy way to do things.
Mike Spencer who co-produced the album is a wizard at that kind of stuff. When we’d played it we would generally leave him to work his magic for a couple of hours and we’d come back and it would go on like that.
Where did you record the album, the last couple of albums have all been recorded in your studio?
Jay Kay: Yeah a lot of it’s been done at my studio at the house, but I also wanted to get out of the studio because being in the same environment can get boring.
We did a lot of writing all around the world. We wrote in Italy, we went to Costa Rica to write, we went up to my little shed up in Scotland because the phones don’t work and you’re not distracted there. My place in Scotland is in the middle of nowhere, so you’ve just got a keyboard, guitar, a little drum machine and you know if you can work stuff out like that, if you can hammer out songs that sound good just with those three things and a voice, you’re on your way.
The important thing is to get the structure of the songs out before we attempted to record them.
We also went to the US to do stuff. We spent a month in LA using a pool of musicians, a string arranger called Benjamin Wright, some great backing singers, and it gave tracks like "Dynamite", which was written there, that kind of flavour.
There was something we wanted to get out of recording in America, which I’d never done, and then we went to New York for a month and did recording and mixing there. And it worked you know, it’s just something different, stepping out in the sunshine and driving to the studio everyday. You’re there for long enough to feel involved in the whole sunshine, palm trees, freeway kinda thing. It inspired 'Dynamite' really, seeing these flash young ladies in their expensive dresses, driving expensive cars.
When you’re working in your own studio you can take as much time as you like and you can work all hours of the day and night. Obviously it’s different when you’re paying to use someone else’s studio. Did the time constraints push the process along?
Jay Kay: Yeah well, when you’re in your own studio you can go on until 4 or 5 in the morning... But working in a commercial studio just creates a discipline. You have to apply yourself properly. And by doing that you end up getting the results.
The first album we’d come out at 6 in the morning, go home and then start again at 11, and we’d just do days and days and days like that. In the end your ears don’t work, you’re just dropping, it’s no fun really to do it like that. And obviously, that was when I was 22. Now I’m 35 I just haven’t got the energy to do that anymore.
Did working that way, with a more systematic, organised and disciplined approach give the album a more focused feel and help achieve its harder edge?
Jay Kay: I don’t think it’s so much to do with time constraint, I just felt that there had to be a new focus on it because it was generally new people working on it. Matt [Johnson, new Jamiroquai keyboard player] who wrote some of the tunes with me on the keyboard is a different guy to Toby [Smith former keyboard player and co-writer who left the band after A Funk Odyssey to spend more time with his young family]. And you know you work with someone for ten years, and then you’ve got to work with someone fresh on a new album, it immediately sets up different parameters.
But the other thing is if you don’t put an album out for three and a half years, you’ve got to focus on it to make it good. It’s got to be considerably better than the last one.
What d’ya do? Do you do stuff like your old stuff? So many people love the first album, but loads of people come up and say they love the last album. They’re a totally different type of thing. And you’ve got to keep yourself happy as well.
You’ve spent almost two years working on the album, apparently changing a lot of things at the last moment, why was that?
Jay Kay: Just because I felt it wasn’t right. Sometimes I felt it was too similar to what we’d done before, sometimes I felt it didn’t have the energy it was supposed to. Sometimes I felt the melody was all wrong.
"Give Hate A Chance" was one of those tracks that was ready to go and I’m singing away and I’m thinking, I don’t like this, this is all wrong, it’s all got to be changed around.
Sometimes it was about stripping things back, letting it breath a little. Although there’s a lot of depth, there’s a lot of layers on it, it hasn’t got so much of me all over it. It’s been much more cut down. Most of the tracks reach a climax in the middle and then they tail off towards the end.
So you wanted to keep tracks simple?
Jay Kay: Yeah. A track like "Dynamite", is just a very simple line and a simple melody and I think sometimes when you’re trying to get people to listen to your stuff you can confuse them.
We spent a lot of time on tracks because we don’t really like to put filler tracks on it. We just don’t want to do an album that’s going to have two great tracks and the rest of it’s rubbish like telephone answering machines and crap like that.
This is the first album you’ve written without keyboard player and co-writer Toby Smith. Was that daunting? Did you feel you had a lot to prove with this album?
Jay Kay: Er, yeah. Toby not being there doesn’t bother me, I mean I can work with anybody as long as we get along and as long as they’ve got an understanding of what I want and what I’m aiming for.
When he left, it was difficult. We had an important gig in a week and he wasn’t around to do it... But you’ve just got to knuckle down and get on with it and in a way it does give you extra resolve to make it work because you wanna turn round and say, "with you or without you, here it is, it’s still rolling, it’s still going". And that’s what’s happened. And that’s kind of pleasing.
Is it good working with different people, does it bring out a different side of you?
Jay Kay: Yeah, yeah, yeah it does. I could just go round and use session musicians for every song, but I don’t find that helps when it comes to setting up a band for live. Derrick [McKenzie, Jamiroquai drummer since 1994’s Return Of The Space Cowboy] has been with me for donkey’s years. Sola [Akingbola] the percussion player has been with me for years. It’s not good to start chopping people around.
The first single "Feels Just like It Should" really typifies the new sound of the album, what’s the track about?
Jay Kay: I had this vision of a young guy who’s just trying to find his freedom. Like a naughty teenager who wants to go out and see what the big world’s like. He wants to see the bright lights and the song’s almost like a journey... from him being a kind of nerd and suddenly he gets a bit cooler.
It’s an experimentation journey, what all teenagers and kids do. The video explains it better than I ever could.
The track’s got a real hard edge and a filthy bassline hasn’t it?
Jay Kay: Well the filthy bassline, isn’t a bassline. The filthy bassline is me. On the end of the last album I was mucking about with a small machine called a Helicon, it’s like a voice synthesis thing, you twiddle it and it makes you sound like Barry White, or it gives you three part harmonies or whatever. I was mucking about with it and I went off doing this beatbox thing which we recorded and kept it.
There was a little part of it that I thought would be great with a beat over it, but we never got around to doing it. So this time around we fished it out and cut out the piece that we wanted and Derrick played the beat over the top and already you could just see this thing forming and it was heavy.
I sang it completely differently... tried it falsetto and it kind of gave it this Curtis Mayfield kind of funk.
It’s certainly a very attention grabbing first single.
Jay Kay: Yeah. The record company went through the process of "Oh, we’re not sure about this track, it's a bit heavy, it's a bit this, it's a bit that, can't we have something nice like you normally do?"
But I was like no, I don’t really want to do that anymore. I think if you hear it on the radio it stands out and it's really different. Who else has used a human beatbox as the bassline for a tune?
Sections of it are quite dirty, with a hip hop feel to it. It's a bit of a curve ball, that's all. It’s a nice way to start, do something different, so hopefully people won’t just turn around and say it sounds exactly like what you did last time.
The track "Dynamite" has a great disco groove, a real feelgood, carefree vibe, where did you write it?
Jay Kay: "Dynamite" is very much Los Angeles inspired. You see lots of pretty well-to-do girls driving round in very flash motor cars, sun glasses on, hair in the wind, and that’s basically it.
It’s not gonna win a Pulitzer prize but it’s more of a groove, more of a feel. I just wanted to have something that goes straight to the clubs. It’s got that bouncing bass feel. Inevitably it’ll get some horrendous remix from somewhere no doubt.
I did a couple of test runs with it, I went to some clubs in New York and slipped it to the DJ and it went down really well.
"Seven Days In Sunny June" is another great summer track, what’s that about?
Jay Kay: I just remember when I was 18, 19, or maybe I was even less than that, 16 maybe, we’d all sit around hanging out, there’d be a gang. A gang of boys and a gang of girls, and there’d always be someone you fancied the pants off, and you kind of go through most of the summer [makes lustful noises] thinking what am I gonna do?
And the minute you actually got round to saying "How about a bit of slap and tickle" she’d go: "I just wanna be your friend". And it would always be a crushing disappointment and that’s roughly what it’s about. "Seven Days In Sunny June", you thought you were going to have some slap and tickle but it never happened. [Laughs a filthy laugh]
It’s got a great, carefree Latino vibe hasn’t it?
Jay Kay: Yeah. It’s very much the type of song I like to do. It makes you think of summer... puts you somewhere where it's a nice day and everything's good in the world. It's got that classic, rolling feel, the guitar and piano working really well with each other.
Although favourites tend to change, I would say that's probably my favourite track. It was one of the easiest to do. It took me ages to get it together, I was just sitting there looking at the floor just trying to get into words what it actually is trying to say to me. I kept listening to the backing track again and again, but when it clicked, I was away.
And it was fun to do and easy — generally it means it's a good track. And you can perform it live.
Where did you record it? Jay Kay: I think it was recorded in Los Angeles. I did the vocals in my studio, but the track was recorded out there. Matt our keyboard player saw the Steinway and wet himself. We’d done it on a kind of plink-plonk stand-up at home, you know and it just needed the richness of the Steinway because they do have a rich quality.
"Electric Mistress" sounds like an intriguing title, what’s the track like?
Jay Kay: It’s an old Detroit Jack kind of feel to it. It’s almost like a pallet cleanser for "Starchild", the track that comes after which is quite a pivotal track in the whole album, because it’s classic us and it’s quite focused about what it’s trying to say.
"Electric Mistress" is much more dance orientated, a little bit more contemporary than the other stuff. It's quite deep and dark and again, quite raw.
Lyrically, "Starchild" makes quite a statement.
Jay Kay: "Starchild" is just my reaction to seeing all these evangelical preachers on the television, Benny Hinn and people like that. You know you see it so much in America, these huge great churches and I just kind of think, I don’t know, I’m not sure they tell the truth to these people. I think they’re leading people astray somewhat and they’re making a fortune out of it.
I just don’t trust them at all. I don’t particularly agree with it and I don’t think it's right. So you know, the question is, where is the Starchild? Still waiting. You know I just felt it was time to write something about it.
Lyrically it’s a deep and pointed subject, what’s the track like musically?
Jay Kay: It’s a very percussive bass, an absolutely scorching bassline. There’s a big thick, heavy Clavinet holding it together and some really great backing vocals. It’s a kind of get-up-everybody-and-sing thing.
Hopefully it touches some nerves. It’s not an out and out dig… one of the lines is "I've seen the preachers on the TV in their white suites with precious stones studded into their boots.." I just feel somebody somewhere is having a laugh and making a lot of money out of it. Having set-up people coming up to the stage, (saying) "oh I can see now, I can see" you know, what a load of bollocks.
On a lighter note, "Black Devil Car’" is a great petrol-fuelled driving track, was it inspired by your black Ferrari Enzo?
Jay Kay: Yeah, it had to be done. It’s just a bit of fun, fairly tongue in cheek. But you know, the amount of girls who’ve come up to me and said "if you let me drive that I don’t know whether I’d be able to bring it back".
A lot of girls aren’t particularly interested in cars, but that one certainly seems to bring them out of their shell.
Cars, sex, the two go hand in hand and have done ever since the Jaguar E Type.
I thought it was a cute concept to have "she loves ridin’ around in my black devil car"... I kind of just thought of this black leather kind of cat woman racing around in your motor car while you’re sat a home doing the cooking, waiting for her to get home. "Had a nice day darling? Diner’s in the dog. Car alright?"
Again that track’s got quite a rock feel again hasn’t it?
Jay Kay: Yeah, it’s a driving track. It’s been tried and tested at well above the speed limit, and it works. Yeah, I think it’s fun and again it’ll translate really well live. It gets under your skin.
There’s also a darker side to the album, where you’re voicing your opinion about just how messed up the world is at the moment, I'm thinking of "Give Hate A Chance".
Jay Kay: I don’t know how many conflicts are going on in the world, most to do with religion and it seems impossible for man to give peace a chance. Everyone’s shocked about the title, (but) it's what everybody does every day, of every week, of every year since time began.
So it’s almost like saying, well you can’t give peace a chance so you might as well give hate a chance, because that’s all you ever do. It's an I'm-tired-of-people track. It sounds light and fluffy, but it isn't, it's quite dark. It does what it says on the box and it leads into "The World That He Wants".
"The World That He Wants" is probably the most political track of the album isn’t it?
Jay Kay: Yeah, "The World That He Wants", I suppose, is loosely aimed at any dictator, but in this instance it's aimed at George Bush, who is just making money out of war.
He's got shares in weapons companies. You get the oil to run the weapons while you’re there. Obviously the longer the conflict goes on, the more personnel are there, and what do personnel need? Personnel Carriers.
You know, he’s opened up a corridor, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, it won't take him long to start dealing with Iran. I mean this guy has got to realise, we don’t all want to live like America. We don’t all want a town that's got a Taco Bell, a McDonalds, a Burger King stuck in every town.
You know I've just driven across the desert and it's exactly the same. Every town you hit the same thing. And some people don't really want that.
The whole administration is slippery and it's something I wanted to write about. It's something I felt strongly about. I feel strongly about that guy, I mean, we’ve got to get rid of him because he’s trouble, for all of us. The shit we’re all in now, it’s all been caused by him.
You know, the moral standards are just all cock-eyed. The picking and choosing between evil dictators... Terror goes on all over the world. And in the past America has created a lot of mess by using the CIA to interfere with places, like South America. Salvador, Nicaragua, you name it, Chilli…
It's all done for America’s purposes and solely for their purposes. The bottom line is he's sending away young men to war and, like the line says in the song, he knows they're not coming home.
Saddam Hussein's a tyrant, I'm not suggesting he wasn’t, but that's not the reason they’ve gone in there.
It's definitely an album of two halves, positive music for troubled times. Was that your thinking behind it?
Jay Kay: Yeah well, I find that sometimes I'm two very different people. One of them’s quite morose and quiet, the other one wants to have a laugh and party. They’re the two sides of me and that comes out in the music. Slso, music's escapism for people, it isn’t just doom and gloom.
What about touring, where are you looking forward to going?
Jay Kay: I’m looking forward to going to Russia actually. We’ve never played there. I’m looking forward to doing South America again because I think it’s just great down there, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, you know, the women are fabulous.
I’m looking forward to being back on the road with the new stuff. It can get dull playing all the old favourites, it's nice to have a new roster to chose from and pep-up the set.
What about the future? This is your sixth album, you’ve been releasing albums for 13 years, do you see yourself doing making music for many years to come?
Jay Kay: I don’t know… I just take it one step at a time really. I suppose inevitably the greatest hits will come along at some stage, which I’m kind of opposed to.
I just don't want to feel like I'm feeding people stuff twice. I can't stand all that stuff: this version and that version and then there's that version.
But hey, what can I say? You just keep doing it for as long as you can do it. As long as you enjoy it, you do it and I do still really enjoy it.
D! (dyego) |
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High Times
Joined: 25 Oct 2004
Posts: 744
Location: music written by JK/Toby Smith
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 18:03 |
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Diego!!!
thank you so much!!! i've just printed it and i am only going to read it,
but now i want to say you make me so happy with every interview
you post here on forums!!!
thank you! |
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High Times
Joined: 25 Oct 2004
Posts: 744
Location: music written by JK/Toby Smith
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 18:26 |
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i am so excited!! its unique information!!
Jay speaks about recording of Dynamite, and about Toby!!!
how cool it is to read this!!! |
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monisum
Joined: 30 Jun 2004
Posts: 1327
Location: Germany
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 18:47 |
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Best interview within a long time   
Many great informations and now we can all throw away our own dynamite reviews 
Quite interesting information about the tracks, the thoughts behind them and the production process.
Thumb up Diego for finding this  
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LLCoolJR
Officer & Expert
Joined: 23 Aug 2004
Posts: 1431
Location: The Netherlands
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 19:01 |
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Thanks! Very interesting. |
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jamirokaki
Expert
Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Posts: 3472
Location: basque country
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 20:57 |
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thanks, very nice, although one part wasn't new....i remember reading exactly the same in an interview , that first single choice part...
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***STONED AGAIN*** |
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EvoV
Joined: 02 Dec 2003
Posts: 1421
Location: figueira da foz - Portugal
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 21:38 |
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preaty cool , nice work D! (as usual)
Nice/Long Interview
| Quote: |
| Jay Kay: I don’t know… I just take it one step at a time really. I suppose inevitably the greatest hits will come along at some stage, which I’m kind of opposed to. |
I don't oppose to this , since is a double album and in the 2º cd came songs that we never heard
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hooked up |
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muzzander
Joined: 09 Oct 2004
Posts: 132
Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
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| Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2005 18:35 |
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phewww...that's REALLY long
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Selamat Pagi Dunia |
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groovje
Joined: 29 Jun 2005
Posts: 18
Location: Germany
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| Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2005 19:11 |
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Great read! Thanks for sharing!
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funk you!  |
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Pepela
Joined: 28 Jun 2005
Posts: 649
Location: Firenze, Italia
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| Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2005 20:10 |
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The best part of the interview is:
Jay Kay: I’m looking forward to going to Russia actually. We’ve never played there.
I wonder if it's goin' to become not looking forward but somethin' like in November(for example) we're coming to Russia and we're very excited:))))))) |
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miss sparkles
Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 411
Location: In the TARDIS
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| Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2005 06:35 |
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Wow thats a really cool interview! Took ages to read through!
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Fascist.
I < 3 DOCTOR WHO |
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FunkEducation
Joined: 15 Jul 2004
Posts: 3309
Location: Maracay, Venezuela
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| Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2005 18:08 |
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| Quote: |
....The record company went through the process of "Oh, we’re not sure about this track, it's a bit heavy, it's a bit this, it's a bit that, can't we have something nice like you normally do?"
But I was like no, I don’t really want to do that anymore. |
that's the most stupid thing i have never heard... shit...
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This is FunkEducation, supporting the 1992-1998 Jamiroquai!!
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