The Wisdom Wall

“The fact that I didn't know what I was doing allowed it to be true to what hip hop was. Whereas all of the records that were coming out, the few and far between, 12 inch singles every few weeks, they were made by professionals who made other kinds of music. They weren't made by hip hop people. So an outsider with…”

“if you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, each one of those things becomes less important. So if you have 10 things, Each one of them is one 10th as important as one by itself. So if you're making something and you want the least amount involved, those things have to be really critically curated because…”

“a lot of recordings are made where the guitarist plays and then they double it and triple it and they create this like wall of guitars. And when you, when there's a wall of guitars, you hear guitar, but you don't hear someone playing guitar. You just hear guitar. It becomes more generic. When one person plays it and…”

“Sometimes for the sake of the whole work, removing things about it that you really love is part of the process. And instead of If you have, if you have a hundred percent and you know at the end you want to have 70% of what you have, like you have 30% too much, instead of whittling down that 30 to get to the 70, I would…”

“I'm doing a, a passion and belief. And he's doing a bottom line, what's gonna work? What's gonna be good for business? And it's just two different things, two different mentalities.”

“as soon as I liked it enough to share it with one person, chances are, it's ready for everybody.”

“if you were to Move into a house on the top of a mountain that no one could ever come and visit. And you made that the place that you most wanted to spend your time and you really create, curated it to your taste. That's the job. It's not about I'm making this to show off to someone else. I'm making this because I want…”

“Once you're aware of it, it's harder to protect. Like, in the, in the process of it happening, if you realize this is it, it's like, it's like, um, what is it in golf? The yips. You know, like when you're playing golf, if you like, if you start thinking about it instead of just being in it, you can't do it anymore. So…”

“That happens by coming up with like, ah, a series of rules that only apply to this project. Those are the constraints.”

“And as you learn more of what you can do, you tend to do that. You tend to, they tend to get bigger.”

“It's helpful for an artist to think that way, because usually, especially when we're younger, we think the thing that we make is, this is my, this is my magnum, magnum opus, and this is going to define me for the rest of my life, and it's a, it's a daunting hill to climb. But when you realize it's like, this is just…”

“The mask of overconfidence and ego, which is hiding insecurity, or there's the insecurity, but they're, they're really the same. You know, they're just presenting in two different ways. Two different people have the same overnight success. One of them gets really boastful and I'm the greatest that ever lived. And the…”

“if there's a house that exists, I might be able to see, well, what's the best version of this thing that already exists? And that's what same, same with music. It's like, I hear what's there and now what's the best version of this? What can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it better? Same thing as James…”