Buck 65 is currently mid way through recording and releasing a series of EP’s, is soon to work on a new album and has recently released his part-doco-part-concert-film-part-animation DVD, ‘The Lost Tapes’.
Buck called up Undercover's Tim Cashmere from Toronto to have a chat about everything he's been doing.So you're in the middle of releasing five four song EPs. Does this have anything to do with the shift of music sales to digital downloads as opposed to physical CD's?
It wasn't necessarily the original motivation for breaking it up in this way, but I guess it's just a nice side-effect of it, just because it doesn't really seem to fit in with the way things are going these days, but as far as the decision to do an album at the end of the run, it will probably to be honest with you be a limited edition thing for the people that collect those sort of things because the demand for that sort of thing seems to be really shrinking these days.
With these EP's as we go, in addition to them being sold digitally which is primarily how people are getting their music these days we are doing vinyl as well, but not CDs for the most part because again it seems that there's this interesting vinyl renaissance going on right now, so it's either people really want the real deal as far as a physical object goes or they want it quick and easy digitally and there's not a lot of room in between unless you're a real hardcore collector type person.
This might be a tad presumptuous, but being a hip hop guy I would have thought you would be very pro-vinyl?
I'm definitely a very strongly vinyl oriented sort of person, so it makes me happy to see a bit of a resurgence in the popularity of vinyl even if its for strange reasons at times. There is this fascination that people seem to have right now with 80gm vinyl, which is nice as a fetish item but I never really cared through the years how much my vinyl weighed. In fact, carrying around lots and lots of records I never really wanted it to weigh too much because it's so heavy when you have a bag with 50 records in it! But it's nice to walk into a shop and see vinyl there and it's nice that people are making it with so much care these days, so it's nice and I hope it's not a passing fancy. I never abandoned it myself. It was still the main format when I was a kid and I continued to buy vinyl throughout my entire life. I have a massive vinyl collection and I'm just glad that you can buy new releases and I'm still going to the shop and spending way too much money.
I found it interesting that you were celebrating twenty years of making music with new material, as opposed to some kind of retrospective. Did you intend the inherent symbolism in this approach?
I can appreciate that that may seem to be a little bit backwards, but I guess when it occurred to me that it had been twenty years – because it hadn't actually occurred to me when I started recording this material – I thought 'Well that's a nice thing to acknowledge', so I thought what I would devote myself to this year is to release a whole bunch of new music, but at the same time spend some time looking back, especially as far as the live show goes and maybe also what I'm going to do with the website, I'll dig up some old material from the archives and some things that fell through the cracks and so on, so I've been offering up some little treats on my website and through my twitter account and I'll continue to do that throughout the rest of the year, so basically I just wanted to make the whole year about looking ahead but definitely looking back as well and just stopping and taking stock with where I am at this point in my career, but I'm definitely looking ahead and I'm looking forward to another twenty from here.
You have recorded the bilingual song 'Final Approach' with Marie-Pierre Arthur. How's your French?
My French is pretty good. I lived in France for the better part of six years and I feel like I can communicate pretty well and get by and watch a French film without needing subtitles, but I wouldn't call myself fluent just yet.
Was there ever a risk of Marie-Pierre singing about how awful you are as some kind of spectacular practical joke?
I feel that I know my French well enough that if someone tried to trick me with what they're sending back that I would be aware. The funny thing is - this song with Marie-Pierre - she's from Quebec and she has a fairly strong accent and she asked me specifically if I wanted to change her accent to more of a Parisian accent to make it more universal, which I thought was funny. Sometimes people in France can't even understand the Quebec accent sometimes, but I thought it was interesting that she even asked that question because the thought hadn't really occurred to me. We talked about it after we spent some time listening to the music and agreed that we would write a song about that feeling that you get when you arrive at an airport and there is somebody waiting for you that you haven't seen in a long time.
You're working with a number of artists from different genres at the moment. Is that different to working with a hip hop artist?
My motivation to want to do that a lot this year was that I knew I wanted to bring more melody to my music and that was something that I was going to need help with. I definitely had to look outside my own genre and I knew it was going to be a learning experience for me. In some cases it was me making my first attempt to write some melodies, for example the song with Marie Pierre, she wrote her part herself, but with some of the other songs, I was writing parts for the other people, I just didn't have enough of a singing voice to be able to sing it myself, so I had a part written for some of these other singers and I would say 'Just sing exactly this'. That was a bit of a nerve racking thing to make an attempt in some of those sorts of areas for the first time, but mostly I'm really excited about how these songs have turned out and I didn't think too much about genre, I just thought how can I make the strongest song I can make. It was just like 'Let's make the best song we can make'.
You have released your first DVD, which is pretty unique. Tell us about that?
Pretty much all of the credit for that has to go to the guy I was working with, a guy named Christopher Mills. He's never made a film, but he's made a lot of DVDs and music videos for other musicians. He's an extremely creative guy, he's a very ambitious editor and he's also an animator and he had a lot of ideas for stories, so I just trusted him completely and he directed me in a pretty strong way.
I gotta say I was pretty surprised with the results because after we shot all of the footage he just took it away and worked on it for the better part of a year and he just worked away on this thing and then finally presented it to me and it blew me away. I feel like I can't really take a lot of credit for it. It's just this beautiful thing that he worked on for a long long time and we just wanted to do something that was different from any kind of music DVD. We wanted it to be more than just concert footage, we wanted it to be more than just interviews, we wanted it to be a whole world of sounds and images and so on and like I said, he really gets all the credit for it. He's a really talented person and he's won a lot of awards for his work. He's a really gifted guy and it seems that Kanye West is a big fan of his work. He's now posted two or three different videos on his blog, so he's got some fans in high places.
Buck 65 is heading to Australia, check him out at any of the following shows:
SEPTEMBER
16 – The Corner Hotel, Melbourne
17 – Factory Theatre, Sydney
19 – The Spiegeltent, Brisbane
20 – The Spiegeltent, Brisbane
