How has life been for you on tour? Life on the road has been lovely. It’s cool because I got a chance to be out here before I even got to this level, so I kind of have the whole road lifestyle down pat. Just being out here working, everything rolling the way it’s rolling, it feels real good to me. I can’t complain about life on the road. Being on the road for weeks on end, does it ever get hectic or frustrating? Oh, yeah. You’re around the same people day after day, so you’re bound to get frustrated sometimes. There’s bound to be little arguments on the road. You gotta do little things to off set it; have a little fun in between the work because it definitely gets crazy on the road. If you can’t control yourself, you’ll get out here and get yourself into some real trouble. What kind of trouble? Man, getting arrested for different things, messing with the wrong female, messing with the wrong niggas, getting caught with a little sack of something to smoke on in your pocket. You just try to live a little or do a little thing, but it’s so many ways. Sometimes you can just be out there with ill intentions and get in trouble, or sometimes you accidentally get into trouble. So the best thing to do is stay with your tight-knit circle, your crew, take care of your business, or take your ass home. What about you personally, what keeps you in check? How do you make sure you don’t get into trouble on the road? My road manager, just watching me, knowing my tendencies and my ways, and definitely my buddies. If they see me acting too wild, they’ll calm me down a little. So if we get to feeling good and I know I don’t have a show the next day or a lot of stuff to do, I might sit down and have a drink and get a little wild. Not too wild. I police myself a lot. You seem to be the most calm and relaxed out of you and the Mobstaz. Do you think that’s accurate? Yeah, definitely. It depends on the situation. In certain situations they’re the livest, and in certain situations I’m the livest. I noticed that a lot of people – like at your album release party – act like y’all go way back. How do you deal with people like that? I’ll listen for a while and try to figure out for a second, but if it gets too crazy I got to keep it real and let them know, man, I can’t really remember. I meet a lot of people, know a lot of people, but it’s all love. Usually they get offended, but if they do, I gotta throw my hands up in the air. What can I say? I don’t remember. Your new album The Day After hasn’t been selling as well as Kamikaze did. What factors do you think are influencing the Soundscan numbers for The Day After compared to Kamikaze? Just the timing of when the album came out. It came out fourth quarter, around the time of a lot of other artists. This time you got that one week’s check and you only got time for that one CD. I think the big numbers aren’t going to come on that one day, but the slow effect is going to take place because I make good music and I’ve got a lot of true fans. Once they realize that my album is out there, everyone is going to go and buy it. In the review we ran in OZONE Magazine, the music editor felt that you were just at a lyrical level too high for most of your audience. What would be your response? That’s a compliment to me. I would rather have fans figuring out later and build themselves up rather than deliver a verse that was so easy to figure out or had no substance to it. In a way, that can hurt you, but that’s how it is being a true artist. You’ve gotta make sacrifices and take chances. So that’s a compliment to me. What’s your favorite track on The Day After? There’s a few, but I think one of my favorites was the song “Lavish,” with Pharrell. We was down in Florida, chillin’ in Miami. The studio was down there so the suite I was stayin’ in was real nice. I’m looking over the balcony, and it was the weekend, so a lot of beautiful ladies were walking up and down the strip. I was working on “Lavish” and everything was flowing together for me. I had a ball working on that song. I heard you and Scott Storch had a really good creative vibe in the studio. Man, you just reminded me of the Scott Storch stuff. Me and Scott, we just work together good. We click together. So I just like going down there with him because you never know what he’ll come out
with messing with those machines and boards and stuff. It comes out crazy. So I definitely like working with him. He likes to get his kickin’ it on too, so that’s pretty cool working with him. Pharrell was off the hook, and my guys, in-house producers Toxic, did like half the album. I always have a ball in the studio working with them. Some of the producers I didn’t get a chance to meet, like Rodney Jerkins. I didn’t get a chance to meet him, but we clicked and everything. Pitbull, that was a crazy track. I’m not gonna get into it unless I can tell it’s going to be a positive or creative vibe in the studio. I won’t even bother to get that close. What helps you relax and focus while you’re on the road? Good ass kush. Good, good kush. That’s what gets me motivated. That’s what keeps me calm. That’s my medicine. What separates good weed from bad weed? Sometimes it can be good if it was grown underwater or grown in the ground. Which do you prefer? It’s hard to say, but weed that’s grown underwater will always be the shit. People don’t understand, you can never really see it. Some might say it looks like it has crystals on it or it look like it’s white. The one with the highest level of THC will always be the best one. What was your mindset going into the studio working on this album as compared to some of your other albums? One of the reasons I titled this The Day After was the whole vibe after the success of Kamikaze. I was fighting for that for so long that once I got it, the whole confidence, the swagger level went up. So when I was in the studio, I was working on songs without even touching a paper at times. I had never done that in my whole career. I didn’t even know I had the ability to do that. But once I realized these fans are nuts out here, ain’t nothing wring with the way I’m spittin’ it. They love the way the Twista style is. I just got that swagger about myself. I go in the studio and spit it the way I want to spit it. And like you said, the before and after. Before the pockets were this level, the confidence was this level. After, I’m driving to the studio a little slicker, spittin’ rhymes a little slicker, and it’s a whole better vibe. And another thing with this album – I worked on three albums worth of songs for this album and narrowed it down to one album. I had never did that before. Every other album, the amount of songs I recorded ended up being the number of songs on the album. You used to record in the city at places like United Techniques, but I hear that for this album you got a new studio. How did that affect your recording sessions? The studio is in Chicago, and it’s always good to have your own studio. To me, I record my best music there cause it’s like home to me. So you get comfortable with the engineer, the way everything looks, the sound and everything. So it is always an advantage to be able to move around a bit and record at home. Sometimes it can be a disadvantage if you don’t know how to keep still and let other things draw you outside of the studio. If you like being at home and feel comfortable in that environment, then it’s the bomb to have your own thing. You can have it looking the way you want it, smelling the way you wanna have it smelling. Let’s talk about Crucial Conflict and Psychodrama, some of Chicago’s mainstays that haven’t really had their major break yet. What do you think the future holds for them? Positivity, if we can all walk through the door that’s been cracked open and figure out how to move at a faster level in the game. We still trying to figure the game out, but a lot of us have slow movement in the game. We all have things we’re trying to put together and we move on them a little too slow. At first it used to just be about the talent. If you were talented, you got a record deal and sold records. Now, your talent is in a rat race. Now you not only have to be talented, but you have to be quick enough or someone else will beat you out. Had I been putting out my album on time I would’ve put this song called “It’s Only For One Night” on there, but Bow Wow ended up using the same sample so I didn’t use the song. Like I said, it’s a rat race, man. You can’t spend a whole lot of time pondering what’s next for your career. You gotta move on things real quick. I think the artists in Chicago just need to figure out a faster way at getting production out of the industry. It’s not a dream. You can’t be dreaming, you gotta make it happen. How was it working with Kanye on “Slow Jamz” and “Overnight Celebrity,” and why was he not featured on this album? OZONE
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