The album [Blaxistential crisis] artwork is by a friend of mine who is a brilliant artist named Sara Pocock. We've been friends for a couple of years and she worked with me on the animation. I believe she's still working over at BuzzFeed.
Basically I made her [ Sara Pocock] listen to funk music for a good month, a nonstop stream of George Clinton. I was talking about the art from...if you look at the art from George Clinton albums there are two or three artists he worked with...I made her listen to my album too so all the images are from jokes I made. I wanted it to look like the thoughts that are coming out of my brain which is what comedy is anyway.
With our last album ("No Time To Bleed"), we recorded most of it in New Jersey. And with being on the road 9 months a year, recording an album on the other side of the country- it just wasn't a good experience for us. All I wanted to do was go home and see my daughter, so for us to only be a couple hours away was huge- I could go home if I needed to.
In 2008, we had barely put our first album out and a lot of people were unsure about us on that tour. But the crowds were insane to say the least.
I don't like to think that I'm on a treadmill of album, tour, promotion and all that.
I would love to make an album full of ballads. For a listener, I want to have variety on there.
You go in and record and sing them some and you go back in and rerecord and sing them some more. That's kind of how I did this album [The Art of Elegance].
The problem is when you write the album, you record all the instruments, you edit the whole thing and then you have to mix it. You start to get out of touch with the songs and it becomes math.
The thing is, I would need the right producer [for dance-music album ], right? "Calling all dance music producers! I'm available.
There might be two or three songs I'm trying out. I've been singing these songs (on the new album) in the studio, but I haven't really done them live. It's intimate to sing them in a studio. Now, I've got to be on a stage and be in front of a lot of people.
Everything going through my head was like, "Just last month or so, I was just flying into L.A. and things were just getting started with recording my album, and then here it is, wow, boom, here I am in a movie." And then with Leonardo DiCaprio! The whole experience was cool and that moment was so epic for me.
The rest of the songs on the album [Mortal City ] have spare arrangements on them. Steve [Miller], really loved that. He'd just come off of a project with someone who basically had to mask the fact that there were no songs there with production. He said, "Oh, my God, you have real songs here!"
Mortal City was really influenced by geography. [The song] "The Ocean" is the Pacific Northwest. Southern California and New York also figure into songs, and Iowa. "February" is very much about New England. "Mortal City" is Philadelphia. The whole album is this anthropomorphized landscape where the metaphors live in this geography.
At the moment we're playing more stuff from our upcoming album which is really a departure from any record we've done.
We've finished our debut album which has 14 tracks. We're very proud of the release and can't wait for people to hear it.
I've expressed my gratitude to my son many times. And his career is far from undistinguished, and it was a great privilege to have someone of this skill bringing this album to conclusion.
I'm really proud of the album. It's something I always wanted to do but I had to wait until I was ready. Shakespeare is a culmination of eight years of stand up experience and joke writing. I recorded two shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York. The crowds were great and that's what really makes an album.
Anybody can have a great album in themselves but it's not until you bring it out and put it into tangible form and creating it and working on it in the studio that all of that comes to life you know what I mean?
It would be cool for someone to ask me about some of the structural choices I make with my albums.
To be honest, I didn't think I would be here for this album [Give the People What They Want]. I thought I was going to die. When the doctor came in by himself and told me I had cancer, it was frightening. He told me he got it and there would be six months of chemo. I really thought people would be promoting my record without me here to enjoy it. But I'm here.
This album [Give the People What They Want] has almost been in the making for almost three years now. When we first began on it, my mother was sick. When she passed away, I got on stage and played that night. The music helped take me away.
I'm in an odd position because I write across so many genres for so many people and they all influence me, and if I'm going to write as honest an album as possible, it's going to be layered.
I have over 150 or 200 records recorded. We have so many EP's and LP's. It's just picking the best records to put the best possible album together.
We're not going to get into how many deals I've had. I don't think there is a label that I was signed to that we didn't deliver an album. Every time the album got ready to be mixed and mastered, it was always a situation. That's neither here nor there, because Tony Sunshine is a different guy now, a different entity.
I had a record on the Terror Squad album "My Kinda Girls", and then I had a record on the second Terror Squad album and was featured all over it. I wasn't really introduced into the game until about late 2000 where people got to see where I look like.
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