One day, a curious kid decided to wander outside of the big metropolis where he lived, venturing alone into an isolated forest, far away from the overwhelming cityscape he’d known his entire life. It was in those lush woods where he faced his fears and unexpectedly made a home inside an old barn.


Portrait by Ben Colen

Soon after, he met a mystical cat named Kirby, and together the duo filled their days with adventures of self-discovery, treasure-hunts, animal friendships, music and imagination. This, however, is not the synopsis of a new show on Cartoon Network. It’s an accurate description of the recent life of my friend, Aesop Rock.

Aesop Rock is a rapper, a label that he is more than okay with. But the word “artist” is a more-fitting description. Since 1997, over the course of six solo studio albums, countless musical collaborations and production credits, Aesop Rock has injected his imagination, creativity and vocabulary into the ears of so many inspiration-craving people that Star Trek’s Khan would bleed with envy.

Like Charlie Bucket visiting Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, I was lucky enough to be invited into the woods of Washington with Aesop Rock before he continued his journey on to Portland. It was here that I worked alongside him, art-directing and designing the packaging for his upcoming seventh solo studio album, The Impossible Kid. In between his conversations with raccoons, birds, and even the trees themselves, I managed to sneak in some questions of my own. —Alex Pardee

Alex Pardee: How did you end up in a barn in the middle of the woods?
Aesop Rock: I was sort of hitting a wall in San Francisco, not feeling all that productive or social, and feeling like my rent was getting crazy for my lifestyle. The ultimate idea was to move back to NY—I was originally only gonna be on the west coast for one year anyway, but got a little side-tracked. Obviously NY prices are crazy, too, so I put that on the back burner and started thinking about places I could temporarily go to save some money and get some real work done before eventually heading back east. My goal was to live cheap and make a lot of music. Really, all I want to do these days is work. Portland was on the table because I always enjoyed passing through; it was affordable, and I knew a few people there. Right around then, my friend in Washington state, who has a barn with a small studio apartment said, "You can rent the barn for a year." That was that. It felt like the perfect place to take a nice break, live somewhere odd, get some shit done, and save some cash.

What does the title The Impossible Kid reference in your new solo album?
I refer to myself as "The Impossible Kid" on the song "Get Out Of The Car" and I liked how it sounded and the meanings I could pull out of it. In some ways it's about my endless and often impossible quest to just feel OK—with myself, with the world, with my place, with my life, my relationships, my art, my impact, if any. It's the impossible quest for happiness and satisfaction. I kind of also think it can refer to generally being stubborn, someone who won't budge within the creative process.

Your songs have always sounded highly constructed, as if they take months to get to that “happy place,” like an oil painting, as opposed to a scribble. On average, how long does one of your songs take to create?
I never really start a song and work it straight through to completion, so while some things take months, or even get worked on in consecutive years, it’s not really accurate to say it took that long to actually make the song. They kind of grow from seeds. Lyrics start as words and notes. Beats start as simple loops. I find a piece that I like and just follow it along, expand the beat a little, maybe write some more lyrics. At some point, I’ll have a half-baked beat on my laptop and some half-done lyrics on my phone, and I’ll make a bad demo on my laptop, often just a verse or a fraction of a verse. I just kind of sketch. I will have many of these going on at once, so if I’m bored with one, I’ll work on another. Eventually, I’ll go in my booth and lay down a slightly more realistic vocal attempt. I just repeat this until I have a body of work that makes sense to me. Then, at the very end, I will redo all the vocal takes in the same month, just so it all feels consistent.

One of the other specific things you mention on The Impossible Kid is abandoning an art career to pursue music, and you allude to harboring a little regret because of it. What was the extent of your visual art career?
For essentially my whole life through college, all I wanted to do was make art—draw, paint, all of it. In many ways, even today, I relate more to people who make pictures than to most musicians I meet. I saw my older brother doing a lot of art, so around middle school, I started really getting into keeping sketchbooks and all that. I started taking figure drawing classes at night at a local studio during my high school years. Eventually, I went to Boston University and got a degree in painting, and worked at some galleries during the summers just to kind of be around it all. I don't think I was ever very good but I wanted it bad, so I put all of my energy into it.

Were you also creating music at the same time as you were drawing and painting?
I also always did music, piano lessons as a child, bass lessons during middle school. Sometime in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the same older brother got a drum machine to pursue his musical hobby, and I made my first little beats there. Recorded some little rap songs, then kept rhyming during my college years, which is when I met Blockhead, who became a close friend and collaborator. I loved making rap songs, and when I moved back to NY after college I was just kinda making art and rap too, and working at a gallery. But I was trained in art; it was my focus and supposed career path.

Towards the end of the 1990s, I would be out rhyming in NY and selling my rap tapes at shows around the city, and people started getting interested . It was kind of an accident, so I always saw myself more as a failed visual artist than a successful musician. In my head, art was the path, music was the hobby.

What attracted you to pursuing music instead?
Really it was just that people were into what I was doing. I just loved creating things, and once people started checking my tapes and actually expressing interest in hearing me rap more, it made me want to work harder at it. Getting positive feedback on the stuff was all the reason in the world to keep pursuing it. As much as I loved drawing, I could feel that I wasn't really on the level of someone who could pull it off; whereas I always had a decent grip on where I stood as a rapper, what I could do, and what I was capable of. I think rapping came way more naturally, whereas drawing was something I had to work hard at and still not get to where I wanted to be. Ultimately, one just won out over the other.

You’ve managed to merge the two loves over the span of your career, though. The roster of visual artists you’ve worked with has been as surreal as your musical collaborators. Just in the last decade alone you’ve collaborated with the likes of Tomer Hanuka, Jeremy Fish, El Coro, Travis Millard and Aryz. Is combining your music with a specific visual style a conscious decision when writing?
I have been incredibly lucky in that I have worked with some awesome people. I think I have a fairly visual writing style, and over the course of writing a body of work, it starts to take shape and you just start to see it. The songs have a tone, an overall color and theme. Eventually, I’ll weigh out who I know, whose work I’ve been looking at, who best fits this music, combined with a lot of timing and who is available and fits in my budget, and I try to make it all come together. Slapping a quick cover on some music that literally took me years to make makes no sense to me. I want the cover and associated visuals to be something special, something that holds its own weight. I want people to know I care.

Your music videos are also focused a lot on really imaginative visuals and bizarre narratives. Your new “Rings” video (directed by Rob Shaw) is equally disturbing as it is touching. Do you come up with the concepts for your music videos?
Sometimes I do, but sometimes it's best to let a director be a director. On one hand, I don't want to feel like I'm losing control of any aspect of the creativity, but at some point I also know that it's just not my field. Usually what works best is playing someone the song(s) and giving them the vibe, and then letting them pitch you something. People will always execute the idea that they came up with best—so if I get someone on board and tell them exactly what I want down to the last detail, they’re just going to feel like a hired worker—and that's no fun. If I say, "Here's what I created—what are you thinking?" It always makes for a better starting point. There's always some push and pull after to shape the idea into something that feels collaborative and accurate, but ultimately everyone needs to be heard and feel that their talent is being respected.

On the other end of the spectrum, you just scored your first full-length movie recently.
Yeah. It’s a film called Bushwick.

Was the approach to writing a score and working with a director and a film a lot different than your usual approach to writing music?
There are similarities and differences. Obviously, not having lyrics is the major difference. As soon as I got the gig, I read the script and did my best to get in the headspace of the movie, and before I had seen any shots from the film, I just started making some pieces that, in my head, were potentially going in the direction of what I thought the movie would be. I just started sending in pieces while they were shooting, and the feedback was fairly constant. I got a decent idea of what tone they wanted from me. I mean, these solo albums I make, I call all the shots. With this, while I created all the music, ultimately someone else deems it usable or not, and has a say in its arrangement—make it peak here, make it chill here, etc. It’s a challenge but it actually felt pretty awesome—and seeing my work set the tone for some insane action sequence is pretty thrilling. These guys were great and made me feel good about what I was contributing. It’s getting close to finished—I’m pretty psyched.

What’s next for you after The Impossible Kid?
Next is tour. We have a big US run coming up and may get around to some other places as well. I believe the Bushwick movie will be out later in the year, and I have a few smaller projects that will trickle out as well.

The Impossible Kid will be released April 29, 2016 on Rhymesayers Entertainment.

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Published in the May, 2016 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, on newsstand worldwide and in our webstore.