Photo Courtesy of R*ch*l W*ckh*m (censored for security purposes)
So last month Atmosphere was in Cleveland and I had planned on attending the show. But being a budding journalist, I decided to ask Okayplayer if they would be interested in a feature story on Atmosphere. They gave me the "okay" and after weeks of waiting for Atmosphere's press people to get back to me, I finally got the interview of a lifetime.
15 mintues (which actually ended up being about 26 minutes, but who's counting) with Sean Daley, my idol. After having a minor panic attack, asking every employee of the House of Blues where Slug was, I was taken back stage. And there he was...
We had met once before (at a concert two years ago, there's an embarrassing picture on facebook as the proof), so him being a little taller than I had expected didn't throw me off, but how down to earth definitely did. First off all he greeted my girlfriend and I by name (because we had been tweeting Atmosphere all day), and instantly I became less nervous (as this was easily the biggest interview I have ever done in my young journalistic career) and more excited to have a pretty candid interview with one of my favorite artists of all time.
After writing the interview, I had a few good quotes and anecdotes that didn't quite fit into my story so I thought I would share them with the world:
More on how Slug and Atmosphere write albums:
When you throw that much mud at a wall, we make probably anywhere from 60-80 songs, some of them start to fall and some of them stay stuck to the wall, and at the end you look at what’s left over and then you go ‘okay, what kind of big story can I tell with what I have?’ And then it might help prompt you to go ‘okay I want to write a song like this cause that would sound good in between this one and this one.
More on the lack of samples on Lemons:
There was no sampling on Lemons but there were certain songs, for… For a song like “Glass House,” there’s no samples, but there’s a synth line that’s mimicking a saxophone line from an old record.
OKP: On the lemons record, you got Tom Waits to do a beat box, I was wondering how you were able to get him to do that?
S: I asked him to play guitar, and got back a beatbox (laughs). We sent him the song and I asked him to put guitar on it and he was like, “yeah.” Then I went on tour, and when I got home from the tour, he returned it. And I opened it, and played it and there was no guitar, there was beatboxing. I was like, ‘this is cool too actually,’ and we just had Nate (Collis) play guitar.
Click HERE to read the whole story.
