ALL AROUND

“I think that a lot of my earlier music was extremely personal,” Illogic says. “Listening to my own music, it would get redundant, as it was just focusing on me instead of focusing on the world around me and what people were going through. It really helped me to understand the people around me and how I can affect the people in those surroundings.”

(Prologue: This interview was conducted 7 years ago back in 2013 and was originally featured in print issue #35.)

Capture the Sun (Man Bites Dog Records) is the first full-length collaboration from Illogic and Blockhead and offers a blueprint for how to properly inject hope into a genre that often seems to advocate the absence of it. Speaking with me a few weeks after its release, Illogic stresses that the foundation for creating such an album is to take the time to really look beyond self to the surrounding world.

“I think that a lot of my earlier music was extremely personal,” Illogic says. “Listening to my own music, it would get redundant, as it was just focusing on me instead of focusing on the world around me and what people were going through. It really helped me to understand the people around me and how I can affect the people in those surroundings.”

Recognizing that there is a great deal of hope missing, Illogic stresses that he is in a good place in his life, and he wanted to reflect that in this project, which is in contrast to the Celestial Clockwork album, which was much darker.

“The title of the album, Capture the Sun, is a hopeful title, which suggests that you should go after your dreams no matter how difficult or impossible they may seem, and it is a concept that was inspired by my late grandmother who passed away a few weeks ago. She always told me, ‘things delayed are not things denied,’ which basically means that no matter how hard something is, do not give up and continue to go after your dreams. It will come if you put the work in.”

In the course of chasing that ultimate dream, it becomes clear that Illogic and Blockhead believe a person is able to both accomplish various other dreams while becoming inspired in ways previously unimagined. In coming together to complete this dream project, the duo’s relationship with each other and their art evolved.

“Illogic’s output would just amaze me,” says Blockhead. “I would send him some beats, and then he would turn around and say, ‘Ok, I’ve got three songs.’ From a fan’s standpoint, it was a nice look into his mind. I made a pact with myself a couple of years ago that I wasn’t going to make music with artists unless I was legitimately a fan of their music. And Illogic was the first who approached me about doing a project together, and he was the first one that I thought without hesitation that this is something that I wanted to do.

“For me, I am past the years of sending my beats to anonymous artists that hit me up over Myspace. That’s not happening anymore. Working with Illogic has lit a flame under my ass, so to speak. Since I have worked on this project, I have started work on a variety of other projects with emcees that I sought out myself. I have one project that is done with an emcee named Billy Woods from Brooklyn by way of DC and Africa. I have another with a rapper from Atlanta named Mark Spec, and then I have another one-off in the distance, Open Mic Eagle from L.A. Then I have another project with a female vocalist and some live instrumentation artists, called the Mighty Jones.”

Known for his layered production, Blockhead admits that one of the most appealing aspects of working with Illogic is his unique ear. “He would pick things that I was really hoping he would pick, and he picked material that otherwise would not have had a home because he is such a versatile type of rapper that he can cover all of these bases. It really allowed me to let my hair down, so to speak.”

Consequently, it was because of what Illogic heard in Blockhead’s production that allowed him to do things that he did not have the chance to do before. “On ‘Lighthouse’ there is that section without the drums, so I was able to just do a poem over it. It was really great to have that canvass to paint on. It gave me the opportunity to be even more poetic. His beats put me into a different place than Blueprint or Prism beats. It was in the back of my mind to make sure that we didn’t do a project that could be compared to his work with Aesop, because a lot of people compare me and Aesop. This is a project that really pushed me to another level, and I think it is one of the best records that I have put out in my career.”

Words: Jason Kordich | Photo: Rachael Barbash