Best of The TrevBeats Show
Episodes 21–40

[00:00] But the whole cheating element of it — you can feel that. You can hear that. It’s not going to make you write a better song than, say, Ashford & Simpson wrote back at Motown in the ’60s. You’re not going to top them with an AI record. You’re not going to top what we’ve done lyrically with an AI record. With an AI record, you can just gaslight people into thinking that you’re a producer and a composer by letting AI do everything for you. Anybody can do that. And the funny thing is, it’s going to show because of the AI footprint. Everybody can hear the same thing. When you look at AI videos, you can see the fakeness in them. You can see where they don’t have it right. It’s jittery and it’s artificial. What’s up, everybody? Well, this week we have Episodes 21 through 40 — some of the best moments, or my favorite moments, from those shows. I want to give a big shout-out to all my guests for the first 40 shows. It’s been amazing. Thank you so much for coming. We have some great things lined up for you all as well. So without further ado, here’s Episodes 21 through 40. [01:00] Real quick, if you’re new here, welcome to The TrevBeats Show. Hit subscribe so we can keep building together. And to my regulars who show up every time, I see you, and your viewership means everything. If you ever want to help fuel this channel so we can do even bigger things, you can grab some fresh gear from the merch store below or jump into the Backstage Membership next to the subscribe button. Now back to the show. You know, and to touch on that too, it’s like you had musicians selling instruments. It’s a different thing, right? You actually had musicians who sold instruments. [02:00] A lot of these guys — I remember going to Guitar Center in West Covina. In the guitar department, the dude selling strings and guitars was from the group Stryper. They would hear you play and they were like, “Oh, well, I’ll help you.” They’d test the guitar and play in front of you. Man, those were experiences that you went home with. Just imagine you’re there for two hours and you go home like, “This guy played like this.” It’s a deep dive for you as a creative and a musician. You want to play more, and you want that in your life. Now it’s like going to a car dealership, man. Everybody’s just trying to sell you something. We’ve had the luxury of working together for so long. I’m talking about since we were kids. We’ve always played together. Everything we’ve ever done has always been complementary to one another. That’s just something we’ve always carried on. [03:00] I think that’s been a true testament to our catalog and our body of work. A disagreement for us in the creative space looks like this: “Maybe just try this here or there.” Maybe it looks like, “Hey, yes, man, maybe try a different rhythm here,” whatever. That’s how we cook and how we bake. We’re always driven by the goosebumps, man. If there’s a performance Bob is doing on his keys and it gets you feeling that way, there’s no, “Man, that’s you. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m out of here.” It’s never been like that for us. I think that’s the beauty of our brotherhood. What does Jimmy Jam always say? He said an argument is when you’re trying to win. Somebody has to win the argument. A disagreement is just, “Try this, try that.” I think that’s been our magic. I asked Terry not too long ago, “T, what made you roll the dice on two Mexican kids out of a small town in California?” [04:00] At a time when you could have had anybody — anybody — he said, “I never looked at your color. I looked at your ability.” When I look back on our relationship and the closeness that we cultivated with them, music was just a piece of it. The bigger picture was who we were going to become as men, how we were going to move and navigate when we became fathers. Terry was always big on family. I think those are the most prized possessions out of the relationship that he could ever give us — things beyond music. Those are our heroes, man. We call them our Black musical fathers. That’s what they are. [05:00] If I’m playing with Jeffrey — and this is no knock or anything, it’s just two different gigs — with a different gig, pretty much any other gig, or even with my band, I can be playing the music and have a little random moment, a different thought, not even thinking about the music, and kind of come back to it. I can’t do that with Janet. As soon as I think about something else, I’m going to miss something. I’m going to miss a pattern. I’m going to miss a note, a hit. It’s because there’s so much going on in the music and everybody is relying on each other to make this show push forward. Back in 2017, I had a follower reach out to me. He was asking, “Do you have any merch online where I can support your brand? Because I like your playing. I like what you’re doing. I love your content.” At the time, I didn’t. [06:00] But that sparked an idea for me to put something out of my own. Initially, the idea wasn’t to start a brand. It was just to put out some merch so people could support what I do. I didn’t want to just put something out with my name on it or my face on it. I wanted to put something out that was universal and that the drum community could relate to. That got me thinking of different ideas. One thing I remember when I was a young musician growing up is older musicians telling me, “If you understand pocket, if you know how to play in a pocket, then you’ll get the calls,” or, “Pocket pays the bills.” I was like, “Okay, that’s definitely something I believe in as a musician.” It’s something I’ve kept in mind over the years, and it has contributed to my success as a musician. [07:00] I couldn’t play really fast. I wasn’t that musical. When I was first coming up on the local scene, I used to shed with a lot of people. I had a season of that, but I made a conscious decision to stop doing so much of that and start spending time on the instrument myself. I allowed myself to just be free on the instrument. I was still listening to music and listening to other drummers, but I didn’t do so much of the shedding. I allowed myself to evolve and be within my own community of people, like my band Four Corners. That’s really when I feel like I began to evolve. Funny story. At first, because Trevor, you know in this business your word means everything. [08:00] I had told the contractor from Ain’t Too Proud that I would give him a year on the road. That’s the first thing he asked for. I was four months into that Ain’t Too Proud contract when I got the opportunity from Hamilton. And you also know in this business, when you get an opportunity, you say yes and figure the rest out. So I did the audition. After they offered me the job, I told them, “I’m going to have to respectfully decline,” because I was still in my contract with Ain’t Too Proud, and I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers or do anything that would give me a bad name. I heard back from the contractor, and he said, “We knew we had the right person from a musical aspect. But the fact that you’re willing to leave money on the table just to honor your word lets us know that we had the right person.” [09:00] I still read it because it gives me a visual representation of where my attention should be, as opposed to just winging it. You close your eyes, you catch a vibe, the consistency may be there, but it might not be there to the point where — we’re talking about Alex Lacamoire — you might do something a little different that pulls his ear. Or you might do something that musically sounds great, but it’s not what the lighting, automation or sound team is used to, or what the actors are used to. You do some crazy fill that you didn’t do before, and now they missed that entrance. So it’s understanding the bigger picture of what you’re a part of. [10:00] It’s not going to work out well for you otherwise. When I moved to New York — I’ve been here consistently since about September — everybody marvels at the fact that it was like, “Wow, man, you got here and you got right to work.” It was like, “Well, yeah.” Reputation and relationships matter. The work that you’ve done before you get into that room follows you into that room. The way you’ve treated people follows you into that room. A lot of people look at the opportunity in front of them, but they don’t realize they’re building the opportunity after that one at the same time. [11:00] I will tell you this: he works harder for the groove than any person I’ve ever worked with in my life. Every gig after that gig became like a walk in the park when it came to groove because he worked. In the heat of it, when you’re young, the last thing as a drummer you want is somebody questioning your groove. You think, “I know how to groove.” But he would work. He would sit there and make sure everything was exactly where it was supposed to be. And over time you understand what that does to your playing. There are peaks and valleys to everything. [12:00] That’s our DNA. That’s our fingerprint. You, me and 10,000 drummers could play a James Brown groove — our favorite James Brown groove — and it’s going to sound different 10,000 times. It’s going to be the same, but it’s going to feel different. Down to the minute detail of where I put my grace note or where I put my hi-hat, it’s not going to be the same. I was fortunate to be on the Two Against Nature record with Steely Dan. When I went in to record, first of all… [13:00] We didn’t cut that one. They loved that one. Ricky had been touring with him, so I went to New York twice. I went four days the first time and five days the second time. The first time I went in after Ricky. I ended up playing Remo drums and did the whole four days. It was one of those situations where you start realizing how deep the history is of the music you’re participating in and the drummers who have come through before you. [14:00] Bernard Purdie calls me and says, “Man, Mike White, I love your playing. Congratulations, and welcome to a very distinct drum club.” The late, great John Blackwell was standing right behind me. He said, “Hey man, I want you to come in this room real quick.” Now mind you, I’m 16. I’m looking around like, “I don’t know about that.” My mom is out there. He’s like, “No, no, you should come back here.” [15:00] I’m like, “All right, man.” Looking back on it, it was still very unwise that I didn’t go get my mom. But something in my heart said that this guy, John Blackwell, has a good heart, has a good soul, and I’m in good hands. He said, “We can leave the door open if you want.” I was like, “All right, he’s cool.” So I’m in a room, and I forget the other guys’ names, but he said, “You probably don’t know them. You’re probably too young, but these are legendary drummers.” There were three other drummers in there. [16:00] I’m coasting. I’m chilling. I’ve done a bunch of gigs, and I’m very grateful to have worked with the amount of artists I’ve worked with. But I’m going to tell you about something life-changing. I went home to Kansas City for Christmas. I’ll never forget, I was in the car with my dad. There are certain things you say out loud that become goals even when you don’t completely understand how you’re going to get there. [17:00] I looked at the arena and said, “Yo, I’m going to play in you one day.” The sad part is, to this day, I have still never gotten the chance to play in that 20,000-seat arena. But the very last show of the Renaissance World Tour ended in Kansas City, where we played a sold-out show. Sometimes the thing you imagine doesn’t happen exactly the way you pictured it, but you still end up somewhere bigger than you could have planned. [18:00] It’s funny because when we play together, people see two drummers and they’re like, “Oh man, it’s going to be loud.” It’s such an amazing thing for me to see when we play the first song and people look at us like, “Wait, this is cool. They’re playing with each other.” I told the guys my objective has always been to make people forget there are two drummers immediately. I want it to feel musical. It’s imperative that you don’t box yourself in. [19:00] You have to understand what’s out there waiting. Not to cut you off, but I really had a moment a few years back where I learned that a few “no’s” changed the trajectory of my career. The unfortunate thing was that a few of those no’s had to be for people I had been working with for years. That’s difficult because you have relationships. You care about people. But eventually you have to understand what something is worth to you — your time, your energy and where you’re trying to go. [20:00] It’s according to what it is you’re asking me to do. Once I really had that epiphany, it changed everything for me. It helped me say no without any malice in my heart. It’s just, “Hey, okay, cool. I appreciate it. If you can’t do this, maybe next time.” The more I learned to do that, the more space opened up for the things I was actually supposed to be doing. [21:00] I had about a week, week and a half. So I learned the main songs because I went and watched Justin play the show about three times. I remember writing down the songs he did at those shows. I learned those songs for the most part because those are the hits he’s going to do no matter what. The way Stevie is, he’s been playing those songs forever. He didn’t want to play them in soundcheck. So you have to walk into a situation like that prepared, but also ready for whatever happens once the music starts. [22:00] It was fresh. He told me before, “If you mess up, man, mess up loud and do it again,” because I guess it made the music new to him all over again. At another point, I was sitting out here surviving off whatever royalty checks and placements came in. That’s part of the reality of the business too. Everybody sees the big moments, but there are stretches where you’re figuring it out and waiting for the next thing to happen. [23:00] Then you see all these people — hundreds of thousands of people — singing, dancing and vibing to what you created. Man, it makes you feel connected with everyone. That’s been one of the best parts. Give us your take on AI. I love it, man. It makes the job easier. I don’t see it as any different from technology that has come before it. The question becomes how you use it. [24:00] The color was the warmth. That was what the tape machine imparted. It gave you second- and third-harmonic distortion. Turned-up harmony is what that is. It turns up the harmonics, and you feel them differently. It’s like piano chords, major and minor. That’s what harmonics are in tape. When you take the tape machine away, we all had these records that we demoed, and they still sounded like demos because they hadn’t been committed to tape. There was a quality that the medium itself added to the recording. [25:00] There are pros and cons to it. Just like anything, too much of it is bad for you. It’s like soda. It’s like sugar. If it’s used the right way, it’s dope. If it’s used in conjunction with what you do creatively, then it’s true to what we like. But the whole cheating element of it — you can feel that. You can hear that. It’s not going to make you write a better song than Ashford & Simpson wrote back at Motown in the ’60s. [26:00] When you look at AI videos, you can see the fakeness. You can see where they don’t have it right. It’s jittery and artificial. I can speak to the fact that he was never in a room with me. That meant he was in all those other seven studios because I was in number eight. When he came around, there were multiple rooms working at once. That was the level of productivity happening. [27:00] We’d say, “We put a hook here,” and for the most part, it was surreal to see somebody work that hard. I’ve always, ever since the first video that took off, had this hope of being able to change how companies looked at musicians. That included drum companies and different music companies. I wanted to broaden the landscape beyond, “Oh, you’re a drummer, so that means you’re going to get a drum endorsement and a stick endorsement and you’re going to be happy with that.” No. If Michael Jordan can be on a Wheaties box, I don’t understand why a drummer can’t build that kind of brand equity too. [28:00] Why can’t a musician do the exact same thing and build a brand that strong? That experience really fit into the idea of me becoming an artist because she taught me intentionality. When you’re really behind the scenes and you see all of the people and all of the planning that goes into a moment, you realize the audience may experience something spontaneously, but the artist may have thought about every detail that created that feeling. [29:00] So I’m going to plan for the moment. I’m going to actually make the whole feeling happen. It became very intriguing and exciting to me to tap into visual artistry the way she did. I think every artist — not even just her, but everybody I’ve worked with — teaches you something. Willow, all these different artists, give you another perspective. It made me understand that if I’m going to create my own work, I can’t be afraid of the full picture. [30:00] “That’s a little too complex. That’s a little too much. The general public won’t get that.” This is me saying, “Screw that.” Not completely, but in the sense that I can really be fearless with sharing myself. That’s the main thing I’m working on. I think back then, my generation didn’t necessarily draw the distinction between what it meant to be a solo artist and what it meant to be an artist playing music. We were trying to make great music. [31:00] At that time, you’re talking about a generation of people who grew up with Stevie Wonder and James Brown and Sly Stone, but also Miles Davis and John Coltrane. They heard that whole span of music, and all of it represented a certain level of excellence. Basically, the session was just musicians getting together and creating at that level. There wasn’t always this need to put everything in a box first. [32:00] In terms of that bass line, the idea of how that would flow, that was all Freddie. The idea of collaboration spoke to me, and it spoke to Terry McFadden, who came up with the lyric concept. Then it evolved from there. But it evolved from something that was already special. That’s one of the things about collaboration: somebody brings something in, somebody else hears another possibility, and you keep building without erasing what made the original idea great. [33:00] I don’t understand. Music is one of the few things — art — where you’re not going to escape the idea of what allows you to feel a certain way about it. Then to understand and participate in it, you do it. You study with masters of it. You live that kind of experience so that it influences the art you put out there. There are aspects of that AI is just not going to be able to do. Some people only listen to Eric Moore. They only want to hear those chops, and you see it in people’s playing and the way they maneuver around drums doing all this crazy stuff. A lot of people never pay attention to the fact that I literally toured the world playing pocket, playing rock music — all kinds of music. [34:00] They don’t even know that I was in Suicidal Tendencies. They don’t know that my first gig I ever had, in 2004 or 2005, was Sly and the Family Stone. Then I go from that to Bobby Brown, El DeBarge, Chaka — all these different situations. You can’t look at one clip online and think you know the complete musician. The career is much bigger than the thing the algorithm happens to be showing people today. [35:00] When it comes to recording and a person being able to type into AI, “I would like Trevor Lawrence. I would like Trevor Lawrence’s sound. Trevor Lawrence would play Latin percussion on this record. Can you give me Trevor Lawrence beats on my record?” That becomes crazy because you have so much music recorded already. The system has material it can learn from. That raises a completely different conversation about somebody’s identity, their sound, their work, and whether they have any say in how it gets reproduced. [36:00] Everybody — no matter how amazing Styx Taylor is, GOAT; DJ Thompson is GOAT — no matter how great these drummers are, you have to at least try to be your own self. Just be yourself a little bit. Find yourself in what you’re doing. There’s so much music in the world. You can put on a rock song on Apple Music and it’s going to give you a thousand different songs back-to-back. Why are we all playing the same song every day on Instagram? Come on. [37:00] She knew how to find me wherever I was. The funniest one was, I was at the gym one day. I’m in the locker room and the phone rings. There’s a pause. “Is Paul Jackson Jr. there?” “Yeah.” “It’s your mom.” I figured I better answer. That kind of accessibility was different back then. People found you, and if somebody important called, you took the call. [38:00] And hung up the phone. Fortunately, he called back. So I sat in there and came up with stuff. Play, play, play. The funny thing is the second part I played ended up being the majority of the record. But I just played and played and played. Sometimes what ends up becoming the record is something you arrive at through experimentation. You don’t necessarily know which thing is going to stick when you’re creating it. [39:00] I’m driving down the street one day. I was in Culver City — I remember exactly where I was — and I hear this record by The Weeknd. It comes on and I said, “Oh man, that sounds pretty good. Man, the guitar sounds pretty good. Wait a minute…” Then I realized it was a collaboration between The Weeknd and Daft Punk, and it’s like, “Oh! One of the songs we cut that day turned into ‘I Feel It Coming.’” That’s hilarious. That’s crazy. Another one would be the guitar solo on “This Place Hotel,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” for Michael. The reason is because he sang it to me. That was an incredible experience. [40:00] He was like my proverbial musical father. When we’re at home, your parents teach you. Over time you might mimic them sometimes. Then eventually there’s a scenario where maybe your parents are gone, and it’s time for you to carry what you learned forward in your own way. That’s what musical lineage is. You learn from somebody, but eventually the goal isn’t to become them. The goal is to understand what they gave you and let it become part of who you are. [41:00] It goes back to when my mom first started buying me those records — Kind of Blue and Birth of the Cool. It was always a part of me. I had the opportunity to express outwardly exactly what was inside of me. I wanted to be a drummer. That didn’t work out because everybody wanted me to do something else. But all those influences were still there. You don’t necessarily know how the things you love early in life are going to come back around in your work later. [42:00] Having an incredible collective of amazing friends — we get together and create amazing stuff all the time. Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, yourself, and projects that we have coming out really soon. It’s such an amazing ride. From working with Elton John and so many other people that you would never imagine this horn coming out of Ferguson would be touching — touching the world over and over again. It’s such a special thing, and I’m humbled by the idea that this is only ground zero, that we’re going higher. Every day, that’s what keeps me coming back: knowing there’s some dopeness waiting to be discovered. [43:00] What’s nice too is a lot of that drum-and-bass stuff, depending on who it is, is impossible to execute in real time. So by failing — inevitably failing — you land in a place that’s unique to you. That’s something I’ve always liked creatively. You hear an idea, you attempt it, but your body and your musical history interpret it differently. That difference can become part of your voice. [44:00] I was too nervous to even follow through. I knew the only way to pull this off was to put it in the calendar and book a show. I booked a couple at Zebulon here in L.A. As it was approaching, I knew I was never going to feel “ready.” So I just had to create a deadline that forced me to walk into the thing I was afraid of. Sometimes waiting until you feel ready is another way of never doing it. [45:00] I started to feel all this stuff, and it actually helped me rethink my relationship to being nervous. When I was young, nervous felt like I wasn’t prepared or that something was going to go wrong. Now this version of nervous was like, “Oh wow, I really care. This is important to me.” It almost became a positive signal: yes, you’re entering this vulnerable place, and that’s the point. My advice — and I’m saying it to myself right now — is to learn as much about yourself as you can. I spent so much time trying to learn about everybody else that I didn’t leave time to learn about myself. The more you can learn about yourself, hopefully that’s the thing you can put out into the world. [46:00] There is space for you in the world. My dad was very proud of me. He wanted to come see one of my sessions. I was sitting there, either at an MPC-60 or Linn 9000, and I was time-correcting stuff and really making it precise. It was the ’80s. After the session, my dad had his own perspective on what he saw. Every generation looks at the tools of the next generation and has to figure out where the craft is inside the technology. [47:00] There are going to be fewer white-collar jobs. You probably shouldn’t even automatically assume college is going to make sense. Kids are going to spend $100,000, $150,000, maybe more to go to an Ivy League school. Are they getting that money back if the work they trained for is being changed by AI companies? That’s the larger conversation. Technology doesn’t just affect music. It changes the economic assumptions people have made about education, work and careers. [48:00] I spent basically 55 years of my life learning how to do this, and you think you’re a composer in an afternoon. But people think that: “I’m a composer now.” There was something in the second verse where she modulated. I think down or up — she modulated it up. In all my years, I don’t think I’d really come across that in exactly that way. Maybe I have, but I don’t remember. That’s the kind of thing you develop an ear for after decades of actually doing the work. [49:00] It didn’t know that. Then I told Diane about it, and she goes, “Hey, that’s cool and everything, but don’t do that because it’s learning my stuff.” True. She goes, “I don’t want you putting any more songs into AI.” I said, “Agreed.” That’s where curiosity about the technology immediately turns into a rights question. What is it learning? What did you give it? And what happens to that material afterward? [50:00] She was telling me, “Every time I point to you, I want you to play everything you know.” If you look back at some of those videos, you’ll see when it’s about to go to the chorus, she’s standing on top of me pointing, and I will play everything I knew. That was the instruction. Every artist has a different relationship with the musicians around them. Some want restraint. Some want you to give them everything. Part of the job is understanding which situation you’re in. [51:00] That came from big realizations. My talks with them became, “Guys, how can I get more than the small percentage?” They said, “If you act as a distributor, that means your logo is trademarked. That means we are dealing with a viable company. If we want to use your logo on your snare or your cymbal, you have to own it. And you need a seller’s permit.” You’ve got to handle business in order for business to get handled. That changed the way I looked at being a musician. [52:00] Versus a sideman — what are we talking about here, bro? Listen, do what’s good for you. Do what’s going to feed your family, feed your soul, feed your lane. Do what you do. I love it. I went into the first rehearsal thinking, “Oh, I can improvise,” because I had been playing in situations where improvisation was expected. Then you realize every musical environment has its own rules. [53:00] For the blowing to get over the top of all that thickness of the synths and the Rhodes and everything else, I needed a little extra range. I knew the six-string would give me that too. I could almost pretend I was trying to be like a tenor player. That’s another example of choosing the instrument around the musical function rather than using something just because that’s what you normally play. [54:00] Herbie and I — and you and Tommy Brechtlein — that’s the band. I’m standing there. I’m 25 years old. I look across the set. We’re playing on national TV, and it’s Herbie and Chick. Chick and Herbie. I’m freaking out. These are my heroes. I’m like, “Am I really here? Did I die already? Is this heaven?” There are career moments where you suddenly realize you’re standing inside something you once only imagined from the outside. [55:00] Maybe he was a little older than that, but I had never heard any of his music. He had his laptop and played me some beats he was working on. Immediately I was like, “Oh, he’s got the Trane thing.” That person is who we now know as Flying Lotus. It’s funny looking back because you meet people before the world knows what they’re going to become. Sometimes you can already hear that there’s something different happening. [56:00] A lot of cats had a band. Roy was different, man. To me, Roy was a guy who — when you talk about living for the music — that’s all he did, day and night. Music. A lot of people don’t understand sometimes when you talk about Roy. Roy was so deep, man, and such a genius. There are musicians whose entire lives are organized around the music. When you’re around that, it changes the standard. [57:00] Everybody sounds the same because everybody is trying to do the same left-right-right-left-right-kick-kick-kick stuff. Come on, man. If Elvin played pop music now, this stuff would be off the hook. He would be phrasing some of the things everybody is trying to do, but with the mindset of Elvin. Think about that. The vocabulary could be modern, but the identity behind it would still be unmistakably his. [58:00] I really hope when they look back, they see that I tried not just to play the instrument, but to elevate the people who came into my space with the instrument. The older you get, you understand even more that it was always about the music. I’m in service of the music. I’m in service of making the people around me sound good. I don’t need every moment to be about me. That realization changes the way you play. [59:00] I didn’t want to walk in saying, “Oh, you’re a drummer,” and have them assume you can’t produce. Now the meeting is already down three levels compared to me just playing my music and them saying, “That’s hot. Let’s get in.” So I always tried to keep those worlds from limiting each other. Even when I got the call to do Earth, Wind & Fire, I wanted the music to speak before somebody decided what category I belonged in. [1:00:00] By the time we were done, he was like, “All right.” His managers — their office was in his studio too — said, “Go tell them what you want. Tell them how much you want.” That was it. When I walked out, I was like, “All right, I guess I’m playing for Prince.” We opened up for Maze in the summer of ’94 — Frankie Beverly & Maze — and Michael White was the drummer. Those moments become part of the education too. [1:01:00] They all smashed. But Mike, with that gig and that soundcheck, made me say, “I’ll never underestimate somebody older than me ever again.” They’re old enough and disciplined enough not to care what you think. Some of us — if I’m at a club and I see all my homies there, of course I want to play something that gets a reaction. But somebody who has been doing this at a high level for decades might not need that validation at all. That discipline is powerful. [1:02:00] It’s the kind of thing where, “I’m just going to be me.” Whoever is going to like it is going to like it. I make this comparison quite a bit when I’m talking about these things. It’s like the difference between Snarky Puppy and Beyoncé. Beyoncé can sell out a crowd at a completely different scale, but that doesn’t make one approach to artistry more legitimate than the other. The question is: what are you trying to make, and are you being authentic to that? [1:03:00] For me, it’s authenticity, consistency, quality. When I really wanted to take music more seriously, Aaron was the person I talked to. I said, “I want to take things to the next level. What are some things I should do?” For anybody watching this: always ask questions. Ask questions. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t be afraid of how stupid you might think your question is. Don’t feel like you’ve got it all together. Don’t try to seem like you’ve got it all together. If you have OGs in the game, ask them questions. [1:04:00] I got right to it. My mom had been trying to encourage me to get my passport, but it took Aaron saying it for me to actually go and do it. It’s crazy because just a short time after getting my passport, I got the call to do Raheem, and it was out of the country. If I didn’t have my passport, I couldn’t have taken the opportunity. Sometimes the advice seems small when somebody gives it to you. Then suddenly that one thing becomes the reason you’re prepared when the door opens. And we out.