Our Interview with Fake Four recording artist Astronautalis

Andrew Bothwell, better known as rapper Astronautalis is about to drop his fourth record entitled, This is Our Science. It will be his first release on Fake Four, Inc. Astro has toured relentlessly, battled at Scribble Jam, and seems to have finally found his voice. This is Our Science is going to blow you away, so don't come to me crying like a li'l ole beeyatch about how I didn't warn you. Fuck off, I did.

Astronautalis was kind enough to take time away from performing at Bumbershoot, and other festivals, shows, and bar mitzvahs to play along, Syffal-style, and answer my absurd questions. And much like he does the rapping, he does it better than a lot of you duds.

Brandon Backhaus: Dear Andy, may I call you Andy? First and foremost let me say that I have listened to your new record and it is a genre-bending epic romp. Every song is intense and builds to these crescendos of holy Fuck!

Second, and not as foremost I suppose... I remember performing before this skinny, bug-eyed little blonde kid back in like '04 on the Code of the Cutz stage with DJ Addverse on Warped who absolutely ripped any and all comers with his performance. That kid was you, Andy! To me that was an all time line-up: Glue, Topr, Boac and Z-man from Gurp City, Black, (my crew) Learning Curve, Nonphixion, Q-unique, Mr. Dibs, etc. and we didn't even know it then. We were just a bunch of wide-eyed kids trying to inhale any and all nearby microphones.

If the Astronautalis of today met the Astronautalis of then, what would be the first thing you'd say to each other?

Astronautalis: Hi Andy, I am from the future. It totally rules here. All the gangster rappers are making diva house, the president is a black guy, and you get a metal plate in your head from stage diving with Mr. Dibbs in Minneapolis! Yeah, you do get a lot more tattoos... But its cool... Dad is indifferent and Mom sorta likes them. Oh, and when the '07 Kentucky Derby rolls around, and you have that hunch about Street Sense... Skip Jack's college graduation, find an OTB, and put every nickel you have on him. Jack will understand when you buy him a Jet Ski.

Brandon Backhaus: Ok a follow up: if I suddenly appeared naked, angry, and in possession of a futuristic weapon of some girth which I promptly hefted up to your considerable head and forced you into my time machine by screaming, "Astronautalis you little prick, get naked and into my time machine!?" what period in history would you secretly be crossing your fingers in hopes I would transport you?

Astronautalis: It is tie... The Gilded Age of Manhattan or The Belle Époque. Which is basically the same age... Just different locations. I would take either. A close runner-up is NYC 1979... So much amazing shit starting then, but more than anything, getting to see The Clash play the Palladium on their first US tour. Bo Diddley was their opening act on that tour.

Brandon Backhaus: Give our readers some insight into your upbringing, where you're from. Somewhere I can't remember (Wikipedia) read that you are based in Minneapolis... But I also saw some reference to Jacksonville? And please elaborate at length, how does this upbringing, indeed, make you that much "harder" than these sucker emcees.

Astronautalis: Born in Northern Virginia, my Pops was an Texas born ex-green beret turned train engineer with a nose crooked from bar fights and my Mom was Kentucky born artist who ran away from home at 17 to get out from under her lousy father. Their lives were pretty tough, so they made sure mine was not. They raised me and my two brothers on an old farmhouse with asbestos siding in Dayton, MD till I was 12, then my father got a big promotion that moved us down to Jacksonville, FL. I started hanging out with skateboard kids, graffiti kids, and black kids for the first time... I am the least hard dude ever... But all of that made me a pretty fucking good rapper.

Brandon Backhaus: Where do you write? My friend still scribbles long hand into this journal whose cover an ex-ex-girlfriend painted for him. Seeing as I am now like a really cool blogger or something, I beat up alphabet buttons on the regs. Where doth thy words spilleth? Follow up: What relic of a past relationship do you still insist on being sentimental about? I saw you included necklaces with the pre-orders?

Astronautalis: I write almost everything on a very sad old Mac book. Some ideas do start out on the notes app of my iphone, but everything ends up on the laptop eventually. I wrote in journals for years, but I finally made the transition to the laptop a few years back, and I believe it has made my work tighter. There is no room for doodles and idle words in .doc file; it makes my writing more focused.

With all the traveling I do, there isn't really room for physical relics in my life, but I have always held onto, and often cited a conversation I had with my first college girlfriend as a sort of foundation for my drive. My guidance counselor roped me into a class I didn't want to take, and my girl was furious, "These people work for YOU, Andy! They work for YOU! You never have to do what they want. They do what YOU want them to." She was a few years older than me, full of piss and vinegar, taught me a lot... I never took things lying down since that day.

Brandon Backhaus: So you were a battle rapper, or do you even see it like that? At this point, to paint you as just a rapper at all is a stretch. How do you see yourself in terms of an identity as an artist? Has it hit home that you are doing this for a living? And that a whole helluva lot of people might actually hear this record?

Astronautalis: I was most assuredly a battle rapper, a fact that I am very proud of. I feel like I got to see, and be apart of the tail end of something very exciting, before 8 Mile came along and made battle rapping the new open mic poetry night in every college town in America. I was rapping every single day for 4 years before I ever started to write anything down, and it was another 4 years before I really started writing songs. All I did was freestyle with my friends and battle anyone that I could... Anywhere... Anytime. Then, I went to Scribble Jam in 2002, got my ass handed to me, and looked around and saw a lot of old men that weren't doing anything but battling... And that is when I decided I needed to do something else with this craft I had been working on. I started working on my first album.

While my music has pretty much stretched my history as a rapper very thin, I still see myself as a rapper. I still write my songs in a very similar fashion. I am a slave to end rhyme. If you take a country song that I wrote, speed it up, and put an 808 under it... It will start to sound a lot like a rap song. Really though, that is just how I see myself. I am certain that is not how others see me, but I don't think those two perceptions ever have to sync up.

I am still totally confused by the fact that this is my career. That may come off as false modesty, but I don't care, because I still laugh out loud when I see that some kids run, and regularly update and Astronautalis fan page. People get my lyrics tattooed on them?! What?! I work my ass off, I haven't been thrown a lot of bones in this business, I earned my place... But god damned... I still can't believe I pay my rent with this. It blows my mind.

Brandon Backhaus: From what I can tell, while I went and got married and produced a couple of little pants-shitters, you've pretty much lived in a van, wheels rolling, towns disappearing, horizons approaching. Allow us, who chose steady access to pussy and food, to live vicariously through a romanticized narrative of how fancy and free life on road can be.

Astronautalis: I've spent 7 years of my life dirt bagging it around the world on a never ending Willie Nelson style tour, the last 3 were spent writing and crafting an album to function as that romanticized narrative. "This is Our Science" is that album. That is about as good as I can sum it all up... With or without a whiskey in my hand.

Brandon Backhaus: If you had to like neutron bomb drop a cooler-than-thou, that-ain't-shit story on some annoying topper muthafucker, what would it be?

Astronautalis: I've had sex in not one, but two, of Stevie Nicks' mansions. Never met her, but damn is her shower nice.

Brandon Backhaus: How did you link up with Fake Four, Inc.? I picture Ceschi, David Ramos, and Bono breathing through like bamboo shoots, popping out from behind ficuses, all ninja and shit about it. Quiet my excruciatingly overactive imagination.

Astronautalis: My homie Isaiah Toothtaker introduced me to Ceschi's music a few years back, and I was an instant fan. When Fake Four started to really solidify as a label, and put out all of my friend's records, I really took notice. One night, I was really drunk in St. Louis with Ceschi and he told me I had to put out my record on Fake Four... It was a really good idea. This has been the first enjoyable experience I have ever had with a record label.

Brandon Backhaus: I will say, completely aware that I sound like your personal ball washer, that how you take ideas at random from the crowd and turn them into plot-driven tales of exploits and conflict is a most amazing talent. I think I once saw you rhyme like "silver", "orange", and another asshole suggestion of a word that isn't supposed to rhyme with anything (month, violet?) and flip that shit into a full-fledged tale of international espionage or some shit. How the Fuck does you do that?

Astronautalis: Ever read "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell? Everyone should read that book. I started rapping when I was 12, and I am fairly certain I freestyled every single day till I was 18. Sometimes for hours and hours at a time. I was a dishwasher all through high school, I would stare at a white tile wall for 8 hours every shift and just freestyle under my breath. When I went to college, that rate was brought that down to every few days. Either way, getting back to Gladwell, I am way past the 10,000-hour mark. I also come from a long line of great storytellers and bullshitters.

Brandon Backhaus: I don't think you'd win American Idol... Or come to think of it you just fucking might... But anyway, you can definitely sing. Was there a moment for you as a "rapper" that you decided, "to hell with it all ya'll.. I'm goin sang!"? Or are you some kind of theater weirdo who grew up singing show tunes in holiday performances with your brothers for your adoring family?

Astronautalis: While I am some kind of theater weirdo, I went to college to be a director and lighting designer for theater, opera, and ballet. I was told by every music teacher and theater instructor I ever had growing up, that I was tone deaf, and I would never be able to sing. There is a special tier in hell for middle school music teachers... They are sad, spiteful people. It wasn't till I went to college, where I received this insane vocal training based on the work of a woman named Patsy Rodenburg, that I learned how to speak with my real voice, which made it incredibly easy to carry a tune. It is sort of a long, and astoundingly nerdy process, that I won't go into here for fear that I will lose that last fine hair of street cred I have left, but it made me confident to add melody to my work, and I have never looked back.

Brandon Backhaus: This Is Our Science is your new release from Fake Four, Inc. due out any day now (September 13th). How does it differ from what we've already heard from you? Who were some of your coconspirators? I'm most curious who produced the record. What is live instrumentation, and what is sampling? Is there a live band on every track, and if so, what should be refer to this motley collection in the future? My vote is for the Astronautalis and the Bothwellians. Why am I stupid?

Astronautalis: I feel like all of my other records I have made, have been orbiting around something bigger and better that I couldn't see, and with each record I got a bit closer to the center, and this album is the god damn center. I feel like this is the record I have been trying to make for years, but was too scared, and not skilled enough to pull out of myself. This record was, just like the last record, produced by John Congleton (who has a god damned genius... Check his resume), but unlike the last record, which I wrote most the music myself, this time I collaborated with a lot of my friends on the song writing process. Here is the laundry list: Tegan Quin (Tegan & Sara), Radical Face (Electric President), Alias (Anticon), Lazerbeak & Sims (Doomtree), Cecil Otter (Doomtree/Wugazi), Mike Wiebe (The Riverboat Gamblers) Picnic Tyme (Erykah Badu/Devin The Dude), Ted Gowans (Tegan & Sara/Fences), this relatively unknown guy named Broken from SLC who is killing it on production, and another Fake Four artist and old childhood friend RickoLus. I got music and vocals from all of these people, and then I brought it into the studio with John, and some amazing live musicians from Dallas who are in or do work for bands like Midlake, The National, St. Vincent, and The Paperchase... And we chopped up what we had, add new layers, reshaped, and restructured, and 10 days later, came out on the other side with that record. BOOM! ART!

The band I tour with is a whole different crew of great dudes, two from indie and punk bands in Portland, Maine, and the other is a great rapper, beat maker, and record collector from the Bronx named Nobs. All of this is called Astronautalis, and I don't know why you are stupid... Did you grow up under power lines?

Brandon Backhaus: Promote thyself dammit! What do you have in the works as far as support for the record? Tour dates? Cities that you'll definitely miss so that the kids can complain you never come there? Is there a witty name for the tour.. you know something like, the "Tegan is my Homegirl Tour"?

Astronautalis: Got the new album, a new tour, and all kind of new new... Which you can find out about at my new website: astronautalis.com! Yup, been touring for 7 years and I finally have a website! PROFESSIONAL BUSINESSMAN! I probably need a witty name for the tour... Suggestions? Also, still working on the Four Fists album with P.O.S... That should be done... Sometime. And I am going to make another mixed tape soon... So... FUZZ YEAH!

Brandon Backhaus: Lastly, and solely for Timothy... Andy, if you were a smell what smell would you be and why? For instance, last night I put on cologne and then proceeded to immediately smoke a cigarette. I assumed at that precise moment I smelled like Crazy Gideon, a LA-based Armenian television salesman who makes super low-budget commercials yelling about his prices being the lowest because, well, he's crazy and then he smashes a "Magmavox" VCR and shit! Yeah, him.

Astronautalis: If I were a smell... I would probably smell like a nice mix of whiskey, coffee, and Tumblr porn.

Brandon Backhaus: Word to Tumblr Porn. Andy, thank you so much for taking the time and for being and all around swell dude.