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11/21/2005 What's good man? What up…I'm just here getting ready to have a Halloween party at my house. And making a second to talk to HipHopGame! Hell yeah, how long have you been working on this project? About two years. I used to do a lot of production and rap over my own beats before Linkin Park started, so Fort Minor gives me a chance to get back to that, but this is like the updated version. When did you start rapping? I was writing raps in around 1989, I think. They were awful, because I was listening to N.W.A. and 2 Live Crew, and I was about twelve. Did you make the beats especially for this project or was it just beats you had already? I made everything specifically for this project. My goal was to write and play every note on the album, and I came pretty close to doing that. What type of vibe were you looking for on "The Rising Tied?" The sound I was going for was a more organic sound. I wanted it to feel like it was played by hand and not so much sequenced and keyboard-ish. What kind of equipment did you use? I have a lot of stuff I go to: MPC, Akai S-900, Korg and Roland keyboards, and all the ProTools gear and plug-ins I can get my hands on. I work in the computer, mostly. I also used different guitars, bass, and percussion instruments, plus vintage stuff like a Hammond B-3 organ. How long did this project take you? Probably about two years. That's because I had to get the vibe straight when I was getting started, and once I got on track, we powered through most of the tracking in about two or three months. You mentioned an organic sound, how important was that for this project? Most hip hop right now is made completely on keyboard, and it feels so stiff. Back before samplers, people used to play with a feel. If it wasn't perfectly on-beat, that was okay as long as it had a good feel. I wanted to have a little bit of that. I played most of the instruments by hand, bass, guitar, keyboard, percussion. Even though I have lots of tambourine sounds on my keyboard, I went out to the store and bought a couple real tambourines, just so I could actually play them by hand. When most people look on the computer screen and see a sound is off, their instinct is to go in and fix it. That's why it sounds so rigid. I just thought it would be a fun experiment to go against that. Most times, I treated a part like it was a sample, where I would loop a part that had a good feel. How important is the MPC on stage? In my stage show with Fort Minor, it's less important. We play some supporting tracks off of ProTools-but I don't use prerecorded vocals. I have a thing against that. They always feel weird to me, and I think if you can't actually perform the stuff on stage, then don't play live. Is this the most exciting album you've worked on? Every new album is exciting to me. I've been waiting to get this Fort Minor album out for a while, so I can't wait until November 22, when it's finally out there. "The Rising Tied" is executive-produced by Jay Z, what kind of work collaboration is it? Just to make it clear, Jay didn't write anything, he oversaw the project in a different way. When I make music, I tend to just let the ideas flow and whatever comes out comes out. That's usually a good thing, because it makes me versatile. But I was worried that the Fort Minor record might lose some consistency if the songs were too all over the place. I like a record to have an identity from beginning to end. That's why I asked Jay to be my executive producer. He helped me pick through all the rough songs I was thinking about using and telling me which ones to keep, which ones to fix up, and which ones to throw out. His input was really valuable. You got Common, Black Thought, Ghostface and more, was it hard to convince them to be part of this album? Ghost is actually on our mixtape with Green Lantern. The mixtape is called "We Major" and it's out there on the internet right now. It's kind of like the setup for the album. The album is called "The Rising Tied." That's a play on words: this "tied" group of people, including Common, Black Thought, John Legend, Styles of Beyond, and Holly Brook-everybody is "rising" together in the music world right now. You also got Lupe Fiasco, an MC we've been supporting for some time now, how did you get familiar with him? Funny enough, I met him at a party on Jay's yacht. Sounds swanky, right? (laughs) It was pretty much a situation where there was a V.I.P. within a V.I.P. within a V.I.P., and I knew pretty much everyone there except him. I wanted to find out who this dude was. We got to talking, and just kept in touch. He's a good guy, and I think we think in similar ways. You've done work with Styles of Beyond, are they friends of yours? Yeah. I've known them for about eight years ago. I did their original logo, the one they've got tattooed. You can check their album credits on "2000 Fold," I did the art direction. So when I started doing this Fort Minor thing, and I ran into them, we just naturally started making some songs together. What made you want to pair them on a track with Juelz and Celph-Titled? Ryu and Celph are good friends, and we all listen to Dipset. We met Santana outside the MTV VMA's this year, and we swapped numbers. Apparently, Santana was pretty excited about the song too. That song's on the "We Major" mixtape as well. How did you go about picking what songs would go on the album and what songs would go on the mixtape? We actually did the mixtape after the album was done. The mixtape is on some "promotional use only" shit. We did it just for fun, and used samples just because we were messing around. You know, mixtapes are mixtapes and albums are albums. The album is a little more serious, more based in writing a song from scratch and playing all the parts. I think overall, though, that the mixtape is a great setup for the album, and I'm glad people are getting into it. The feedback has been really strong, and I know that if people like the mixtape, they'll be feeling "The Rising Tied" too. Would you say you had more of a Hip Hop or rock education? I think my musical education began in classical music and Hip Hop. The first type of music I listened to ever was hip hop. In the beginning of the Yo! MTV Raps days. Run-D.M.C., LL, Beastie Boys, Biz, N.W.A., Kane…all that stuff. then, once I started really learning my way around a piano, I started picking out rap loops. I studied classical piano for about 10 years. Were the other Linkin Park members involved at all? Joe Hahn has a guest appearance on the song "Slip Out The Back." Also, Brad Delson, our guitarist, helped me with the direction of the album by being my A&R. That means he, with Jay-Z, helped me pick which songs should go on the record, and gave me his opinion on how to structure and arrange them. Some of his advice I took, and some I didn't! (laughs) How did you approach this project differently than a Linkin Park project? The album started with me asking myself, "If I take the hip hop I used to do before LP, and add in all the songwriting and touring and world experience I've had in the past six years, what would I come up with?" That's where it started, and here we are. Did the Jay-Z collaboration increase your fan base? I don't know. We had already sold 35 million albums around the world before we did one song with Jay, so it's hard to say how the fan-base was affected. But I know that as artists, we just keep growing and doing different things, and it was just as new for Jay as it was for us. Maybe even more new, because I would imagine that we focus more attention on Hip Hop in what we do than Jay does on rock. What were the biggest challenges for you with the Jay-Z project? Just bridging the gap right. You've got to have a love and respect for both parts when you're doing a mash-up. And as Jay will tell you, since I was the one putting the "Collision Course" music together, I had to know every part of every song well in order to make it sound smooth. There seems to be more collaborations between artists in Hip Hop, why is it so rare in rock music? This might be a long answer. I think it might be because a rock album takes so much time and work to do. Most Hip Hop albums are based on getting beats from different people, and sometimes that hook is already on there. You just have to lay the verse, and it's done. On a rock album, you have to start from scratch and make every note and every sound, every melody and every word. Plus, once you're done, you have to go out and play the songs live, and it would be weird to skip a part in a rock song because the "guest vocalist" can't be there. I think it's more of an artistic decision-and one last thing: at least for us in Linkin Park, I know we want our albums to sit on a foundation that we built ourselves, that nobody can say our album's quality sits in the hands of someone else. Where do you see Hip Hop going in the future? There's room for a lot of different things. I just hope there's more variety, less sticking to the same topics and sound. What's next for you? Just looking forward to the release date: November 22. In the meantime, I'll be touring and posting on fortminor.com-staying in touch with the fans and making sure people know what's going on with the album. What do you want to say to everyone out there? I guess if I wasn't in music, I'd be the kid who writes into the music magazines and tells them that I want to see something different. There is so much of the same going on right now, and although I like some of it, I think there's room for more music that doesn't comfortably fit into all the same categories. This Fort Minor album is going to be a challenge for people because it's different. But I know when people actually get to hear it, they'll see what I'm talking about. They'll get the reward.

By Brian Kayser, Photo: Mike Warterman

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