Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

Stephen Starr: Here’s to a good future.

a pause that almost refreshes but doesn’t give you quite enough time to answer anything before the drum returns and the flood of questions with it. That’s sort of how life operates.

Playing on the floor at my Grandmother’s Compton, California, house. This is where I stayed when my parents were recording their Congress Alley album in 1972.

Paul Humphrey was a session drummer who worked with everyone from Jimmy Smith and Charles Mingus to Frank Zappa and Marvin Gaye. He was also the drummer for Lawrence Welk’s TV show in the late seventies, and his children would sometimes appear with him on the show. Sound familiar?

Donald Trump kept trying to thread the needle with birther accusations. Maybe this sitting president isn’t a real American. Maybe this election—of a man, by the way, who was scrutinized the first time he ran for office—is a case where we need to take a closer look. This all happens on a more fundamental level than policy disputes. It would be comed

realize at the same time how you’ve been defined almost entirely by this tapestry you’ve been woven into for twenty years, and how grateful you should be for that tapestry. It’s a sentimental thing to say that I wouldn’t exist without the band, but sometimes sentimental things are true. I spent years looking for this commune or that one, the jam se

Let’s say there’s an event and people around me get invited and I’m not invited. Some part of me will feel like a failure. How can you not? The real me knows that it’s just an event, but doubt enters my mind about why I’m not there. Is it because I’m not good enough?

I thought it was the best gospel song I had heard in what seemed like forever, but it also sounded like an emo song that was crying out for a Ghostface Killah rhyme. I walked right up to Jim and told him that I loved it and wanted to find some way for the Roots to record it.

But after Dilla’s passing I couldn’t imagine going back to the sound of Things Fall Apart. It was too fraught, too sad, too connected to the admiration I had for him. He was my idol, and I didn’t want to make my mark in his shadow, or in his absence.