Sublime

and JEFF’s head

I was and am so devoted to the review process that I write the reviews for my own records. Almost no one knows this, but when I am making a Roots record, I write the review I think the album will receive and lay out the page just like it’s a Rolling Stone page from when I was ten or eleven. I draw the cover image in miniature and chicken-scratch in

We were inspired by the Native Tongues collective and their idea of a broader identity that hangs over all the individual acts and unites them. By the fifth week out there, we even had a name for that overarching umbrella, too: the Foreign Objects. It was mostly playacting, I guess, the idea of thinking of a band name and a name for the group that

Ellington’s most visionary work, the three-movement suite Black, Brown & Beige.

Puffy was taking obvious sampling to its extreme. The Neptunes were stripping down songcraft to its skeleton and also riding the crest of a cult-of-personality wave. And where were we? Where was I? I was perched on the precipice of what would eventually be called neo soul.

Your trust in your instincts and excitement are what resonate with others.

Something I truly loved and appreciated about Prince during the years we worked and lived together was the way he took artists like these—and like me—under his wing. When he saw talent that intrigued him, he got the artist in front of people, and his seal of approval meant a lot—in the audience and in the industry. He lifted them up above the noise

And because it didn’t sell as well as either Phrenology or Things Fall Apart, we felt like we had been deceived. Here we were, selling our souls for greater commercial success, except that it wasn’t greater at all.25