Thundercat

"This is when I first started taking my bass seriously. This was this was a when I got hungry to understand what it meant to play bass. I thank God that there was a Stanley Clarke as a frame of reference to what to what is possible with the bass, along with Jaco [Pastorious] and Marcus Miller. There was a period where I stopped liking the practice, I was like 'uh I don't wanna practice', and my mom was really clever about it. She offered to pay me to transcribe Stanley Clarke's School Days. And of course, I'm like, 'I want to buy comic books and Marvel cards', so of course I transcribed School Days. Journey to Love and School Days became really personal to me. It was just like, I felt like this was my n**, and I felt like this was who I am; I identified with those two albums. I didn't even discover the self-titled album until later in life; I was very much married to School Days and Journey to Love. I think that Journey to Love is still very much a story to me that I feel resonates in my mind and body. I don't know what you would call it musically, but I paraphrased the album on my very first album, sonically."

"This goes back to when I was a child, and me and my older brother were in the house together. This is the era video games come into play too, because this is where me and my brother started fighting over the TV and what's being played loud in the house. This was me and my brother fighting over the over Nintendo and Sega Genesis, while he's practising on a drum pillow. Dave Weckl was a massive musician to us when we were young, and John Patitucci, we were into him a little bit, and Frank Gambale of course. We would listen to this album a bit religiously – this is how we wanted our instruments. We would play with this and we would learn the album. I actually wasn't excited about this album until my later years, because it being tied to such an emotional place. When I got of age and realised how important this album was, I revisited it and there's nothing like it still, sonically. For who it was and what it did, there's nothing like this album. There's actually a moment where I do get synaesthesia from this album, it's somewhere between 'No Zone' and 'India Town'. I literally remember standing up in front of TV playing The Karate Kid, and I remember listening to this and feeling so happy, I felt weightless. This is me, the musician, the one that was practicing, playing jazz band. I didn't know too much about anything, but I knew that I couldn't play Nintendo without Chick Corea in the background."

"So this is pre-teen me; I became a bit of a rocker. This is when I got into Marvel really heavy, and still playing in jazz band and other stuff. I remember my favourite movie at the time was The Crow, and when I was younger the littlest thing would snag me, like if I heard some type of melody or harmony or something that would immediately get stuck in my head and I would have to know where it came from or what it was. Stone Temple Pilots, for me, it started with The Crow. I remember hearing Scott Weiland singing the melody of 'Big Empty' and I was like, 'What? Who wrote this? Who the hell wrote this song?' I was literally like, I had to find this album. I would listen to albums with repetition a lot of the time, and this is right in the middle of like the grunge era. All kinds of stuff going on, and clearly Stone Temple Pilots, when they came up, were making waves outside of that. Ultimately, because Purple had my favourite song from my favourite movie on it, it essentially became one of my favourite albums when I was a child. To this day I still listen to it."

"What don't I say about Aja? We all have our different experiences with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, but everything that they've created throughout the years is really awesome. I have a few albums of theirs I love; Can't Buy A Thrill, Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, but there's a number of reasons why I am totally in love with Aja. It stems from the personnel, the feel, and how much it was a stab in another direction of pop culture. It was anti-pop, it was a bit on the outskirts of everything, I think. It's always funny listening to Donald Fagen singing about stuff because it's like, 'what's the guy rambling on about?' sometimes. A couple of my favourite musicians are on it; like Steve Gadd and, again, Michael McDonald. When I realised this was Michael McDonald singing background I lost my fucking mind, like, straight up. I always loved the Doobie Brothers and I knew his hits because of hip hop and stuff, but I remember being like 'Who's this magical person singing these dissonant chords behind the changes with ease with this weird timbre of voice?' – and you look at the credits and of course it's Michael McDonald. Aja, if I can't listen to it in its entirety then I get mad; I get pissed because I want to go through the whole album every time. One of my favourite moments on the album is Steve Gadd playing out on actual song 'Aja'; the way that just like the drum feels and everything – I don't know how to play drums but I love to try to act like I play drums to that one moment when he takes a slight solo at the end. Steve Gadd was always one of my favourite drummers ever because of the choices of records and stuff that he would do. Aja is he was he was one of those moments that it spanned out to everybody at that point. It was like at the height of their popularity. That was what happened and it was perfect."

"At this point I'm already in Suicidal Tendencies and I'm walking around school listening to Korn and Suicidal. I always had my headphones on and I had long hair, I kind of looked like a girl. I remember my friend called Carla, she gave me her copy of Evil Empire. It was really dope, it was one of the coolest moments ever, because she gave me a copy of her CD and then she gave me a kiss literally, and she said, 'this is yours.' I remember putting it in my CD player in my car and I've never sonically heard anything like that in my entire life. That shit blew my fucking mind. I didn't know what the hell to do with myself. I was like, 'who the fuck plays an instrument like this? What the hell is this?' Tom Morello's guitar lines were ridiculous. To this day, it's still ridiculous. If Jimi Hendrix were alive he would be like, 'what the hell is Tom Morello drinking!?' Then on top of that, add the part where they're from Los Angeles; it's a bit of a prideful moment for me. I don't ever have these moments where I'm like, 'Yeah, they from LA', but Rage Against The Machine, I felt like it was me. This is again identity; who this is and what this is – this is the sound of where I come from, this is how we sound. Then you mix Suicidal Tendencies in there, and I'm touring at this age already, so this was this made me want to play harder and more aggressive and made me want to exude more energy and play with power. That's where I learned that, and it moulded my years in Suicidal Tendencies. So Evil Empire, if I put it on in an Uber everybody's going deaf. It's Rage Against The Machine: I don't care – it's still too good. It's still too fucking good. They're getting ready to go back on tour this year. I'm gonna be the guy in the front row with the mouth guard and boxing gloves. Rage Against the Machine changed my life and will change yours on arrival."

"Leon Ware is one of those people, if not the main person, that taught me what it was to be a songwriter. I'm very happy and fortunate to say that I got a chance to tour with him at a very early age. He was my first experience with songwriting. When you go listen to Musical Massage, you can hear the spirit behind most of the things people were doing in the 70s; everybody that we know that Leon used to write with, like Minnie Riperton and Quincy Jones and Marvin Gaye, just to name the ones that are easily pinpointable out the gate. You can see his spirit through the music. Musical Massage is, I think, the perfect soul album. I'm not lying to you. In my opinion there's only a few that exist in that space. Leon Ware's album was the actual definition of soul. And you can hear songs that were copied from it; you can hear like 'oh, this is where this person did this' and 'This is where this person took this'. That's where I learned how to be a songwriter; Leon Ware taught me everything about songwriting. He taught me the emotion behind it, he taught me how to get to those emotions, he showed me what it was to not to ever quit, no matter what is getting thrown at you. One of my favourite songs that brings tears to my eyes, like to this day is 'Got To Be Loved' on Rockin' You Eternally – I know that's a big jumped from 1976 to 81, but let me say, every time I hear that song I can feel that whatever he was feeling when he wrote it, and I think it hit me at different points in life too. So this is all about Leon Ware's prowess as a songwriter and why he was the hit maker that he was. I get to spend some time with some quality time with him growing up, and I'm really grateful for that. So Musical Massage is a journey, man, it's a real journey. I remember telling Tyler, The Creator about Leon Ware, and Tyler's very much to himself, but you can see every now and again Tyler will say something about how important Leon Ware's music is, and I think even Tyler even went so far as to try to write some stuff with Leon. God rest his soul because he passed a few years ago; that was very difficult. He left me and us with a lot of music, and to this day when I think about my own songs like 'Them Changes' or 'The Turn Down' it's always was a reminder to say how you feel."

"Emo steez. I was a little emo kid. It's one of those things where, again, notably realising when somebody does something different – and Fieldy definitely played his instrument different than any bass player I'd heard before. I could tie this to Marvel and everything again, like Todd McFarlane did the cover of the album Follow The Leader and the video for 'Freak On A Leash', and he was also a Marvel artist at the time. It was a bit iconic for me, from Follow the Leader to Issues. That's all I was at school; at one point I went through a hard-ass Korn phase where I was just like, 'I only listen to Korn.' I didn't want to play bass like Fieldy because I didn't I totally understand why it wasn't always very melodic or harmonic, but a lot of the choices that they made when it came to progressions and stuff like that were insane, also, and it was something that drew me in. Every now and again I run into them, and we're not friends, but we're associates to the degree of where we recognise each other. I literally just got a chance to see them at a show and we sat and talked, but I haven't ever told them that like they were a big part of my growing years as an artist and as a bass player. Yeah, Issues is still one of my favourite Korn albums."

"I think these albums [by Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke] essentially let me know what I was supposed to do in life. I would read Jaco's autobiography, I wanted to learn everything about the man, and I would go find the other albums that he worked on. Everybody knows him as the actual virtuoso bassist that planted the seed, but I wanted to know what made him tick, what got him to the point of being who he was. That's what Jaco Pastorius did to me; it made me want to know him as a person. I would study, I would transcribe, I'd listen, imitate and mimic everything. As you go through different phases, somebody may even go so far as to say 'you sound like this person'. I mean, you gotta be okay with those moments, because it's leading to something. If you're keen on the instrument, it's always leading to something else. Every time I listen to the self-titled album I feel weightless. I feel like it's going between 10-year-old me and 35-year-old me. It almost feels like I've never heard it before, and I get the same emotions every time I hear it. It's one of the only ways I know I'm moving forward is by hearing this album all the time. It's crazy, it feels weird, but it's the truth. It's like a reset button in my life, listening to this album. By the time I get to the end of Jaco's album, I just remember how much and how hard guys like him used to work. It also reminds me to keep going, and it also reminds me where I came from."