Altar Magazine interviewer, Joel Bordeaux, talked recently with Chicago native John Hughes (aka Slicker) about Louis Armstrong impersonations, film, barnyard animals, and the new album We All Have a Plan just out on his own prodigiously consistent Hefty Records.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" ?>

Altar Magazine: You were in NY a few weeks ago?

John Hughes: We did a release/press party.  I DJ’d and we had some really great DJs and just had a party. We had fun. It was a really good party, although the release date got pushed back. We had a couple of macaws, a parrot and a boa in there, in keeping with the theme of cover of the record, so people could take pictures. It was pretty awesome.

A: What’s up with the livestock, anyway?

J: We just kind of needed something to visually rally behind for this record, you know? It’s pretty cohesive, but it’s got all kinds of crazy ideas. I wanted to have an album cover that’s wild to go with the record to, kind of, let people know that it’s a sort of controlled madness that I was going for. And I think the whole animal thing... there’s also sort of that theme of music being communication. There are so many levels on which it works out that I just wanted to roll with it.

A: Why was the release pushed back?

J: Just a manufacturing defect. Essentially our booklets got stapled upside down.  It really sucked because we worked so hard on this artwork. The final artwork is really beautiful, and we were super involved in every step of the printing, making sure that they were doing the mattes right, color correction, everything. Then we get them [laughing] and whoever loaded the book in stapled the center spread backwards and we just felt like vomiting when we got them. We opened them up and were like “Oh my god, this is so great.” The cover looked awesome, everything we were worried about came out great and this was literally the last thing we turned to. It was a horrifying situation, but it’s all good now, I think the extra time was actually good. It’s almost here now, only a week away, so it’s definitely behind me.

A: Were you so involved because it’s Slicker, or are you typically that involved with everything that comes out on Hefty?

J: Yeah, I’m pretty much there for everything. There are six of us altogether at Hefty, so I get a lot of help, but I’m always the one to sign off on things. And I like to be there to make sure everything goes right.

A: Why did you start the label?

J: Initially it started just as a home for my own music. I wanted to just cut right to the chase and throw my music out there, see the response to it. Hefty has always been set up as kind of a call-and-response label. In the beginning I wanted to get all the kinks out of my music, make mistakes, make my own records…so it’s always been about letting the artists on the label have control of their ideas…being involved in the business side, but not weighed down by it. I can definitely see how some labels can slowly take away the freedom of their artists, who might be absent minded sometimes, but in reality, even if you can have a great record, it doesn’t really matter if people don’t hear it. That’s where we come in, as an artist collective, bringing in a business sense, but staying artist friendly.

A: When is Hefty going to take over the commercial R&B charts?  I keeping hearing these tracks and thinking, “This is the single that’ll break...”

J: I think really the way to penetrate that market is to take a ride on someone else’s music, which I want to do. I’m definitely not afraid of attaching my sound to something bigger, as long as I don’t have to compromise what I’m doing too much. I’ve seen a lot of people like Kanye West, Neptunes, some of the more obvious people; they have a really good sound if you listen to their instrumentals. You wouldn’t really expect those to get on the radio. Right now, that’s a way to sort of crack the mainstream that’s working. I would love it, but I don’t think now that, no matter how hard we try, we can really crack commercial radio. It’s just not set up that way. We were naive about it. We were making music that we think is pretty accessible, but in the grand scheme it’s pretty tough, you know? You have to give yourself a reputation, prove that you can hang. I view my new record as more of a production showcase than anything else. I was able to pull a lot of artists together from different backgrounds and work with a whole array of people.

A: Did you meet Lindsay xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" ?>Anderson through Telefon Tel Aviv?

J: We signed her band, l’Altre, to Hefty last week, and they are from Chicago. Her voice is amazing. I’d heard the music she was working on, but the l’Altre record wasn’t stylistically up my alley, or maybe I’m more on the production end of it, but she worked with Telefon Tel Aviv and that’s how I first got to meet her. I was really impressed with her contribution to that record, and wanted to work with her on mine. I can’t really say enough about her voice.

A: And what about the other people?  I hear some African accents. 

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A: So, you would come in with a beat and....? 

J: Yeah, pretty much. When I write I always start with a beat. I’ll write some of the song: keyboards, bassline, just enough to have the structure of the song in place and, if there’s going to be a vocal track, I’ll lay down the scratch track, which I’ll either replace myself or have someone else sing it. Just enough to have something solid, but not stifle anyone’s contribution. It’s not as much icing. It’s more than that. I love collaborating. It’s definitely what I feed off of. I get so tired of working by myself. Even though that’s the way I decided to do it, for freedom of making my own decisions, still it gets really lonely. Even my new record, which has so many people playing on it, 90% of the time I’m by myself. When you collaborate with someone it gives you a chance to listen to someone else’s contribution and not just your own. It sort of gets you through the mix, you know? 

A: Do you have a primary instrument?

J: I don’t really have a primary instrument, but I guess keyboards would be it. 

A: And that’s you playing bass on “A Strong Donkey?”

J: Yup.

A: Is that a Louis Armstrong sample on there as well?

J: It’s Cromwell. He studied in the UK and, the way I understand it, one of his professors pulled him aside and told him “I think I can train your voice to sing like Louis Armstrong.” Cromwell went through, like, two years of vocal training until he got to the point where he could do it without destroying his voice because obviously singing like that can thrash your voice. So, he does this dead on Louis Armstrong - it’s really frightening. He did all the laughs on the record, and that dog growl sound. I’m just saying, hearing him do those dog growls is horrifying. It was the weirdest thing. And the Louis Armstrong I just wanted to get on the record. I thought it was just so cool to see it.

A: How many samples do you tend to use?

J: There are no samples on the record. Everything that sounds like a sample was probably dressed up to sound like samples. The only thing, there’s one sample that was totally a nod to my hip-hop phase: the break that Rob Bass used in “It Takes Two.” That’s the only outside sample I took. Everything music on the record is all chopped up live performances. I just had no reason to dip into any samples. I mean, on occasion maybe I’ll take a snare hit or something, put it on top of one of my snares, and I definitely steal a lot of record dirt, things like that.    

A: Do you work on all of these tracks at once?  I notice little bits of things popping up here and there.

J: I had all those sessions open at the same time, letting people come in. Other than “Strong Donkey,” which was the last track I wrote for the record, I just wanted to do one more track to sort of tie the record in and took another one off that I did. I think it worked. I really wanted to do something as cohesive as possible, so having those sessions all open at the same time…to be able to steal pieces from each one and sprinkle sounds around on the record...I just didn’t want it to sound like a compilation. I wanted it to have a flow, have things going on in the track that you heard in the previous one, and I did the reprise. I just wanted it to be an actual record, put together. I think a lot of it is mixing.

A: How did you pick up recording and mixing? 

J: I’ve been recording bands since I was a kid, started with a 4-track when I was in 7^th and 8^th grade. Even before then I was fooling around, but by the time I was in high school I was recording any band I could. I’m a really intuitive learner, so I knew that I needed to record as much stuff as possible. I was always seeking out people to record and, basically, giving my free time to just to get better at what I do. After a couple of years of college I felt like I was ready to put something out on my own. 

A: You didn’t apprentice or anything?

J: I don’t even read the manual, it’s so intuitive. I’ll get a piece of gear and just figure it out. It doesn’t matter if I don’t have a technical understanding of it; I just hop right into it. It’s the only way I can do it. I don’t know why. It’s the way I’m wired, I guess. 

A: How long did the album take? The whole process, I mean?

J: About nine months maybe. The record’s been done for a long time now, but it wasn’t like I was working nine months straight on it either. I mean, I was working really hard on it, probably every day, but it was like I was working 2 or 3 hours one day, the next day 6 or 7, that kind of a thing. Then I’d take a day off, so it’s hard for me to say how long it really took, but it’s the longest I’ve worked on a record, for sure. 

A: You were working on other projects during the same time?

J: Well, I had a new baby, and that’s time consuming. Sort of restructured Hefty a lot. I was really busy during that time.

A: I was wondering if that was you in “Knock Me Down Girl.” What do you make of fatherhood?

J: It’s good. I’ve always wanted to be a father, and I really like the structure it brings to my life. And the inspiration. I got to a point where I realized “Okay, I’m a father now. I’m in a different spot in my life.” Instead of trying to be something I wasn’t, I really wanted to be inspired by what’s right in front of me. I was worried with that track that it would come off as sappy or corny, but at the end of the day I really like that track because it meant something to me personally, and so I’m willing to deal with the consequences of it. 

A: And it’s catchy as hell too.

J: Exactly. In the early stages of the record I was literally bouncing sounds off my daughter from sound design. I had her on my lap, to see what turns her head, what kinds of sounds catch a baby’s ear because likely deep down inside of us it would catch our ear too whether we turn or not. I want to get back to looking at the root of what sound does to us, find stuff that sort of tickles our ears. That was definitely a big part of why I wanted to sort of document her a little bit on the record, because it was a big part of what this record’s about.

A: How do you do this stuff live? Do you take Slicker on tour?

J: I did on the last record. I haven’t yet on this one. Yeah, it’ll be really tough. I think I know how I’d do it though. I’d probably just bring a few of the musicians from the record and do a dub set of it, have everyone feeding through me. Last time out, I basically set up Pro Tools with some real time spring reverb and tape delays, live keyboards. I’d probably do the same thing, but step it up and see whatever players went out.      

A: What dub inspires you, and what do you think about digi-dub?

J: I’m not really that familiar with the digi-dub stuff. I’m more into Scientist and Tubby, Perry, more those kind of things. The new stuff, I like it, but I’m not that familiar with it.  I really like how dirty the old stuff is. And the way dub producers look at music, I can definitely relate, like the way they use effects, the way they trimmed back the tracks and maintain the melody and leave the rhythm and bass. I don’t think my stuff comes off sounding like dub, but I think the approach is sort of similar. If you look at the way my tracks start, with a million tracks of people playing all kinds of source material, then I wipe it all out and start from scratch. Addition by subtraction.

A: How do you reorient yourself toward a track if you’ve gotten into a box?

J: I usually do multiple versions. I’m working on a remix right now actually for L’Altra. I finished a version of it, hated it, and had to rework it. That’s how the whole record was: do one version of it, then wipe it all away, and do it again. It’s the only way, really. A couple of times I was able to keep my first try, but if I do a version of a track that I’m not completely satisfied with, I’m not worried about ripping it down and starting over again.       

A: Have you gotten into film scoring or branching out in other ways?

J: I did one film score, and I’d love to do it again.  For Scarlet Diva made by Asia Argento. Do you know who she is?

A: No. I know very little about film.

J: She’s a big actress now. She was in that movie XXX, and her father is Dario Argento, who did these Italian horror films. It was really fun, a really fun movie to work on. A totally different thing for me and I loved it.

A: Do you read your reviews, or what music press do you read?

J: I read everything. Sometimes I tell myself not to. I think if I didn’t run the label I probably wouldn’t read it, for some of the same reasons that I decided to release my own music. But it if you’re putting together the bio you have to say something, and artists tend to kind of cringe. Having to classify your own music is really weird. But yeah, I like to know what people say about my music, to an extent. If there were a lot of negative vibes out there, I’d probably just tune it out. I try not to be influenced by what people say about what I did previously. 

A: What’s some recent music that inspired you?

J: There’s that Kanye West record. It’s good for Chicago to have that out there, and I definitely vibe off of demos I get. You can just tell when someone’s got good ideas, even if it sounds cruddy or they’re not set up right. That’s the most inspiring thing because it makes me think about when I was a kid and music was really exciting to me. I can’t get as excited about music as I did when I was a kid, though I still try. I do occasionally, but I used to want to go to every show, play every record, support all the bands I liked, the artists I liked. But it kind of takes me back to thinking about when I wanted to find a home for my music before I decided to put it out myself. And I think it’s pretty cool to hear stuff fresh out of someone’s bedroom cause that’s where the next stuff is, you know, some kid in his parent’s basement. 

A: What’s next?

J: There’s definitely a lot of stuff coming up for Hefty. We’re doing that L’Altre record I was telling you about, which comes out in January. Samadha has a new one coming out... 

A: Oh, cool.  I know Chris [Case] from Atlanta.

J: Yeah, Chris is a really good musician. He blows me away. They’re in the process of getting another record done. I haven’t heard it yet, but I guess they’re done recording. I’m getting ready to help mix that a little bit. Doing another Immediate Action compilation in the Fall, a 12’’ sort of thing, and constantly updating www.weallhaveaplan.com.