Today we’re excited to bring you the second instalment of The Come Up Show Podcast. As promised, every two weeks we’ll be dropping a new podcast with one of your favourite hip-hop artists. We began the series with Shad. This time, we chop it up with the ever-maturing, newly-surprising — and among hip-hop fans, often-polarizing — Mac Miller.
We begin by talking about the influences behind his album Watching Movies With The Sound Off, including how the album was originally conceived. “When I first started doing it, the concept was gonna be that every song was a different movie, and at the end, you’d have to figure out what movie I was watching by what the song was,” says Miller.
He later reveals to us why Flying Lotus told him he’s at his greatest stage as a producer: “He was like, ‘you don’t have a sound that people are looking for; you don’t have a sound to model after or anything like that.'”
We talk about how he became friends with Earl Sweatshirt, as well as the music they’ve made together. He tells us, “I think we created something new when we made music together – it wasn’t his shit and it wasn’t my shit; it was something new, which is what you want to do when you collaborate.”
On the subject of “Aquarium” — which he calls the best song off WMWTSO — Miller tells us what he means by the line “confessions that I have and curiosity about life and death/ most of us will never understand it, we just like the quest”:
“Everybody’s so focused on it. What does it all mean? What am I supposed to do? We talk through all the possible variables and all the possible paths and different things that life could be about, and you can make a great case for any side of it. You can make a great case that life is just about evolution; you can make a great case that you have a destiny and you can’t control it; you can make a great case that you[‘re in complete control], or that Jesus is everything, or that Allah is everything, or there is no [higher power].
There’s so many different things that you can make a great case for, and I don’t shut any of them down; I’m open to all of them. I think that in reality, there is no actual conclusion [to that question]. It just doesn’t exist.”
Later, he tells us that despite far how he’s come, the journey isn’t even close to being over: “I feel like everybody thinks that I’ve [already] accomplished what I sought to accomplish, but I don’t think I’m even close to being in the same country of where I’m headed to – which is both good and possibly horrible, because my aspirations are so high for what I want to do and what I believe myself to be capable of that accomplishing anything less would be failure at this point.”
We talk about all of that and plenty more in the podcast. Listen to the interview below (note: you can also read it here).
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