Speaking of hip hop collaborations, I know you played with Curren$y both at the Electric Factory over Thanksgiving Weekend and down in Jamaica. How did you first meet him?
That was through Damon. He came down with Damon to the Electric Factory show the day they released the Blakroc album. I met him, and we had a smoke off, and I definitely won—I’m not afraid to say that I won that smoke off. That guy is a great guy, man. I predict big things for him. I could see him becoming a movie star. I’ve been hanging out with him for a couple of weeks, and we hung out for a bunch of days in Jamaica, and I just get along with him real well. He reminds me of Chris Tucker. If Damon decides he wants to make a movie, Curren$y’s the fucking star, man. A good hip hop star is charismatic, and he’s just really charismatic. I heard a remix he did of “Konkrete,” and it is really cool.
What’s nice is that we introduced Planet Anthem collaborators] Alex Chigger and Harry Zelnick to Curren$y, and Pnuma’s Alex Botwin was already into Curren$y. I have a lot of friends that are big Curren$y fans from everything he’s done with Lil’ Wayne and all the stuff he did when he was on Young Money. I hooked him up with Alex B because he makes crazy beats—they hung in Jamaica for a bit. It’s cool because we could make an album with them and, at the same time, we could just be making a new Biscuits record. We could have two simultaneous records. Right now me and Aron are in the other room working on tracks for the next Biscuits record.
Already thinking ahead—this one’s not even out yet?
For us even “Mirrors” is old at this point. We have about 25 new songs that were written after Planet Anthem. We’re just writing so many songs right now that we can’t even hold them for the next record. There’s this massive batch of songs that won’t get on a record because of this record, and they’ll probably be old by the time we want to make a new record.
Well that’s how the music industry has changed. You can put them online or remixes and they will still get out to people.
There are just so many singles. We need a little time to do that we want to make “Minions” into a single and “Mirrors” into a single and bring “Rockafella” into the studio. We have all these songs we’re playing that we want to make definitive studio versions of by putting them out as singles or maybe as bonus material. We were planning on doing another four-song EP and giving it away, and have those songs be “‘Rockafella,” “Park Avenue,” “Minions” and then maybe “Flash Mob.” It was going to be a free EP but we are finding it hard to find time to make that record because we are thinking so far ahead.
Speaking of hip hop collaborations, I was just looking at the credits on the On Time EP, and saw that TuPhace not only co-wrote the lyrics with the Biscuits. That is a new songwriting approach, right?
Aron wrote the music, and TuPhace wrote the lyrics, and then we changed some of the lyrics around, so it’s a collaboration. The guy’s really talented. At first we were like, “How are we going to perform this?” But the truth is it just works so fucking well. Magner sings with the vocoder, and it just sounds cool. “On Time” at the Electric Factory was really big, the same as “You and I.” The two songs kind of grew out into their own at the Electric Factory show. It’s been so fun—my favorite thing about playing these songs is the process of watching them grow.
It’s just really fun and for a couple of years it wasn’t fun. New songs are always new so people don’t know them. It’s a hard process when you’re a small band and you can do whatever the fuck you want. Then when you get a little bit of success you have to live in your own world and not worry about anybody else. But it takes a little bit of maturity to learn that. For me, it took a little bit of maturity not to worry about what’s going on out there, and just enjoy what I enjoy most about being in a band, which is writing music. The best part of being a musician is sitting down with nothing and creating something. This is happening right now in the other room. I watched Ski use this synthesizer last night, and I though to myself, “I have that synth,” so I went home, opened that synth, and I put it on a song I’m working on that is tentatively called “Rahm Emanuel.” It is not actually about him so I have to figure out the title [laugher].
I brought it in today, and we practiced our countdown for a couple of hours. After we finished, I played it for Magner, and he’s in the other room right now working on that song. The best thing I can do is just not be in there right now and let him take what I started and work on it a little. But I was just awe-inspired by a hip hop legend working with a fucking synth in his studio—it is the best part of being an artist.
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