Astronautalis Talks About His Latest Album, Storytelling, The Music Industry & More [Interview]

For years, Andy Bothwell, AKA Astronautalis, has been compulsively traveling, spitting his whiskey-soaked sermons in town after town, baptising audiences of hip-hop heads, drunks, punks, indie kids, and anyone else with an ear he can shout into. Initially coming up in the battle rap scene via Jacksonville, Florida, Andy diverged from his roots in freestyling as he started writing songs, which he quickly began promoting with an incessant penchant for touring. After releasing two albums, Bothwell hit his stride with the 2008 release, Pomegranate, a jagged, Victorian-inspired work laced with historical fiction as narrated by Bothwell’s gravely vocals and rampant flow. His most recent album, This Is Our Science, sees Bothwell’s continual reinvention, offering his audience more intimate personal incite fueled by his experiences on the road. This new direction, combined with the reciprocal burgeoning passion of his fan base, has propelled the album to places typically unheard of by indie releases. Still, do not misunderstand, Andy’s drive does not come from a place as shallow or simple as self promotion, but from a passion for life and adventure which highly informs his music, making it a magnet for a wide audience of music fans.

You’ve been on tour now for about two weeks. How has it been going so far?

It’s been incredible actually. A lot of these cities that we’re playing early on are places that we don’t do particularly well in normally. And we’ve actually done really well and it’s kind of hard to believe. Every musician has their area where they just don’t do as well as other places, and it’s just sort of been a dead spot for us traditionally [but] it’s been awesome. So it’s been pretty reassuring to see people are connecting.

From what I can tell, the response to the album has largely been very enthusiastic and positive. Did this surprise you?

Yeah, totally. I mean, I knew it was going to be an indie release and I knew that we didn’t have any money for advertising and that sort of thing, that it would be a small thing. I didn’t really have any expectation of its success or growth. That sort of part of the process of making a record is you work on a record for two years or three years or whatever and then you just kind of throw it out the window and hope that someone’s there to catch it. And it was kind of mind boggling how many people were standing outside that window. I really didn’t have any expectation of it having anything remotely close to the success that it’s had and it’s surpassed the sales of a lot of my earlier records in the first few hours, which is just crazy.

I thought it was amazing. I mean, you were #9 on the iTunes Hip-Hop charts the day of the release.

That was the thing that was kind of the most amazing. For a lot of people that are in my position to do stuff, real die-hard indie people and DIY people, it can be a real challenge to find assurance in this business. There’s a lot of struggle and there’s a lot of disappointment. You don’t have the power of a big label behind you, that can kind of push people around or anything. It’s a lot of disappointment and it can be hard. And to see how people not only got behind the record as listeners but got behind me as fans is just kind of mind blowing. The iTunes stuff was all awesome. That was really cool but what’s really been the most amazing to me is just everyday when I open up my Facebook page or my Twitter feed and I see people that are just posting about my album. Like when I look at my Google alerts and it’s people that are just slamming their own personal sites, their own Facebooks, their Tumblrs, their Twitter pages, insisting that people listen to my record. That’s the kind of assurance to know that it’s accepted, to be reminded on such an incredible scale that you’re doing the right thing. You’re on the right path. It’s okay that you don’t have a real job. It’s okay that you don’t have health insurance. This is the right thing to do. That’s just a really mind blowing thing.

For a large part of your career, you’ve played shows without anyone backing you, just yourself and a laptop. Was it difficult to find motivation to perform in that type of situation?

Sometimes the hardest part is taking the two steps up on the stage. But then when you get up on the stage, even when there’s 15 people in the crowd, which for the better part of my career in rap music that was the reality. I spent more time playing for 10 to 30 people than I spent playing for 100 to 200 people. And so even on those nights, the hardest party is just kind of walking up onto the stage, but once you walk up onto the stage, you have to be a cold, heartless, jaded, cynical bastard to not be totally excited about that situation. But even when you’re playing for 10 people it’s an opportunity to really convince them that this is important, to show them how much this means to you. So even on the hardest nights when I’m sick, and don’t have any health insurance to take care of it, and there’s nobody at the show, and the promoter’s a dickhead, and there’s five drunk people in the front, those people can still get it, they can still get what I’m doing. So as difficult as it can be from time to time, that difficulty just washes away as soon as you’re in front of the crowd. It’s my job and my job is awesome. On my worst day it’s so much better than every other job on its best day.

How do the live shows now, with the full backing band, compare to those earlier solo shows? Do people receive you differently?

It’s definitely changed and I think it’s changed for the better. There is something that is really endearing about playing the laptop shows where it’s just me and the audience and there’s much more of a one-on-one conversation. I like how simple, and special, and personal that was but at the same time it also just didn’t serve the music as well, and I also felt limited in the amount of energy that I could suck out of a crowd. And with the band up there, the shows are so much more insane and they allow me to get much more involved and lost in the music because I don’t have to worry about everything that’s going on with the show because the rest of the band are there to kind of catch me. So I can throw myself much harder into the performances than I ever did with the laptop show. The laptop shows are great, I’m really proud that I came up that way and I’m really glad that it went the way that it did, but now having done shows with the band, and now on my second full tour with the band, I just don’t think that I could ever go back to the laptop. I’m addicted to it. The audience is responding to it in a really great way where they’re even more excited and singing along more. Whereas, when they’re just watching one guy, it’s a little harder to just kind of lose yourself.

Yeah, whenever I’ve listened to your records, I’ve always pictured this larger ensemble, so I was happy to see that with these past two tours you were finally able to do that. In comparing your previous albums to this most recent one, your previous record dealt more with constructed, fictional narratives, whereas this record is a lot more personal, revolving around your time on the road and whatnot. I’ve also read that you felt like you wanted to write these songs for a long time beforehand but thought you weren’t ready. What made you finally start writing these songs, and after having them inside of you for so long, was it hard to figure out where to start?

We could go a whole night talking about this but the short version of it is like…Part of the struggle of deciding that you want to make a career in music is accepting the fact that most people are not going to get that, and most people are not going to understand, and a lot of people are going to see it as you’re throwing your life away, or you’re wasting your time, or you’re just kind of dragging your feet until inevitably you settle down and get a real job. And a big struggle with all of that is just accepting who you are. Once I started doing this I knew that I wanted to do it but it took me years to really commit to it and really work at it. And after that it took me even more years to just be really comfortable with it and to be really proud of the slow, steadily growth process that I’ve gone through to make a career in it. And part of that acceptance is accepting that you are who you are for better and for worse and it’s going to make your life different, and it’s going to make your life difficult, but it’s going to make your life [worth] living. And so a lot of these stories and ideas I had inside of my head and my heart but I didn’t feel strong enough with myself to put them out. And in the last two years there’s been a lot of change in my life, and my personal life, and my career that made me okay with my own life path and proud of what I’m doing and confident enough that I could share these sort of weird and private moments about my life and this other side. There was always a part of me that I kind of kept up my sleeve. And I kind of felt like if you really want to risk it as an artist, if I really want to be an honest artist, truly making honest music, then I have to eventually work up the strength to pull that shit out of my sleeve. I feel like this is my best record yet because of those reasons. Because I was truly honest on the record. Because I really spilled my guts on it and I was okay with being personally flawed as opposed to showing other people why they were flawed. And I think that people really responded to that.

Since you felt you were ready to make songs that include that part of yourself, where do you think that will take you creatively from here? Do you think it has freed you up in a sense?

Yeah. It’s more or less something to add to the tool belt that I can call from. No longer is this part of myself off limits for discussion in the work. I still don’t know what my next record’s going to be about. I’m feeling pretty creatively exhausted right now but that’s kind of like a hangover for every record. I drag myself over coals when I make a record. I really kind of work myself ragged and the moment I get done, I’m pretty spent for a couple of months and I try to read fantasy novels and shit to just kind of relax my brain. I don’t know where I’m going to go but it’s nice to know that if I want to get back into this well, I can always do that now or with some security. And I don’t know if this’ll be the focus of the next record but I’m pretty sure that like all of the records that have come before it, there’s always a [bit of]…you can listen to This Is Our Science, and you can find notes of The Mighty Ocean in there, you can find notes of Pomegranate in there, you can find notes of You And Yer Good Ideas in there. It’s sort of like building a career is like building a house and the job is like laying down a new room. There’s always going to be a bit of a through line, and there’s always going to be stuff that you learn from that one album that you’re going to apply to the next. But hopefully I’ll be able to move it all in a different direction as well too.

Were there any songs on this record that you surprised yourself with when you were writing them?

Yeah. With every record there’s songs that are scary to make. And often times I think the songs that are the scariest to make end up being the songs that are the most successful. With You And Yer Good Ideas, making “Oceanwalk” was terrifying [to make]. With Mighty Ocean it was “Meet Me Here Later” and “My Dinner with Andy,” which were both really kind of scary to make. And then for Pomegranate it was “Trouble Hunters” and “The Wondersmith,” which both ended up being the most popular songs on the record. Because those are all the songs that I really feel like I pushed something forward in myself. Just in rap music in general, I feel pretty confident that I was able to do something that not many people had done before and I certainly hadn’t done. It’s interesting to me that the risk always shows through to the audience. The audience always get it and responds to it, whether it’s kind of subconsciously or not, I don’t really know yet. But for this record the two songs that really scared the crap out of me were “Secrets On Our Lips” and “Measure The Globe.” But also I feel like, with both of those songs, when I was working on them, there was a moment when they both clicked. When I found the pattern of the melody to the second verse of “Measure The Globe” and when I wrote the last chorus on “Secrets On Our Lips,” when the key change happened, those two moments [were like], this is something really new for me. These are both things that are really new for me and really exciting for me but it was also really scary because as soon as I do something that I feel like is new, my first concern is, “What will people think of it?” But it’s my obligation to press forward regardless and follow what I trust is right and hope that people will get it when they hear it. Without a doubt “Contrails” is going to be the most popular song on this record because Tegan (of Tegan and Sara) is on it and because she killed it on the chorus. But I think after that, those two songs are songs that people will really connect to and respond to. Those are the ones that I feel like I really cut myself open and showed a lot, and not only contents wise and lyrics wise, but just musically and artistically I feel like I kind of let people know a little bit more of what I was about.

Since the subject matter for this record was so different from your last one, did the writing process change for this one? Or was it a similar process but you just wrote about different things?

No, no, the process was really different and was actually kind of frustrating. I’m really big about picking a language for the record and picking an overarching style for the record. [On] Pomegranate the style was really kind of elevated and I took a lot of inspiration from old Victorian and Edwardian poetry. I went for a really dense language and really elevated word choice, and I wanted it to be sort of high pollutant. And it took me forever to kind of get that right. It took me forever to kind of get the language down. To kind of become fluent in my own language. And sort of once you get it, once you make that record, it becomes really easy to do. Like I could write in Pomegranate-style lyrics whenever I wanted. And what was really difficult was when I was writing this record, was to not write like that. I wanted this record to be much more conversational and plainspoken. I didn’t want to hide things behind metaphor or allegory and I didn’t want to reach over a common tongue with dense language. I wanted it to sound like something that I would say to people, and it’s actually funny how that proved more difficult because I had just become so used to writing in this kind of high language. And so one of the biggest struggles is just constantly going, “No. Simplify that. Simplify that. Simplify that.” While there are parts on the record like, “Thomas Jefferson,” [where] I really rap super-fast on that, but for the most part, it’s a much slower delivery and it’s much more calculated and patient as opposed to Pomegranate, which is just like all of the words falling out of my mouth all the time. It was a very big word nerd album and this record is just much more about being a storyteller, making sure the audience understands every aspect of those stories.

Astronautalis at Santos Party House in NYC. All images © Bryan Cipolla

You’ve been touring for essentially the past two or three years without many breaks, so I assume that a good portion of your writing happens on the road. I was wondering how you navigate writing in that type of environment. Has it become natural to write in that type of space?

It’s not fun. It’s not natural and I don’t think it ever will be, because it is much better to be able to just sit down and let your mind kind of settle into sort of a meditative state and let the work come to you. That’s the best. That’s the most exciting. But there is just also an element of necessity, too. And while I don’t write as much as I used to when I was younger, like I used to write all the time. Just constantly writing, constantly writing. Instead I’ve gotten better at editing things in my brain before they come out into my hand. On tour you have a lot of time sitting and staring out of the window of a car, or staring out the window of a plane, or just walking around a city you don’t really know. So you do have a lot of time to think and I think the thing that makes writing on the road the hardest is that you don’t often have a lot of privacy. You’re almost always surrounded by people. Any opportunity for me to be alone in a room is just priceless because I’m literally around people all the time. A lot of times I’ll just go into the hotel…I’m sharing a hotel with like five guys, and once everybody goes to sleep I’ll just got sit in the bathroom on the edge of the bathtub and read just to be alone, because it’s so rare. And that’s what makes it difficult is the opportunity to just be alone with your thoughts and ruminate on things. I’ve gotten just better at that. At kind of forcing that on myself, so it’s made it a little bit easier. I almost never sit down and write a song from start to finish in one sitting. Often times I sit down, and I write an idea and I’ll come back to it and I’ll start to piece together words and concepts and figure out a beginning, middle, and end for the song and direction for the song. And over the course of several months, instead of finishing one song in one day or one song in one week, over the course of six months I’ll finish four songs. Just kind of bouncing back and forth between all of them. [That’s only changed the way the songs are written.] They’re definitely more calculated. They’re more careful. It’s not so much about being in an emotional state and pouring out a page, which is okay for me. I feel like I did that with my earlier records and for the more recent stuff I definitely want to be more calculated and careful.

While this album is a more personal record for you, from the title of the album, to the art, to the other artists on the record with you, the presence of your friends on it is very apparent. I wanted to ask you about that more collaborative aspect, how that aspect plays into you as an artist, and if that’s part of the statement you wanted to make with the record?

It certainly is. Getting back to that original idea about getting comfortable with myself and my life choices and everything, a great deal of the people that motivated were my friends and my friends that were also doing it. My friends that were living the same life, and not just in music but in art and jewelry and everything. People that were all deciding, “No, this is what I want to do instead. I don’t want to get a job in an office. I don’t care if I don’t have health insurance, and I don’t care if I make a lot of money.” My best friend was fluent in Mandarin Chinese and had every opportunity that he could possibly have before him because of having that skill and decided to quit it and become a chef because he loved that. That was more important to him, so I watched people like him, and people like P.O.S., and all of my friends that I had made and grown with over the last seven years of my life and those are the people that enabled to me feel okay with myself. Those are the people that kind of enabled me to kind of continue forward, because those are the people that helped me. Those are the people that helped me get shows and helped me make beats, helped other people hear my music, put me on tours. Those are the people that answered my phone calls at 4 o’clock in the morning when I was having a nervous breakdown about my career path. Those are the people that helped me and they are as much apart of these stories, and as much apart of my career, and as much apart of my life goal as I am. And so it’s important that they’re there. It’s important that they’re apart of the album. I don’t make these records in a vacuum by myself. I’ve sat down and counted how many people worked on the actual record, before the record came out, and it was almost 50 people. From one person playing strings, to producers and engineers, to people who made beats, people doing guest vocals, people who ran ideas by, people who helped with the PR push and the packaging and everything. It was almost 50 people and 90% of those people did it for free, and everybody [who got] paid, got paid a lot less than they normally get paid. They did it because they really loved it and they did it because they really love me and they believe in what I’m doing. And it’s important that they’re apart of every aspect of the process I guess, because they’ve been apart of every aspect of my life.

From what I can tell, your attraction to hip-hop and the work of other artists largely stems from their ability to tell a great story. In your experience, what’s needed to tell a good story?

My father, I think, is probably one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met and two of his best friends, the Bedwell Brothers, are a big influence on me. Actually in Pomegranate there’s a dedication in the beginning [to] a group of friends and family members and one writer that I think are all the most incredible storytellers. And I was really fortunate to grow up in a family where [that] was kind of a high priority. I have a lot of memories of being at a young age at a family barbeque and at the end of the night when it all starts settling down, and being around a campfire or something, and everybody [would] gather around my father and him telling stories and everyone laughing and passing him beers. He was really good at holding court and I witnessed that at a young age and that really was impacted on me. So it’s something that has been in my blood for sure and it’s something I was groomed to do. But I think more than anything, the ability to understand why people want to hear the story. If you have a story and you can understand why someone would find it fun and interesting or enlightening or hilarious, once you capture that and once you’re able to read that from the story, you can’t really be stopped. There’s a lot of little things, and I think there’s something to be said for the fine art of bullshitting as well, but really what it comes down to is you just need to know why. Why people are going to care. Why people are going to need to know this. And if you know why people need to know, and if you know why you need to know it, then that’ll come through and people will get it.

Specifically, I wanted to talk about the first track, “Do You Believe In Life After Thugs?” on your mixtape, DANCEHALLHORNSOUND!!!!, in which you talk about the reversing of roles between mainstream hip-hop and indie hip-hop in terms of their creativity. As an indie rapper, how are you viewing that change and why do you think it has occurred?

Well, I feel like in a lot of ways, indie musicians sort of became everything that they hated. I think they became lazy and became repetitive and why I got into indie rap music was because it was motivated by change. Because it was desiring to be something more with the craft than what was being done at the time. And I feel like a lot of, particularly indie rap musicians, figured out something new in their first and second waves of albums and then just kind of sat on that and just made the same records over and over and over again and kind of ground the genre of indie rap music into irrelevance, for the same reason a lot of rap music became irrelevant. And in the meantime, pop rap music started becoming really weird and adventurous. You had Andre 3000 making really crazy records and on an even more pop level. Auto-Tune kind of changed the nature of rap music where it became less about the content and more about the delivery and the style and more about just the energy of the song, where it became more like dance music. If you asked me 10 years ago if I thought all the rappers would be singing over 90s house music, with robot effects on their voice, I would just call you a liar. And whether you like it or not, whether you think it’s a good thing or not, it is a different thing. And I think it’s important that music always grow and progress and I feel like the bottom line was, whether you share the aesthetic or not, indie rap music ceased to grow and progress and pop music started to grow and progress at a really rapid rate. And I just kind of got set up with hearing a lot of indie rap musicians talk about [how] they weren’t getting appreciated and become spiteful about their waning fan base. And it was just like, “Man. Make better music. Quit fucking complaining. If fans don’t like you, that’s because there’s something wrong with your music. If you’re making music for people, and people don’t like your music, you’re doing something wrong.” And so that’s what it really came down to. I just got really frustrated with the arc and the attitude of indie rap music. This sort of entitlement that like, “We are smarter than all of these other people. And we’re so smart, that’s why nobody wants to listen to us.” And it just became so shitty and I kind of got over it.

It’s been really fun and exciting to see rap artists such as you break through without the help of any major labels. Your album debuted at #9 on the iTunes Hip-Hop Charts. Das Racist’s album was at #2 or #3 and Macklemore’s new songs have been huge as well. How has that climate shaped your music and your career, and what do you think this is saying about where the music industry is headed?

Where a lot of people are feeling like it’s the end of the music industry, I think it’s the new kind of exciting frontier for it. And the emergence of the middle-class musician is something that’s really amazing to me. 15, 20 years ago, to be a professional musician, you were either nobody or you were U2. And there wasn’t a lot of room in between. And now, with the emergence of indie musicians and the opportunity to make your own money without having to rely on a label, labels are obsolete. Labels are just banks with a fan base. So it’s been amazing to see this because label’s are crumbling and going out of business and a lot of people think it’s sad that these labels go under but the thing is, it’s just the way it goes, man. And I think it’s actually much better for music for a couple of reasons. One, it allows people to make money off music that would never, ever have made money off music in the first place and without having to change their music. Because they can use the Internet to market their music instead of throwing it in the faces of 10 million people and hoping that it sticks to 10 thousand. They can skip past all 10 million of those people and find those 10 thousand people instantly if they want to make nerd rap songs about Japanese animation, for instance. And that’s really been such a huge deal for my music, that I’m able to communicate directly with my fans and find people that really love my music. On top of all that, because music is free…you don’t have to buy an album to like an album. They can get an album for free. So buying an album has nothing to do with wanting to hear the record. Buying the album is like a political vote. It’s a vote of support. It makes you have to make a better record and also be a better musician, and treat your fans better, and respect your fans, and be a better person. It’s not good enough that you make a good record. It has to be that you are a person that someone wants to support because anybody can go pirate a record. It’s so easy, that anybody can do it now. So it has nothing to do with the quality of your record. It has everything to do with the quality of your business, the quality of your person. The quality of the music is part of that. And it’s an exciting time for music I think because the fans are in power now, not the record labels, not the radio stations. They have the power to choose whatever the fuck they want and I feel real fuckin’ lucky that a bunch of them have chosen me.

You pull inspiration from a number of different places, whether it is visual art, writing, or music. How did you choose music out of all the things you seem to be passionate about?

Well, I went to school for theater. I went to be a director and a lighting designer for theater. And to be perfectly honest, that’s something that I was really good at. Music was, is still really hard for me. I’m not a musician. Like I’m not a trained musician. I was trained in theater and that comes really naturally to me. The problem with theater is that you can’t get on your laptop in your bedroom and make a play. You can write a play but you can’t make it happen. And I’m a director, so that was always the problem. And theater has that hierarchical element where you kind of have to do your time interning and slowly climb the ladder and be an assistant director on A Christmas Carol…you know? I love theater and I love a lot of other mediums, but music, because of what’s going on with music right now, music is so accessible. I need an audience. I need to communicate with an audience, whether it’s as a director or whether it’s as a rapper. I was rapping a bunch and that sort of presented itself. As I’m getting older I’m finding myself kind of more excited about knowledge than I am about experience because I’ve kind of got a lot of experience under my belt. So my inspiration comes from all over the place. I get excited about all sorts of mediums of creativity and knowledge and development, but it always comes back to music because of the audience and just the ease of doing it. Everything that we know about the music business and the structure of music promotion has crumbled in the last ten years and it’s become wide open. And so it just allows for more reinventing yourself. And I think a lot of the other mediums are kind of going through that in a great way, but music is just far and away the most exciting and accessible medium out there right now.

You just put out the new record, but it seems like you’re constantly working on a number of different projects at once. Is there anything you’re working on now for the future?

Yeah, I got about four or five right now. Hopefully this winter I’ll finish that record that I’m making with P.O.S., The Four Fists record. I don’t know when it’ll come out and if it’ll get done, it just really depends on our schedules. We kind of work on that when it’s convenient. So that’s on there. I have two ideas for two different mixtapes that I want to do over the winter as well, and I have a bunch of other little ideas and projects that I have to keep secret for a while. I try not to tip my hand too much. I learned my lesson with The Four Fists. Once everybody knew that it was going to happen, I’d get asked about The Four Fists every single day. I was like, “Trust me guys, when I know a release date, [I’m not going to] keep it secret.” So I’m learning to keep things kind of close to my chest. But yeah, The Four Fists record, it’s on its way, slowly but surely, and then, a couple other projects in music. Then I’m kind of looking to some other stuff to branch out of music as well too. I’m getting interested in making some other things in other mediums and other ideas, so I’m trying to keep myself pretty busy so far.

Is there any music you’re listening to now that you think people should know about?

Yeah. My friend just told me about…I just heard this song called “Video Games” by the singer Lana Del Rey. And man, watch the YouTube video for it. It’s really pretty amazing. It’s just this really awesome, super kind of creepy desperate love song. And I’m a really big fan of love songs that are incredibly creepy and desperate. It’s really good and her voice is just completely mind-blowing. I heard that like 2 days ago, so I’ve been really into that. And I just produced my first record. Me and my friend Radical Face. I made most of the music and then my friend Radical Face kind of helped producing some of the stuff too for my friend Bluebird’s new record. His new record’s coming out, I think, in November on Fake Four, the label that I’m on. And it’s mostly my production with some stuff from Radical Face as well. And I just heard the first three mixes from that and I’m super excited about that too. I think that’s going to be really cool. What else, what else. I feel like there’s something else I’ve been listening to…Oh, I can’t stop listening to Wood Kid…

I actually listened to his record after you put up his video. It’s so good. It’s crazy.

It’s so good. That EP is awesome too.

If you like creepy love songs have you heard the new St. Vincent record at all?

What’s really funny is that record was produced by John Congleton, who produced my record. And it’s almost the exact same backup band as my record and was recorded in the same studio. They literally finished that St. Vincent record the day before I got into that studio and started my record. Annie is friends with all of my friends and it’s funny because they had just finished the record and like 2 days after if was finished he came by and me, and Annie, and John, and McKenzie, who played all the drums on her record and my record and is the drummer for Midlake, we all went out to lunch. I had never met her before then and towards the end of the session, John played me some of those songs and they are sooo good. Yeah, I really like that record a lot. I’m really stoked on it.

You can read Scrappy’s review of the Astronautalis concert at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios here. For more information, merchandise, and the inevitable announcement of more tour dates, visit Astronautalis’s website.