How did you end up with such a richly layered album?
The best way to describe the process is very much like a sculpture. You’re just constantly chipping and chipping away at it. I’ll work on something for a minute, and, once I feel like I’m starting to fixate on it, I put it away and go to another one. I jump around a lot. I play pretty much everything on all of the songs, and after I’m done with the blueprint, then I’ll bring in my guys. Or there are times when it’s just me and Ahmir [Questlove], and he’ll come up with the drum pattern, and I’ll sit around and write the music. Then when Pino comes in on the bass, he can mirror my left hand on the keys in such a way where it’s hard to tell the difference even amongst ourselves.
Can we attribute the delay of the album, ultimately, to your substance issues, or was it much more complicated than that?
The shit that happened in my personal life didn’t help, but it wasn’t just about that. There were moving parts — management changes, record-company changes. Virgin Records went defunct, and before that, they went through personnel changes. Back in the day, the executives actually gave a fuck about music — that’s the biggest change. The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it’s a tightrope. It’s a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.
What was the label hoping for?
The label wanted a Voodoo part two. At one point, after Voodoo, I was early in the process of working on new music that would eventually be on Black Messiah, and I let the label know where I was at with it. The music was pretty ahead of the curve, and they weren’t ready for that. They had these young college kids coming in as A&R, trying to tell me, “You should get so-and-so to produce this track, or you should get so-and-so to spit 16 on this.” I remember walking out of a meeting like, “Fuck you, fuck this!” The biggest factor in all of it was money. They cut off funding, and I had to go on the road to generate money on my own to fund the recording.
What has the course of your friendship with Questlove been through all of this?
For the most part, it’s just love. There were peaks and valleys — we’re brothers, and brothers fight. When Dilla died, it hit all of us. [Editor’s note: Voodoo collaborator J Dilla died in 2006, of complications from lupus.] It scared the shit out of me, actually, enough that I really felt my own mortality. I think Ahmir was afraid for me at that point, and sometimes when you feel like that, I guess you don’t quite know how to express it, and there was silence. I just had to go through it and get to the other side of it. And thank God I did.