DJ Shadow to HMV

Dj Shadow: “I was getting kinda bored being identified as “the sample guy” and it was my engineer who was responsible for weaning me off my old way of working.”

DJ Shadow spoke exclusively to HMV about his latest release:

“I was getting kinda bored being identified as “the sample guy” and it was my engineer who was responsible for weaning me off my old way of working. For tracks like ‘3 Freaks’ I used stock keyboard sounds because that’s what is “in” in the Bay but the response locally in an urban context totally diverted the record that way. There are tracks on there which are “all-live”, or where only the vocals are sampled. The vocals on ‘This Time’ are about 40 years old. A recording studio in the Bay Area closed down and a friend of mine got hold of all these reels. It’s literally 1 minute 20 seconds of this guy tuning up his guitar, singing this little song, and I just fell in love with that vocal track so I literally built the song around it and I’m happy with the way it came out. I have a lot of imitators back home following the ‘Endtroducing’ model so I just wanted this album to be as hard to imitate as possible. That’s one of the reasons I called it ‘The Outsider’.”

The Outsider is available now on Island Records.