Captain Kirk Douglas is already a legend to so many, but he’s not ready to settle. The Roots’ guitarist stepped out as a frontman back in 2019 under the moniker Hundred Watt Heart with his debut solo album Turbulent Times. The album featured Douglas on lead vocals and introduced the world to his poetic songwriting, heartfelt guitar solos, and natural knack for memorable melodies. Three years have passed since Turbulent Times and the title still holds true, Douglas found himself at home at the height of the pandemic with nothing but time and his recording equipment. Like any musician would, he found solace in the writing process and found himself putting together a full LP. What came out of those sessions was New Unknown, the sophomore album from Hundred Watt Heart, out today (November 4).
The 10-track album sees Douglas exploring new areas of his vocal range and leaning on a more psychedelic sound. The spacious arrangements allow for the guitarist/vocalist to dive deeper into the use of textures through blistering guitar solos that play on tropes of classic and psychedelic rock. All over New Unknown Douglas is able to pull from his wide array of influences to create a focused yet unpredictable piece of music. The tracklist bounces from heartfelt ballads that swell into stadium rock anthems (“Ain’t No High”) to groovy, drum-driven tracks like “We Can Be One”. This colorful world of Douglas is all strung together by slick, complex guitar solos and their refusal to sound like anything you might have heard before. New Unknown is a full-body experience, Douglas is able to create enticing arrangements that are equal parts familiar and refreshing all at the same time.
Glide had the pleasure of sitting down with Kirk Douglas to discuss the process of putting together New Unknown, his journey through music so far, and much more. Check out New Unknown out now and read the full interview with Kirk Douglas below:
All of the singles for the upcoming project had a similar abstract geometrical theme for the artwork. Who designed those and what made you go with that style of artwork?
An artist by the name of Sarah Stewart. Her project is Rattlesnakes and Rainbows. I saw her artwork on Instagram, and I really loved what she had done. I reached out to her and asked if she might do artwork for my album. I sent her the album and basically just asked if she’d create a piece to accompany it. That’s what she has done. The artwork for the singles are just details from the artwork in its entirety. When the album is released or when it’s close to release, then I’ll release everything as a whole, and so you’ll see how it fits in the context of the entire piece.
How do you usually approach artwork and how important is it in your creative process?
I want to have something that would allow the listeners something to look at as they listen to the music. That’s how I grew up listening to records. You have the music and you have the album cover to analyze or just meditate on as you listen to the music. I think what she made is a good visual accompaniment to the album. When I received the artwork, I listened to the record while having the artwork in front of me, and it made for an enhanced listening experience.
How about the name, New Unknown? Is there a deeper meaning behind it? How did that name come about?
It was recorded during the pandemic, and it was recorded at a time when we didn’t know when things would return back to “normal”. The future’s always unknown, but the type of unknown that we’d be dealing with is– At the time, it felt like we’d be dealing with a more unprecedented unknown. That’s how I thought of it, was like, we have the unknown, but this is the unknown in a way that we really– At the time, it felt like there was no prediction of how things were going to go, and there was a lot of speculation about how things would go. Now, here we are in the future, and there still seems to be– When I take the train to work, I see some people in masks and I see some people that are not. It’s a future that I couldn’t have really predicted two years ago like that. That’s what I’m referring to.
What kind of equipment were you using for New Unknown? What was the recording process like for this one?
It was done at my mom’s house. I did the basic tracks in the basement of the house I grew up in. The rest of the tracks were done either there or where I live in Brooklyn, my apartment in Brooklyn. I also reached out to some members of The Roots who recorded things in their respective homes. It’s very much like a homemade project in the most literal sense. I used Ableton, the digital audio workstation to record everything. I used various guitars, various amplifiers, and speaker simulators, and I even recorded some of the stuff at 30 Rockefeller Center, some of the vocals I would do in my dressing room there.
Do you have a laptop or a mobile studio that you bring around in terms of when you were recording those vocals?
Oh, on my laptop. Everything was done on my laptop. I should have specified that before. I use a digital audio workstation, Ableton, which is something that I have on my laptop. That’s how I recorded everything.
When you’re stepping out to be a frontman compared to when you’re working with The Roots, are there any key things you picked up from working with other frontmen? When you guys were working on the stuff with John Legend or Costello for example, did you pick up any techniques for being in the spotlight like that in a way?
It involves more multitasking as an instrumentalist. It definitely requires more practice behind the scenes, trying to play and sing things at the same time. It requires more preparation, I suppose. A lot of the music was not really recorded with the live setting in mind, but that’s where the fun begins, to figure out how to translate that which you do in a studio to a live setting. As far as picking up anything from those frontmen, just really engaging with your audience and– That’s pretty much basically it, engaging with your audience. That’s pretty much what I picked up from them.
I also want to talk about your debut, Turbulent Times, from 2019. I was listening to it, and the songwriting feels very sentimental and personal in a way. How do those songs compare to the songs you wrote for this new release?
Both situations are pretty much based on my commentary on the world around me. First, the music comes, and the lyrics are just basically what I’m dealing with in my immediate life and what I observed from the world at large. Not much has really changed, as far as my approach. There was just a lot more going on internally this time around, just because of the unique state of the world and how my world itself was so different.
Basically, the main reason I was able to make the new record was because my wife and kids left the United States and went to Denmark for seven months during the pandemic. I found myself alone with– The only real family I would see was my mom. My normal routine of working and parenting was changed. I had a lot more free time, at a time when New York was mostly shut down. That gave me a lot of time to really put focus on the creation of the record. I was just recording music. I didn’t have any intentions of recording a record. It’s just that after doing one song and doing another song and doing another song, it just added up to what could be a full album.
The first time around (Turbulent Times), I was working with an engineer and somebody that mixed the record. The same person that recorded the record is the same person that mixed the record. I learned a lot during that process. This time, I was able to really have a lot more creative control, and I was able to record it way more comfortably because it doesn’t get much more comfortable than being in your own home. I think that those factors added up to what this record resulted in.
You said you didn’t go in with the intention to record a new album. How many songs were recorded compared to how many made the record, what was it like putting that track list together?
Once I realized that I had 10 songs, I created the record so I could listen to it from start to finish. Then I just basically made a song order that was fun for me to listen to and a song order that, for me, felt like a bit of a journey. That’s how I arranged it.
I want to go back to the Turbulent Times again. Do you remember the feeling you had when that debut album was released? How does it feel, waking up on a day when your record is out in the world now and you can’t really do anything about it? How does that feel compared to when it’s a release with The Roots or your earlier work in more collaborative areas?
It’s collaborative work. I guess with my own solo work, you take more responsibility for the positives and the negatives, and it’s– You just feel a lot more naked and exposed when you do a solo release. Any release that’s been done with The Roots, it’s a band, but it’s pretty much Questlove and Black Thought’s project. Everybody else is contributing. You’re a small part of a big puzzle. It takes a lot more of a village to make a Roots album. Still, the responsibility of it or the face of the album is more Black Thought and Questlove. Having been a fan of The Roots, it’s fun to help make those records what they are. It’s a fun thing to be a part of this huge collective, but for me, it’s also fun and it’s also a challenge, and it’s also very fulfilling to share with an audience what’s really going on inside your heart, and what’s really going on inside your soul musically.
I guess that feeds into why I call it Hundred Watt Heart, thinking of 100 Watts being something that’s loud and your heart, your emotions. Basically, the idea of putting what’s in your heart out loud, saying what’s in your heart out loud.
To what you’re saying about when you finally put it out and there’s nothing you can do about it anymore, it’s like, to get the music to a place that you like it requires a lot of repeated listens. You listen to music that you’re creating in a different way than when you’re listening to an album that you just bought or an album that you just downloaded and it’s just coming at you. I really try to get my music to the place where I can sit back and I can just enjoy it. To sit back and enjoy the music, that’s the payoff. That’s the fulfillment of having something in your inner ear and sharing that with the outer world. That process is– It’s almost life-affirming. It’s one of the things that’s life-affirming, but there’s just a lot of satisfaction that comes with it. It’s just one of the things that just makes you feel good about living, basically.
You were saying how you have to listen to it until you’re fully happy with it. How many times did you have to go through New Unknown before you were like, “Okay, this is a finished product.”?
You’re going through it in different stages, so I would say hundreds. There’s the stage where the whole thing that was recorded was literally just drum and just guitar. There’s the enjoyment of hearing that, and hearing that come through the speakers. Then you’re just adding another instrument and just getting the second instrument to the place which you like. That’s another five listens you can think of it as. Then you send that song away to James Poyser and ask him to put keyboards on it. Then you get it back, and then you hear like four different keyboards. Then you’re listening to see which one fits the best. Just already right there, that’s like 15 listens, and that’s in the course of one song.
To answer your question, it takes many different listens, but the fun is capturing a moment that you feel may not happen again. Capturing a moment that feels like magic. You’re in pursuit of that. A lot of times, I’ll just set microphones up and just record for a long chunk of time, and then you go back and you listen to what are the best moments. Then you find those moments and edit those moments into what feels like one magic moment. That requires a lot of painstaking listening.
By the time you get to this stage, now I listen to other people’s music or try to create new music. Now I’m at the point where this music for the New Unknown, it’s now, but I’m trying to make room for what’s going to come next for me musically and creatively.
You were saying that you listen to other music. What new music have you been listening to? Is there anything recently that’s come out that’s inspired you in any way?
There’s a band called Wolf Alice, I really love them. There’s a band called Boogarins. They’re from Brazil, like a Brazilian psych band. I like them a lot. I like Steve Lacy. I think he’s really good, too.
I want to talk about your collaboration with Gibson and what that process was like. What were some of the more important elements that you would focus on when you were crafting your signature guitar with them?
I wanted to just make a guitar that was fun to play, that looked cool, and that just inspires me to play. A guitar that inspires you to pick it up and play it. A guitar that inspires you to just look at it in your hands and for it to feel good in your hands, and that sounds really good.
I did a signature guitar with Gibson back in 2013. It’s based on a Gibson SG, the old SG that I had from 1969. I just wanted to update the features and update the color of it. The more recent guitar I did with them last year, the signature guitar is basically an update of my original signature guitar. It has a global volume knob that allows you to have immediate control over different pickup combinations.
I also wanted an updated color. The SG is sort of like a vintage-styled instrument, and the new color modernizes it in a way. Gibson was very cool to allow me to go back and forth with prototypes until we got one that sounded really good.
Do you have a favorite guitar that you wish you still had, that might have gotten lost or damaged along the way in your career?
I used to have a Kramer Elliot Easton signature guitar that was actually stolen from me back in the ’90s in Penn Station. I’ve always wanted to try to find another Kramer Elliot Easton signature guitar again. I’m always on the lookout for Reverb, to see if one shows up at a good price. It was the ’90s. That was part of my initiation into being a New Yorker.
The role of guitar in hip-hop in general has skyrocketed. I think it’s more relevant than ever, especially in the modern day. Do you feel The Roots and yourself have had a role in popularizing guitar loops in hip-hop?
I think The Roots have brought to the landscape the idea that a band can really accurately replicate a lot of the samples that a lot of hip-hop has been based on. I think one of the best things or one of the strong points of The Roots, or one of The Roots’ strengths is the ability to accurately recreate samples, and sometimes even multiple samples at one time, in a live setting. The ability to recreate these in a live setting. I think there are some artists that would want a DJ to handle the sample, that aspect of it. I think The Roots can show you that it can be done organically and also give something that a sample doesn’t give you, which has the feeling and the power of a live band in front of you.
As far as the guitar itself, it’s like anything else that just serves the song in its entirety, whether that involves being louder in the mix or softer in the mix. I think as far as the guitar, it’s important to respect the space of the other musicians and to utilize your space. I think that ultimately lends to a more impactful result when all the musicians are conscious of space.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Brooklyn. I lived there till I was five, and then my family moved out to Long Island. From the age of five to 23, I lived on Long Island. It’s a common misconception that every member of The Roots is from Philadelphia. Every original member of The Roots is from Philadelphia, I believe. I joined in 2003, and very much a New Yorker at the time of joining the band. Ever since joining the band, I got to spend a great deal of time there. I guess you could consider me an honorary Philadelphian.
Whenever I go there, it’s always very inspiring, the art, the food, the Philadelphians, and the culture. I love the city. There’s definitely a feeling of– People were just unapologetically themselves. That’s my feeling from being in Philadelphia. I don’t know, there’s some sort of authenticity I feel from people, maybe more so than in New York. People seem to really say what they mean. When a Philadelphian audience is liking what you’re doing, it feels like you really earned it.
Knowing the musicians that come out of Philly, The Roots, Adam Blackstone, Hall & Oates, Bilal, Gamble, and Huff, it’s such a rich city. I’m honored to be in a band that has its home in Philly.
Was there an art scene in your hometown on Long Island? Was there anything that influenced you in terms of the culture around where you grew up?
Where I grew up in Long Island is suburbia. It’s like a White suburban environment, and I was one of the few Black kids in my school, so I was surrounded by a lot of rock. That definitely left an impression on me. It was also at the advent of when MTV was beginning to get popular and Yo MTV Raps was getting popular. Between my cousins, they would come and visit us in Long Island from Brooklyn and Queens, and when I would go– I would go to a camp in the summer, and there were a lot of kids from the city. It was the beginning of when hip-hop started to become a lot more mainstream.
I feel like my life always had that rock, hip-hop duality in it. Where I grew up in Long Island is one town over from where Biz Markie grew up. Biz Markie, before he passed, he’d speak a lot about how so much rock got– He sampled so much of that stuff, and that was very much geographical, based on growing up in Patchogue, where he’s from. Our surroundings are the things that can give us our uniqueness. My mom still lives on Long Island, the home I grew up in. I’m driving to Brooklyn from there right now as we speak. I make sure I go out there at least once a week to see her and to spend time in that place, that’s like my musical incubator. That’s why it felt good to make the album, New Unknown, in that place where I learned about music, and to keep that– While I feel like part of me has evolved very much since then, there’s always a part of me that wants to maintain the spirit that I always had throughout my life regarding music, and trying to maintain that level of excitement and curiosity.
Can you talk about those early days of your career? How did you get involved in Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber and other bands?
With Burnt Sugar, was one of many different bands I was playing with in Manhattan in the ’90s. At one point, I was playing with probably like 11 different bands at night, and during the day, I was a preschool teacher. Burnt Sugar, was led by the late musician, and music journalist, Greg Tate. It was led by him and he had a– There could be anywhere from 8 to 15 musicians up on stage with Burnt Sugar. He would lead us by conducting us, like how a conductor would conduct a stringed orchestra at a symphony.
Similar to that, he would use symbols to indicate when certain players were to come in when certain players were to come out, when someone is to solo when somebody is to repeat a phrase or hold a note. A lot of that was heavily improvised. That was part of my musical education. I’m playing in large bands like that, playing in small bands, playing with poets, playing with rappers, playing in straight-up rock bands, just different applications of what I did. I look at all of that stuff as my musical education that primed me for my meeting up with The Roots and what I brought to the table with them.
Collaboration seems like it’s always been a big part of your career. You touched on this before, but what are your keys to a productive collaboration, or how do you approach collaborations?
The first thing, just really listening to what the other parties are doing, and don’t play anything until I feel like– Emphasis on what I feel is only going to add to what’s going on. How can what’s going on be a more enjoyable musical experience for all parties involved? That’s what guides me in a collaborative situation. I love when somebody sends me a track that they want guitar on. I love the process of listening to that track and having the song become a part of me, and seeing what comes out naturally without being forced. See what comes out and what feels good. I love to think of what it is that I would play while I’m not holding a guitar, so I don’t go into muscle memory. It’s really, “What do my ears want to hear and what does my soul want to feel?” and let that determine whatever it is that I’m to offer. That’s generally my attitude– Whether I’m in a collaborative situation or whether I’m collaborating with an idea that I had a week ago, and adding to that, that’s the same approach that I have.
In improvisational situations, which doesn’t happen to me too often, so it’s really special when it happens in a live setting. That’s a different animal. You’re reacting from an audience, too, there’s the excitement and the adrenaline in that situation, in front of an audience live. It’s part of the fun of the creative process, the different ways in which to be creative, the different approaches. That’s part of the fun of being creative, essentially.
Having joined The Roots in 2003, do you still feel like the new guy when you’re working with them, or when you’re doing the late-night show, how has that relationship evolved over the years?
You feel like the new guy until there’s somebody that’s newer than you. I’d have to say I don’t feel like the new guy anymore. There are moments when I realize I’m not from Philly. I’ll always have that feeling of not being a true Philadelphian, but at the time I joined the band, they picked me. I volunteered to be there, but they kept asking me to come back. I don’t feel like the new guy anymore, but I definitely, at times, feel like the non-Philadelphian, especially when I’m not– I don’t drop everything to see an Eagles game. I don’t have deep emotional feelings and connections over one cheesesteak place over another cheesesteak place.
Is there one word that you could use, to sum up, the sound, or the process in general for New Unknown?
When I think of the album, I think of it as a journey. I feel like you start in one place and you end up in another place entirely. In between those places, you basically– The music is pretty much the soundtrack of my emotions over the past three years. It feels good to have music that’s there for posterity if somebody wants to know what I am all about. I think that the music on the record is pretty accurate and it’s a representation of what’s going on inside my heart and soul.
