For over twenty years, the multi-hyphenate producer RJD2 has built a colorful catalog of releases. After his debut album, Deadringer, hit the shelves in 2002, the acclaimed producer has continued to evolve. Working with hip-hop legends like EL-P, Murs, and Tame One will do that to an artist: force them out of their comfort zone for the better. Not that the Columbus-based producer needed help in that area. From being exposed to a wide range of music at a young age to studying theory in high school, it is almost as if RJD2 had no choice but to become the diverse and dynamic artists we hear today.
After 22 years, RJD2 is still finding ways to shock and impress hip-hop heads. Such is the case for Visions Out Of Limelight, the artist’s latest LP. The LP is brimming with funky instrumentals that pull inspiration from 80’s cop dramas just as much as MF DOOM. This marriage of classic TV theme songs with RJ’s passion for reworking the limits of hip-hop produces some simply captivating musical moments. The droning and eerie keys on “Es El Nuevo Estilo” can be used as backing music in a horror show yet fit perfectly next to the booming jazz of the drums that are more akin to a Wu-Tang record than anything else. Therein lies the magic of this record. RJD2 didn’t simply pull from his TV influences and force it to fit into his old ways. He approached Visions Out Of Limelight with a refreshed vision of how he wanted his music to affect listeners. This considerate mindset opened up an entirely new sonic world for the super producer to play around with. He emerged with a fresh take on live instrumentation in hip-hop, making it sound grandiose in nature while, miraculously, keeping the listening experience quaint and personal.
By slightly adjusting his approach to instrumentals, RJD2 found an explosive sound designed to become a soundtrack for your life. Visions Out Of Limelight is a 13-song outing boasting hypnotic live instrumentation while intertwining it with alien-like melodies. Glide had the honor of speaking with RJD2 about this new approach, the process of making Visions Out Of Limelight, and starting his label, RJ’s Electrical Connection. You can read our full conversation below.
Visions Out Of Limelight is out tomorrow (July 14).
What were some of your earliest memories of music, and were you more drawn to the writing or producing aspects early on?
Writing for sure. My parents were professional dancers, but my mom loved The Beatles, and that was as conventional as it got. After that, it was mostly music that would be considered a part of the modern dance scene in the early 80s. I remember Kraftwerk; they had the Computer World album and Phillip Glass. There was some pop music, like Paul Simon and Tina Turner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Laurie Anderson, but her song “O Superman” was one of the more distinct memories of my youth in terms of music. I was exposed to avant-garde stuff fairly early on.
I had multiple musical interests early on. I spent a lot of time playing in bands in my teens. I guess, technically speaking, composing came first. It wasn’t until I specifically got into being responsible for the sound of recordings that I got into production more. By the time ‘96 and ‘97 had rolled around, I had just gotten my first sampler. I was enamored with why rap records sounded the way they did. They didn’t sound like performances. It didn’t sound like I was listening to anything that I recognized from playing in bands with a drummer and guitarist. It was infinitely intriguing to me, and it sent me down a rabbit hole of why the recording sounds the way it does. Which obviously puts you at the feet of music production.
So, that era of ‘96 and ‘97 is when you first started getting into Hip-hop?
No, like I said, I was into a lot of different music when I was a kid. My parents were dancers, and when breakdancing was a fad in the 80s, my dad got pretty into it. I remember he had a linoleum mat he would roll out in the backyard and practice breakdancing. The popular music that people would break to in the 80s, like Twilight 22, was also a part of what I heard around the house. My first recollection of rap was hearing the first UTFO in an alley behind my house. This would’ve been sometime in the mid-80s. The tape came out in 1984, so somewhere between ‘85 and ‘87. After that, it was Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, and Run DMC. Now, there’s a lot of talk about hip-hop culture and the five elements of hip-hop, but none of that stuff was on my radar back then. When I first started hearing rap music, it was just music. It was right next to Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode. When you’re at that age, you’re just taking in as much new music as you can. If you’re interested in music, everything is fair game. I was just taking in as much music as I could. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I had any inkling of the cultural connotation of rap music.
By ‘96 or ‘97, I had been a rap fan for close to ten years. I had already been DJing since I got my turntables in high school, and I graduated in ‘94. In the early 90s, I started going to shows and hip-hop battles; that’s what was happening locally. So, by the late 90s, I was just starting to hone in on producing and making beats.
You mentioned you were in bands. What sort of bands did you play in, and what was your role in them?
I played guitar. That was my first instrument. I played in hardcore bands; that was a thing in my generation. I played in bands that were on the fringe of the genre.—something between Metal and Fugazi, Bad Brains, and Minor Threat. If you could find a middle ground between those three bands and Metallica, that was sort of what I was doing. That was my very first experience actually making music.
When did you pick up the guitar?
It’s fuzzy. I think I was in the neighborhood between 10 and 13 when I got my first electric guitar.
A lot of your bios on streaming services label you as a “Philadelphia Artist.” Did you grow up in the area?
I’ve had a bit of a transient life. I was born in Oregon, but when I was four years old, my parents moved to Columbus, Ohio, where I am now. I was there until 2002; I actually lived in the Bay Area for a bit but moved to Philly in ‘02. In 2015, I moved back to Columbus.
What was that Columbus hip-hop scene like in the early ‘90s?
My recollection of the mid-90s was that everything was still New York-style rap. Anything that had any kind of regional aesthetics or creativity to it was, in my experience, seen as a lesser second cousin to New York. I think it’s safe to say that 100% of the people in the Columbus scene if you were to go back to the mid-90s, were all aiming for the upper echelon of New York Rap. Artists like Gang Starr, Pete Rock, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest; that’s what people were aiming for in Columbus, Ohio. To extrapolate outwards, it seems that every regional scene, at least in the Midwest, was also doing that.
The New Album, Visions Out Of Limelight, is inspired by old TV Theme songs. What are some of your favorites, and what do you find so enticing about them?
I look at stuff like Starsky and Hutch and Magnum P.I., anything from the ‘70s and into the ‘80s, and some ‘60s stuff; it was just what I was listening to. A big part of that was my son went through a phase where he was really into that kind of music, and I always liked that music. You have a different appreciation for it when you listen to it A LOT. You start to absorb aspects of the music that you might not be aware of. It was a blitzkrieg for me listening to this kind of music. A few things jumped out at me during this time. One was that these theme songs are 30 to 45 seconds long, so they’re not working on a verse-chorus structure. There isn’t even a chorus. The songs aren’t long enough to repeat anything. You’re not returning to anything in 30 seconds, so that was one thing that was really interesting to me. What directly impacted the making of the album was the instrumental theme songs.
They all had a few criteria to them. One is that it had to be almost immediately engaging. Almost none of those songs have a boring intro. Number two is that they’re built on a great harmonic idea almost all the time. The melodies of these are not just grooves in the sense that they are something that would appear on a James Brown record. They might have a great groove, but they’ve also got a really strong melody, something you can hum. That was a big takeaway for me. I was like, well, I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to make cool grooves, rhythmic pieces that feel great, and that comes out of making beats for hip-hop records. I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to do that while incorporating a strong melody from an instrument. That became a focus for me.
It’s embarrassing to say out loud, but honestly, it should be the basics of composition. When you look at Mozart or other classical composers, it would be completely unheard of for these guys to think about sitting down and writing a song where there was no melody. It would be front and center. It would be almost all of it. One of the beauties of hip-hop is that you can make a groove that’s so captivating and compelling that it can stand on its own. It can be a thing that could dominate your attention. I’ve been lulled in that for a lot of my life, but this was an opportunity to sit down and bring that melodic thing into it.
Was there a process of translating those 45-second theme songs into longer compositions?
It wasn’t that I sat down and tried to do that. I used them more as a mission statement and applied that to what I was doing. If the theme songs were a script, I would take something from that script and apply that to my tools like actors, sets, and lighting. It wasn’t so much that I was trying to mimic these theme songs. It opened a doorway in my mind on how to approach what I instinctively do in a different way. For me, previously, I would just assess something aesthetically. If it was a cool groove, and the drums, rhythms, and harmonics were great, that was what I was aiming for. With Visions Out Of Limelight, I was trying to do that, plus something that you could sing walking down the street. If you forget your phone at home and if you try to sing a lot of rap beats, it’s almost impossible. There isn’t a strong melodic element to them. You can walk down the street and sing “America The Beautiful” because it has such a strong melody, and I wanted to make that.
Does implementing those live instruments change the way you approach crafting an instrumental?
Full disclosure: I played all the instruments on the record and have worked like that since around 2007. For better or worse, the mission statement I gave myself after my first few records was to see how far I could get with my own resources. That transition phase is when my history of playing in bands with live instrumentation and my experience with guitar and hand drums prior to making hip-hop records became a benefit. I also went to a vocational music school for high school, so I have some foundation in music theory. When it came to a point when that would actually be a benefit, that’s when I dusted that knowledge off. My 2007 album, The Third Hand, is largely live. I was playing keyboard, bass guitar, and a little bit of drums at the time. I mostly used the MPC for drums and built live instrumentation on top. Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more into that.
With this record, I’m playing all of the drum parts myself. Loosely speaking, around 50 or 60 percent of the songs on Visions Out Of Limelight are my drumming.
Those moments on the album where you’re not playing drums, what do you look for when digging for a song to sample?
If I’m looking through records for sample material, I’m looking for something interesting that I can recontextualize. Particularly something I can take apart. I’m not interested in finding and using a loop anymore. I’ve learned enough techniques on a sampler at this point in my life that there are ways that I can disassemble something rhythmically, change the pitch, and shift things around. If just a basic passage has some intrigue there, I’m in. I don’t really need any rhythmic leadings. There are times when even the harmonic leadings, if it is something that’s in a major key, there are ways to take it apart and shoehorn it into a minor key environment. It’s something that’s interesting to me. It’s the same thing that I was looking for when I started digging for samples, something that piques your interest.
Collaboration is a big part of your musical DNA. Does collaboration change your creative approach, and how did you end up working with vocalists like Jamie Lidell and Jordan Brown for this LP?
It changes the working dynamic when you bring a singer into the mix in obvious ways. You’re no longer the only person influencing the direction of the song, and that cuts both ways. For the most part, it’s a benefit. You’re relinquishing a little bit of control, but you’re gaining the unpredictability that comes with working with someone else and tapping into their ideas. Both Lidell and Brown are lightyears beyond me when it comes to singing. They’re great singers and writers, so being able to have them throw things back to me that were unexpected, like trading demos, there are things that I didn’t see coming. That’s enormously exciting.
When you’re putting together the songs with vocals on them, do you make the instrumental with the intention of someone singing on it?
I rarely work with any intention before a song. I’ve come to terms with the idea that, for me, I don’t know if it’s the truest way to make a record. Songs end up having a contrived nature when I sit down and say, “I want to make a thing.” I’m not saying I haven’t done it. When you’re finishing an album, there are times when you start to see an image of what an album can be. You really do get specific about how you want to fill in those holes. Initially, to me, the creative process is at its most pure when there are no expectations of what a song is going to be. You’re literally just fumbling around in the dark, waiting for something cool to come about. That, to me, is when I come up with the most interesting stuff and probably the best.
You’ve been releasing music for over twenty years now. How do you feel you’ve evolved since your debut?
If there is something I’m the most proud of, it’s being able to comfortably play drums on a record—and, as of late, play drums for a crowd. For the last couple of years, and my last album, I would play drums live for songs that I played in the recordings. That was really the toughest nut to crack for me. Like I said, I went to a vocational high school, and part of that was they would force you to sit down at a keyboard and display some understanding of music theory. That was the tool you used to learn theory. I came into my career having some familiarity playing keys, guitar, and to a lesser extent, bass because I’ve done that in the past. I had no experience playing a trap drum kit when I started making hip-hop. It was also the thing that was probably the most captivating about starting to make beats. You’re able to make drum tracks that don’t sound anything like traditional drum sessions would sound like. If you were to go into a studio and say, “I want to record some drums,” even if you’re a great, confident drummer, regardless of the actual performance, what you’re going to hear is going to sound something closer to what you would hear on a Liz Phair or a Sheryl Crow record. It’s hard to overstate how hard it is.
When you listen to something the Daptone records, It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to make drums sound like that. It’s really fucking hard. Playing drums is probably my biggest creative undertaking of the last 15 years of my creative life, getting to a place where I can both confidently play a part and also do the engineering, tuning, and mic placement. All of that works together like soup. Every ingredient has a role, and they all work together to get to that place where the drums sound the way they sound on my records now.
What inspired the name and artwork for Visions Out of Limelight?
The title came to me when I was kicking around ideas. I’ll usually have a bunch of song titles as notes on my phone. Oftentimes, I’ll kick them around and ask friends what they think. I’ll poll people on what they think about the titles and such. I’ve increasingly been more comfortable as a bit of a recluse. One of the hard things to navigate when you start making music, especially for people like me, is you might’ve signed up to make recordings and be a professional musician, but being treated and experiencing anything close to low-grade D-list celebrity can be uncomfortable for people like myself. I read once that DJ Shadow chose his name because he was more comfortable in the shadows. He didn’t want to be a rapper or be in the front of the stage; he wanted to be in the back orchestrating. I think a lot of people who do what I do feel similarly.
In terms of the cover, and I’m probably going to sound nonsensical, but ever since I was a kid, I’ve been curious about what it’s like to be buried up to your neck. You see people on the beach, and I’ve always been the kind of person to see people buried under the sand and wonder what that was like. There’s also Funkadelic Maggot Brain, which is one of my favorite albums. I was running back Redman’s back catalog during the Pandemic and looking at the cover of Dare Iz A Darkside, which is his take on the Funkadelic cover. I like to locate albums in my mind chronologically, so give or take; Redman did his cover 25 years after Maggot Brain. Now, 25 years after Redman came out, and being a fan of both artists, I wanted to treat this as a lineage, and I’m just the next link in the chain. Hopefully, 25 years after me, someone will do their own take on the cover.
Visions Out Of Limelight is coming out on your own label, RJ’s Electrical Connections. How did the label come to be, and did moving to your own entity open up any new freedoms?
I started the label in 2009. When you’re on a label, the most uncomfortable part is when you’ve finished an album and submitted it to the label for approval. It sucks because you’re already in a mind state of wondering if the album is good, but the label isn’t answering the question of “Is this good music.” They’re wondering if they can market, promote, and sell the album effectively. It’s equally challenging from the artist’s perspective. I was very happy to go out on my own when I started the label and not have to get permission or approval from a label. It can really suck when you submit an album, and the label says they like these songs but not these ones. It’s really hard being an artist on a label and staying true to your own vision. It allowed me to put out the music that I wanted. There was a sacrifice in terms of visibility and having a machine behind you. It’s 15 years later, and I’ve made it work. A guy like me is not in the upper echelon of any scene, and all the financial resources that come with that, and that’s totally fine. I didn’t show up to achieve financial success or celebrity. The older I get, the more important it is for me to leave the legacy I want. I want to leave a legacy of music that is exactly what I want to make.
I know what it’s like to be an artist in the artist-label dynamic. I don’t want to subject someone else to that. At the risk of making a statement that sounds grandiose, to me, this is the natural paradigm of what releasing music should look like. If we’re at a place where, economically, anyone can afford to make their own recordings from their home, I see no moral reason why someone else should own the master of those recordings. To get from there to releasing the album, it is only getting easier in terms of resources becoming available. Every year, more and more artists are learning how to press their own vinyl or put their stuff on Bandcamp. If you were trying to remake the music industry in its most moral incarnation, this is what it would look like.
Some of your older albums that were released on different labels now say they’re on your label. Did you have to fight or buy those masters back from your old labels?
Those first three albums I made were actually licensing deals, so I was rightfully going to get those masters back. The only album I don’t have is The Third Hand, which was put out on Beggars/XL Recordings. I would like to have it, but it’s not a huge deal for me. I could negotiate something potentially, but those early albums were naturally coming back to me anyway. When it came time for me to start a label, those negotiations weren’t fraught.
Are you pressing up physical copies of Visions Out of Limelight?
They’re already up for pre-order! The first shipments are about to go out, actually. They’re pressed up and available on my Bandcamp. I have a distribution deal as well, so it’ll be in local record stores and Amazon. For the orders that go through Amazon, I’m not packaging those. If you order from my Bandcamp, I’m shipping and packaging those myself. I don’t do this often; it’s a lot of work. When I look at the most sustainable way to be an artist, it does look something similar to this. While it’s hard work, I like having that tactile connection to how I started doing this. Do I want to spend eight hours packing up vinyl? Not necessarily. I also don’t want to be in a position where I’m so removed from it. A lot of artists like myself started by selling physical copies hand-to-hand. I used to sell cassette tapes on consignment to record shops. They’re taking five or six mixtapes. You go back after three weeks and collect your little $27 or whatever it is, and there is something about it that sounds quaint now, but it is real. There is a part of the modern streaming economy that feels imaginary and detached from anything real. I probably sound like a Luddite, but I’m loving the hand-to-hand economy. I love going to garage sales and flea markets and seeing hand-to-hand commerce grinding it out via cash. There is something enjoyable about it to me.
Are you planning a tour or any shows for this new album?
I wouldn’t call it a tour, but I’m doing shows. I’m doing New York first, and then I have a hometown show in Columbus. Next month, I’m doing some West Coast dates. I’m kind of constantly doing shows.
What do you hope people take away from Visions Out of Limelight? Is there a sense of relief when you finish a record, or are you immediately on to the next project?
I don’t have any specific hope for what people get out of the record. For me, the beauty of making music is that you show up, you make what you want to make, and after that, it’s no longer yours. What you take from it is what you take from it. All I hope is that they enjoy it. As for what’s next for me, I spent a lot of my life going from record to record, trying to be as prolific as possible. The last couple of years, and this might sound strange, but you hit an age where you realize there’s a finite amount of time to do this. There’s a part of me that’s just trying to be in the moment and enjoy it while it lasts. The day of release is usually the most satisfying.
