Soul music is at an incredibly exciting point in its history, and Aaron Frazer is a big reason for that. The multi-hyphenate artist has spent years learning how to perfect that nostalgic, sinfully sweet sound the genre is known for, only to create his latest project, Into The Blue, which breaks all of the rules. The sprawling and experimental effort has Frazer blending his passion for Hip-hop with his natural knack for crafting infectious melodies that harken back to his heroes while keeping Frazer planted firmly in the present with a Vulture-like gaze on the future. An album like Into The Blue, with its sentimental songwriting, somewhere in between overthinking past trauma yet accepting those emotions’ role in your new life, does not happen without risks. At the time of recording Into The Blue, just about everything in his life had gone through a dramatic shift. He was in a new city all on his own, and the colossal sonic shifts throughout the record represent this tumultuous time in the artist’s life. Frazer did what any great artist would do in times of struggle: Set that struggle to a melody. The results are awe-inspiring as Into The Blue cements Frazer as one of the most forward-thinking artists the soul genre has seen in quite some time.
Outside of his solo catalog, which includes his Dan Auerbach-produced debut, Frazer cut his teeth with his band The Indications, which is helping create equally innovative sounds with Durand Jones. If Frazer knows anything, it’s soul music and, more importantly, how to manipulate it into something completely new. He takes from his past recording experience but doesn’t see it as a blueprint. Allowing for the creative freedom that drives his records.
Glide had the pleasure of catching up with Aaron Frazer a few days after Into The Blue hit the streets. He talked in detail about the emotional journey it took to create his latest work, the current state of soul music, and how Hip-hop found its way into his life and music. You can read Glide’s full conversation with the refreshing artist below.
What were some of your earliest memories with music? When did playing and songwriting come into the picture?
I have a really early memory of dancing in the living room with my mom to “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. There was a turntable in that room, and my parents used to put on records a decent amount. My Mom used to play Carole King’s Tapestry a lot, which is still one of my favorite records. My dad would drive me to school and play The Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Doobie Brothers, and Eagles and stuff like that. He would quiz me on stuff. He would give me these facts and ask me about them. He’d ask me things like, “Where did the name Three Dog Night Come From?” He had told me on a drive to school a month ago, and I would try to remember. Neither of my parents are musicians, but they’re great music listeners, which I think is a gift to be able to listen deeply and passionately to music.
Drumming started when I was 9. I would drum on the car door a lot. The door on a car makes a great kick drum sound. It’s very dead and thumpy. I think my mom saw an intuitive connection to rhythm and asked if I wanted to learn how to play the drums. You don’t have to be a parent to know that to offer your kid to play the loudest instrument is coming from a place of love.
What was the first album you remember buying on your own? What drew you to that album?
The first CD that I ever owned was Big Willie Style by Will Smith. I don’t remember buying or asking for it. I really don’t remember how it came into my possession. The first one that I remember buying where it was my choice, and I was in the record store, and I was maybe 12. We were at Virgin Records in New York. We didn’t take many trips growing up, but we did take one weekend in New York City with my brother and whole family. We went to Virgin Records, and I picked out Curtis Mayfield’s self-titled CD. I don’t think I ever heard Curtis before that, but it was something about the album cover that looked really cool. He’s in this yellow suit, and it’s shot from a low angle, so he just looks like a giant. That CD really changed my life. From a songwriting perspective, he has beautiful love songs and political songs. The arrangements are incredibly beautiful, and his singing, obviously. I heard Smokey Robinson growing up or baby Michael [Jackson] singing in a high voice, but Curtis was my true conscious introduction to falsetto. It changed the course of my life.
You mentioned Will Smith, and I know hip-hop greatly influences you. Who are some of your favorite rappers, and what made you gravitate to that genre?
I don’t know what made me gravitate toward it, honestly. It’s probably because Hip-hop is so drum-heavy. I also loved jazz, so as a kid, I loved songs with jazz samples in them. “The World Is Yours” by Nas is an Ahmad Jamal sample, like three and a half minutes into his song “I Love Music” but it’s this four-bar phrase that comes and goes. I love the samples, and I love the drums. Nas’s Illmatic and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt are huge influences for me. Black Moon’s Enter Da Stage is a really underrated East Coast record. It got eclipsed because I believe it was released in ‘93, and then in ‘94 was Illmatic, and ‘96 was Reasonable Doubt. It got lost in the shuffle of these huge East Coast releases. The song “Keep It Real” by Milkbone, who was this goofy white rapper from the Jersey Projects. He wasn’t a great rapper, but that is an all-time instrumental. It’s the instrumental that Big L uses on one of his legendary radio freestyles.
The Roots’ Do You Want More changed my life. The first album I heard from The Roots was Tipping Point, released in 2004. Those albums were so cool because they felt like me. I play the drums and love live instruments, and here is a full band doing Hip-hop. That changed my life. I love the genre so much. Asheru is this rapper that most people know as the guy who did The Boondocks theme song. He is a D.C. rapper, and he has a few albums, one called 12 Months and one called Soon Come, that were really influential to me in high school. I love the genre; it’s actually a really great time for Hip-hop.
Do you remember your first concert, and what are some of your favorite performances you’ve seen? Do you think they had any influence on your stage presence now?
The first concert I went to that wasn’t just my parents taking me was The Roots, actually. It was The Roots with Gym Class Heroes opening, and Estelle was the first performer to go up that night. Estelle had a hit in the mid-aughts with “American Boy,” but no one really knew her other material. She was first, and then it was Gym Class Heroes doing this sort of alt/rap/rock thing, which makes sense as to why they would open for The Roots. Then, I watched The Roots, and it was amazing.
In terms of my favorite concert, in 2012, I saw Crosby, Stills, & Nash open up for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. They both crushed it. Their voices were all in great shape, and harmonies were locked. Crosby, Stills, & Nash played “I Almost Cut My Hair,” which I love. David Crosby takes this ripping guitar god solo, and this huge gust of wind comes and blows his old man wizard hair back in the wind. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
Into The Blue is finally out. How are you feeling, and is there a sense of relief when you finish when you finish a project?
It’s a big mix of emotions. There is definitely some relief and excitement. This one was cool because I had a release show on release day, which I haven’t done since I was 19 or 20. It’s exciting to have this big event on release day. It feels like you think you’ve climbed to the top of a mountain, but you really just climbed to the base of a bigger mountain, which is going out and actually promoting the record. It’s just the start of the campaign, even though you’ve worked on it, in my case, for a year and a half. There were a lot of emotions, but all good ones.
Do you have to compartmentalize all of your other projects when starting the work on a solo record, or are you working on everything at once?
I’ve done it both ways now. For my debut record with Dan Auerbach, I was also working on The Indications’ third record, but I guess that one was also compartmentalized because with Dan, we started from scratch. Everything we wrote, we wrote together. That album was written in a week. For Into The Blue, there were some writing sessions for The Indications while I was working on my solo record, but I was mostly focusing on my solo stuff. The album came out on June 28, and on July 2, I flew to North Carolina to start recording The Indications’ fourth record.
Collaboration is a big part of your work ethic. Does your relationship with collaboration change when you’re working on your solo material?
I really do love collaboration. The big difference is, with the band, it’s collaboration but you’re working with the same collaborators generally. It’s easy to have too many cooks in the kitchen. In my band, everyone is amazing songwriters and producers, so I don’t want to bring too many other people into the Indications. With the solo stuff, I’m collaborating with all kinds of different people, and I have a different flexibility in a way to tailor my collaborations from song to song. There are songs on the record that I co-wrote with Lydia Kitto and Josh Lloyd-Watson from Jungle, and those are a really specific flavor. I could be working on Northern Soul tracks and go, “I know Nick Waterhouse could crush this with me.” I could be working on one that’s more Latin or Tropicállia, so I’ll bring in artists from Chile. I have a lot of flexibility with collabs on the solo stuff.
Was there anything you learned from making your debut album that made you change your approach to Into The Blue?
What’s cool about working with Dan Auerbach is that he has all the resources to make a record with a billion tracks, overdub everything, and make it all perfect, but he doesn’t do that with Easy Eye Sound. There is a philosophy at the label about embracing imperfection and accessing intuition. Dan helps artists access intuition by keeping the writing period very short so you don’t overthink it. I’ve been a session musician, and I drummed on my own record, but Dan brought me back down to drum on Yola’s Stand For Myself record. When you’re a session musician at Easy Eye Sound, you don’t get to hear the records ahead of time. You go into the studio, and they play the demo while somebody writes down the chord changes as they hear them. They print out the chart, and you look at it while listening to the demo one more time, and you’re expected to get it within three takes. A lot of the time, he’ll use the first take because there is this spark of intuition. It’s a permission structure to use the thing that’s not perfect, and I think that’s very freeing. Especially because all musicians make demos that have the magic, then all of a sudden, you do the full-out production, and sometimes you lose that thing in the process.
On Into The Blue, there are times when I get super into the weeds, and it’s an extreme level of production and arrangement, like on “I Don’t Wanna Stay,” where I’m creating this transition between dubbed-out basement soul that transitions into this psychedelic operatic, orchestral section then it goes back and forth. That takes so much work. Then, I have a song like “The Fool,” which is the last song on my record, in which the drums, bass, and guitar are all one iPhone voice memo. Then I tracked on top of it because I thought it had magic. We tried tracking a new version of it, and it was cool, but it sounded amateur. There is a subgenre of jazz records that people collect from high school bands. It could be the Broward County High School Jazz Band 1975, and it sounds like amateurs, but there is something thrilling about it. That is what that iPhone voice memo gave us the vibe of, so we just used it. I’ve made three records with The Indications and two by myself, and I’ve learned the rules and how to break them. I think that’s a powerful thing.
Into The Blue is far more experimental than your debut record. Did this sonic direction come naturally, or was it a conscious attempt to step outside of the box?
Yes, I wanted to! This chapter of the soul revival has been going on longer than the years it’s referencing. That’s weird. It becomes cyclic. It’s the snake devouring its own tail. There are a ton of sweet soul records out right now, and new bands are popping up every day that are making really cool, sweet soul music. It also started to feel the same to me. We are maybe approaching some sort of saturation point where there are three or four producers around the country who specialize in retro soul, and all these bands come to them. The bands come out the other side and oftentimes sound very similar. They all sound unbelievable; they’re amazing. I wanted to do something for the sake of trying. Step out and make a sound that is distinct.
I think philosophically, I’m doing what my heroes did, which is not making the same record over and over again. None of those bands I mentioned really made the exact same record throughout their entire career. Sometimes, it wasn’t for the best. I love taking the bands from the East Side Story compilations and tracing their discography through the decades and seeing how it changed every five years. Again, sometimes it’s weird, but then you have Barba Mason doing electro-funk in the eighties, B-Boy chest-rattling 808s stuff. It’s so sick. Gil Scott-Heron in the eighties was super cool, and Curtis Mayfield in the 90s was doing interesting things. Gil Scott-Heron did a record with Jamie XX in 2010 that I think was thrilling to hear. We have to keep moving. We have to keep pushing and evolving this genre, or it will kind of collapse on itself.
What was it like sequencing a tracklist with this many sonic changes? How important is sequencing to you?
Sequencing is crucial. If you eat a meal but the flavors are in the wrong order, they’re not going to work. Even if they’re complementary and fit together, if you arrange those flavors incorrectly, whoever is eating it is going to be like, “What the hell am I eating?” I think music is a lot like that, especially on a record like this, where the common thread is music that I love. The common thread is my record collection. With the sequencing, we put a lot of time into making sure that you’re on a journey but not experiencing too much whiplash. I think we achieved that, and I think there is a flow to it. I wanted certain moments of surprise. The record opens with “Thinking of You,” which is sweet soul. It’s kind of what people know me for, even though the way I’m sequencing the string loop, I wanted it to feel a little more Hip-hop. That’s like the cold opening to the movie where “Into The Blue” is the title sequence. Which has this spaghetti western thing, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s different.” Then you hit “Fly Away,” which is a 90’s R&B joint. I wanted you, as the listener, to say, “Okay, I have no idea what the rest of this record is going to sound like,” which is fun. I want people to be excited after every track. It’s like a scratch-off ticket; you don’t know what’s coming next. It’s thrilling.
Can you tell me how you came up with the title, Into The Blue? On the song, it sounds like you paint it as a place or emotion you can revisit and escape to.
It’s kind of like you’re in the emotional wilderness. I was working with Jungle in their Airbnb in Los Angeles, and this was our second writing session together. The first session was when we wrote “I Don’t Wanna Stay.” We came back, and I was going through a break-up at the time. I had just moved to LA without my partner, and we had planned to move there together. It was pretty early on in my stay, and I was distraught, sad, and lonely in a new place. The Indications were taking a year break, and I read something one time about the most stressful events in people’s lives, which are moving to a new city, a change in relationship status, and the loss of a job. Obviously, The Indications were still together, but we were taking a break. So, I was in a new city, just broken up, and I was feeling very sad. I went to Jungle’s house, and I couldn’t get myself to write. We all decided just to chill and listen to some records, and we all shared a love for these ghostly vocals. Artists like The Ink Spots are super ghostly, and Ennio Morricone’s stuff has these operatic vocals. We were really getting into the Western stuff, and I was like, “I want to write some stuff like that.”
Even though I was sad, I felt inspired. I still hopped on the drums, and we started with just a melody. Rather than just keep it as a wordless melody, Goose was the one who heard the demo and said, “It sounds like you’re saying ‘blue.’” It just became this thing, especially with the Western feeling; it felt like you were heading into the desert or the ocean, and you were setting off with nothing around you but the horizon. It’s a lonely place to be, but like with the cowboys, it represents infinite possibilities.
It feels like the idea of escapism was a motif in all the visuals for Into The Blue. Considering everything going on in your life at the time, was escapism something you had on your mind?
If it were a movie, I would be cutting back and forth between riding through this giant desert and flashing back to remembering certain times in past relationships. “Thinking of You” is the cold opening, and I’m still in New York, running into my ex-girlfriend’s friends on the train and still thinking of this person. It’s me realizing there was nothing left for me in this town, slamming the car door with all my bags, and driving off west. On the long drive west, I guess I am kind of escaping into my mind a little bit, but just to reflect on the course of the relationship. This is an emotional processing record for me. When I started writing the sad songs, I was able to go back and write ones that celebrated the good times in the relationship. By doing that, by the end of the record, I’m able to get back out there and date again. It’s a lot of reflection.
In terms of artwork, that’s me standing in the Pacific Ocean for the first time. There’s an alternate back cover to Into The Blue. I took the same photo but in the Atlantic Ocean when it was cold as hell. I was super bundled up in boots, a big coat, and a scarf, and I looked very cold standing on the Atlantic. I wound up just using the Pacific Ocean photo. To me, it represents a new beginning. Even though you don’t see the Atlantic Ocean photo, it’s me shredding some layers and being able to stand in this expansive place like the ocean. I think it captures the sprawl of this record.
Going back to the release show for Into The Blue, did you perform the whole record there?
I did a mix. Maybe a little more than a third of the set was the new record. When the record comes out at midnight the night before, then you’re playing the following night. I wasn’t sure how many people would get the chance to hear the record. It was actually amazing how many people came, and I asked the crowd, “How many of you have heard the new record,” it was amazing how many people were saying they had. I have so much fun performing these new songs. “Payback” is so much fun to do live. It’s Northern Soul mixed with garage rock, so it’s super high energy. “Easy To Love” is also super fun because it just feels so good, like disco. “Fly Away” is really cool to do live. We have a really fun horn arrangement that’s not on the record.
I love playing live because it gives these songs the chance to have a little bit of evolution. A year after the album comes out, that’s when I feel the songs are actually finished. You find these little moments live when they’re in front of an audience and actually tested. I’m excited, in a year’s time, to look back and see how these songs are performed and how they change and grow.
