Small little things like that made it feel new and modern but still nostalgic. “Me and Your Mama” - the 808s in the beginning and the processing of the vocals. If you listen to “Stand Tall” for example, how it transition to that synth part at the end. It’s not fun if people listen to it and it’s like, “This sounds like someone could have made this 40 years ago.” Bringing in recording techniques and studio elements that didn’t exist back then, and bringing together a mix of genres that weren’t being combined back then. Something else that I was thinking about as a producer is how do we make funk music in a way that it couldn’t have been made in the ‘70s. Were you already familiar with their catalog going in? We were playing around with the riff for that song, changing the time signatures - the song starts in 4/4 and switches to 6/8 - and making it more unique.ĭonald Glover was very vocal about the Parliament-Funkadelic influence on the album. One of the song ideas that we felt was really special and that we always circled back to after listening back was “Me and Your Mama.” Prior to these jam sessions, Donald and I had been playing around with different riffs. We probably did 15 songs in the studio and a lot of it was really out there. We didn’t really know where it was going to go. We got our band together in the studio and spent the studio trying out different sound ideas and jamming. Before every show, we go out there at soundcheck and play with each other for two hours - just jamming. There’s been performances with big string sections and stuff like that so we’d been working a lot with musicians, even though our first two albums were more produced in the studio. So I think that’s always been the sound of our live shows. It is a departure but I would say if you’ve been to one of our live shows, we’ve always had a huge live band.

Awaken my love release