Catching Up with Astronautalis

If you read my column this week, you know how I feel about Andy Bothwell, A.K.A. Astronautalis, so I'll keep this short and sweet. He's the man, he'll be in Boston at O'Brien's Pub on Sunday, and his new record This Is Our Science is about to top many an end of the year list and (hopefully) propel him to indie hip-hop stardom. Buy the record, go to the show and get onboard with Mr. Bothwell. Thanks to Andy for taking the time to chat with the Clock, and a big thanks to his excellent management team for setting this up. Great dude. Great interview.

BK: Congratulations on the new record, first of all.

AB:Thanks man.

The title has been driving me nuts, what does that mean?

It's sort of about comparing the process of scientific development and discovery, with the process of creative development and discovery and self development and discovery and sort of how all these lines start to blur, kind of, the deeper you get into this thing. When I first started out touring and chasing this sort of silly dream job, it's kind of silly and ephemeral and as you get deeper and deeper and deeper it becomes more calculated, it becomes more controlled and you become more focused and you start to get more serious about things. I've seen, you know, not just in myself but in a lot of friends who are touring musicians and self employed artists and screen printers who are just kind of living outside of a normal business structure and life structure, it just becomes kind of this continual self discovery. There's no set path. So, it's sort of like how a scientist works where they figure something out and they go "OK, where are we gonna go next with this knowledge?" and you take a step and you land on a lily pad, and all of a sudden you have to take this big leap of faith. So it started to really feel like, this my science, this is our science, this is the science of my friends, this is the science of the people around me who are not living regular, normal, run of the mill lives.

Do you feel like that's a pretty good synopsis of the lyrical content too?

Certainly, the main focus. I mean, the title is kind of a thesis for the record.

You're  a little hard to follow sometimes, you're pretty verbose.

Haha, yeah.

Are you a big reader?

Yeah, I come in waves, just like anybody. I'll, like, plow through twenty books in 2 months and then stop dead and play video games for 2 months. Generally, I become topic obsessed or author obsessed. When it's non-fiction I become topic obsessed, and when it's fiction I become author obsessed. I'll just read everything by 1 author and reread it and obsess over it and take notes on it. So it comes in huge bursts for me.

I remember reading that the Four Fists stuff with P.O.S. is based on Fitzgerald.

Yeah, it's this idea that, sort of blossomed with Stef (P.O.S.'s name is Stefan Alexander – Ed.) and Fitzgerald's short stories. Especially Fitzgerald's take on this sort of gilded age of America just before its' imminent collapse, and seeing the collapse before it happened. It's really an easy parallel between what's going on in America today and the sort of collapse that we're seeing right now where we have this incredible, gilded software age and then this huge decline. It's like how everything was going after WWI, before the complete and utter collapse of the Great Depression.

What's the status on that project, is that going to see the light of day?

Yeah, totally. We just work on it when we have time. We don't rush it, and it's not a priority. We worked on it some more and got it like 70% done and close to finishing it and then we both had to start on our own records. Stef is wrapping up his record now, right in time for winter to drop seventy tons of snow on us in Minneapolis, so we'll have nothing but time on our hands to finish this record in the next 5 months or so.

Are you going to be on his next record?

Kind of the same way he's on my record. I do a lot of backing vocals and I wrote a chorus for one thing. I mean, who knows if it'll even end up on the record or not.

You guys play off each other so well.

Yeah, we work really well together. We bounce ideas off each other really well. I'm really excited for that record to come out, because it's a cool process for us.

I saw you guys do "Handmade Handgun" together in Burlington, Vermont. It was unreal.

That's awesome man.

This is a question I like to ask, I always get a really cool answer out of this. What is a record that you were really into when you were growing up that your fans might not expect you to have liked?

Wow, um, the record, and the band, that I think would really surprise people is Blur.

Really?

Yeah, I really like Blur. Especially like 8^th grade, 9^th grade, 10^th grade. All while I was loving and falling in love with rap music, before all that, Blur's Parklife was my favorite record in 8^th grade. It's a really weird record, because it starts off with "Girls & Boys," which is this dance song, and it has all these weird sort of spoken word parts and waltz parts. It's a very strange record. I didn't really realize how weird it was until I started going back and listening to it years and years later with a new perspective but while I was loving fucking super crazy, violent New York gangsta rap I was still listening to Blur all the time and wearing like, winter camo pants with my Blur Parklife t-shirt. It was such a weird place I grew up in. So yeah, I think Blur's Parklife would be the one that was this huge obsession for me in 8^th 9^th and 10^th grade.