The Roots are a Grammy award winning hip-hop band that’s kept percussion and the elements of a solidified band in hip-hop for the past 20 years.
Today, The Roots drop their 13th studio album entitled Undun. Undun tells the stories of a fictional character that’s very theatrical and cinematic.
EXCLUSIVE: Black Thought On Michele Bachmann
GlobalGrind caught up with lead vocalist Black Thought to chit-chat about The Root’s latest work of art.
Check out the exclusive interview below!
GlobalGrind: The Roots new album Undun coming out tomorrow. How amped are you about that?
Black Thought: I’m pretty amped. I don’t know how amp-able I am…at this point…
In the game?
Yeah. But I am really proud of the work and I am satisfied with the way the effort came to fruition, so I am excited to see how it’s going to be received.
The album is based off of a fictional character or a semi-fictional character. How did that idea come about?
Rich Nichols is the Executive Producer, he manages The Roots and he saw this next record as something that was one unified thought, generally speaking. He came up with the concept that the record should be something that was dense, that told a story that focused on one main character, very much in a theatrical, cinematic, screenplay kind of way. And that should be short enough that can be taken in on one sitting so to speak. It’s a short record that you can listen to on the train, on your way to work or during your drive to get your kids to school or whatever. It’s about 30 minutes or so long, but it’s emotionally and sonically very deep.
It was his idea and we just expanded on it. Dice Raw who A&Red the project and who is my writing partner, worked in the capacity that he normally works in. The only difference in the way Dice worked on this record is where he would normally write choruses or come up with the chorus idea and then we would reach out to other vocalists to perform what it was that Dice had written, we left Dice as the person doing the chorus on quite a few of these records. That’s a difference. But the idea was there was more Rich Nichols than Questlove and myself and we brought what is that we do to the table.
The album features Big K.R.I.T. on there.
K.R.I.T. is the newest relationship who appears on the record, everyone else is a part of the normal Roots team. But, K.R.I.T we met when we were doing the Hennessy event. I forget the name of it, but we did a tour for Hennessy and K.R.I.T. was one of the artists that came out and rocked with us. I think it was either Chicago or Detroit that he came out. But we found out that we were label mates and he was a big fan. We decided that we might want to work together on the next record. I feel like he did a really decent job and we might work together again in the future.
