IN DEPTH: Grieves

Grieves continues his rigorous touring in Europe with ‘The Secret Handshake Tour’ to celebrate his latest release ‘Collections of Mr. Nice Guy’. The Seattle-based artist will be co-touring with UKs Too Many T’s Europe wide where both artists will undoubtedly deliver some of the best shows hip hop has to offer. Grieves is signed to the internationally renowned Rhymesayers Entertainment and has toured with artists such as Atmosphere, Macklemore, Cunninlynguists, Watsky, Chris Webby, P.O.S and many more. He caught up with Jess ahead of tour to talk sacrifices, soul work and T-Pain when T-pain was T-pain.

‘It’s been a minute, now I’m back up on these beats/ tell your mum if I didn’t call her back she didn’t make the team.’ 

Mr. Nice Guy Tour

There were a couple of really great moments on tour, I got to go to some places that I hadn’t really been to. We sold out a city called Kelowna, that’s in Canada, we hadn’t been there before. 

We played a brand new venue in Denver which was absolutely amazing, the Mission Ballroom. I think around 5000 people can fit in there. It was an amazing night, me, Brother Ali & Atmosphere.

It was really good to see everybody as Colorado is a hometown for me so my Pops was there, loads of kids that I grew up in high school with, people that saw me when I was younger when I was like, ‘I’m gonna do this!’ and they were like okay whatever haha.

Soul Work

That’s what I went to school for, to be a kindergarten teacher. I was having disagreements with the whole public education thing, It seemed to me like there was very little going into it. They were just churning out people to become these teachers who once again, churn people out. I was testing really well and then I started asking a lot of questions which didn’t really go down very well. 

It’s not like we’ve all given up on our dreams. We’re still young people right, we’re here for a reason because something inspired us to be here, nobody just cops out to be a teacher. It doesn’t pay a lot of money, it’s not rewarding in any other way other than soul work and a lot of us were there to do soul work. 

I feel like the best way to teach a kid is showing that their ideas, their imagination and all that stuff matters. To teach them that there is like a hundred fucking ways to skin a cat; and you guys are only teaching 3? AND you’re making us choose 1 which we use to teach these kids, I just strongly disagree with that.

I found a school that did have a different approach and I worked there for a little bit then I went to music school instead because at the other end of it, it’s just more soul work. 

T-Pain when T-Pain was T-Pain

The T-Pain tour thing was interesting because it was with Gym Class Heroes. Travie McCoy is a friend of mine and he had really pushed that through. He said he really wanted me on it which was cool but I was also semi hesitant because it was T-Pain when T-Pain was T-Pain. 

It was at the beginning of my rise at Rhymesayers, forums were still a thing and people were very vocal on the internet. I hadn’t really experienced that before. 

I remember being like here’s the deal, I’m going on this tour and to the people who are mad about this, I’ve been looking at your locations, you are nowhere even near these shows so there’s no way you were gonna go see me anyways. If you don’t wanna see T-Pain and your bummed out, I got like a 20 person guest list each night so there’s nothing to bitch about. It’s like being mad at me for the kind of car I drive, you don’t get to decide how I get where I’m going.

At the same time they would say ‘oh those fucking T-Pain fans, they’re fucking idiots.’ It’s like, why are you smarter than they are? The towns we went to were super small mid-western college towns; these kids only know T-Pain because of the radio, they don’t have access to things like Rhymesayers, we haven’t reached them yet.

‘Yeah underground, keep it that way’ – No. None of us are actually trying to be your dirty little secret, we’re all trying to make a living out here. These kids have every right to find out about Rhymesayers just like you did. What if I do go to a T-Pain concert and I change someones whole entire view on hip hop?  

I was doing this when those kids were still playing with barbies. I don’t wanna have the discussion about what’s hip hop or not with a kid. I pay my dues in hip hop I don’t have to answer to anybody - my track record speaks for itself.

Sacrifice

Both Running Wild and Together Apart have both very opposite memories for me. Together Apart was my first record with Rhymesayers, It’s like the beginning of what we’re talking about right now. It built everything, it was my foundation. 

It was also a very wild, weird time of my life and not the greatest; although great things came from it. I was in transition everywhere I went, I toured a lot then because I felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere. 

Running Wild was the opposite of that. It was confident and collected in where I am and what I’m doing. Getting to enjoy the fruits of my labour, crossing an ocean to make music, taking risks and doing new things and not making this sad fucking music all the time. Knowing I get to have that for the rest of my life. 

I look back at the music on Together Apart and I feel how I felt. It’s like wow, I’m glad I don’t feel like that anymore. I would love to have the opposite reaction for Running Wild where I’m like fuck, I’m glad I felt that good and I wanna continue to feel this way. I’m just getting older life has gotten easier, I’ve figured a lot of shit out. I was still a young man and I didn’t understand it all but I knew I wanted it to happen. 

There’s a whole lot of sacrifice that went into my life to be able to do this, which is another reason why I’m not going to listen to people when they’re like ‘you need to do this’; I’ll do whatever the hell I want, you don’t have to tell me shit. 

December

It’s kind of a homage to how all the music that I make and all the stuff that I do comes out when I’m feeling something, most of the time on the more negative end of the scale.

I had people reaching out to me when we dropped Running Wild like ‘I liked you better when you were sad’. My response is always ‘well, I like myself a lot better when I’m happy.’ With the track December, it was kind of looking back at that process and at peoples reactions to a how I am still called to that kind of darker song.

‘Finding myself in the shitty maze that I’m lost in’ it’s like, look at all the stuff that has come out of being wildly confused and lost. That’s why I make my music and in some weird ways, how I define myself.

Let the Devil In 

The beat is tough right? I was working on the beat and Pants came in and flushed out some of the piano stuff. I ended up spending the night at the studio I owned in Seattle that night. Beats, vocals, everything I recorded it there and then, then I fell passed out on the couch in the studio. I woke up in the morning and Pants is like ‘oh shit, you’re still here!’

That beat is for someone like Vinnie Paz from Jedi Mind Tricks. I thought it called for something else, for shit like that but that’s not me. I thought no-one was going to sit there and hear that from me. I was trying to figure out a way to touch that aggressiveness with stuff that was still extremely poignant to me. How to do the song and still have it 100% authentic even though it’s a little out of my wheelhouse, but yeah I think it worked out! We’ve got a couple more like that. 

We’re dipping into our next full-length album and I’ve got another thing planned for March which we’ll be announcing soon. Then I’m fucking going dark and finishing this record, I have been touring my arse off.

Skate

I used to skate but my old man knees don’t really tolerate it. Not throwing myself down shit any more, it’s a vessel of point A to point B for me. The trick that I would always win a game of skate with was a switch heel flip 180 but other than that I was like kick flip heel flip 360 flip.

I was also a lot younger when I was doing that stuff. I was skating every day and I was living at the skate park, even then I wasn’t all that great.  I was snowboarding a lot when I was younger and I got really good at that, I thought that that was what I was going to do for a living. My knees would have never supported that career choice. 

Do you follow Steve Berra from The Berrics at all? His whole thing is skate boarding is fun and it is and it doesn’t matter if you’re a top pro skater or your you. If you send him a picture of you doing a varial flip or a pop shove-it he would probably fucking post it because If you’re having fun and inspired by skate boarding, that’s all that matters. That’s the same with music, the same with art, the same with any damn thing that you do, we just put all this goddamn pressure on it.

Interview by Jessica Daly