Photo by Vash Noir
Ross Olson is exploring the Grey Theory.
Less than five minutes into our Zoom conversation, Chester Watson brings up an intricate-sounding term in psychology that I had never heard before: induced autosuggestion. The niche phrase comes from one of Watson’s favorite books, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today by William Seabrook, the American travel writer and occultist whose work helped popularize the concept of zombies in the West.
Seabrook’s theory, presented in the context of witchcraft and black magic, refers to the debilitating psychological effects behind verbal judgment and its subsequent repetition. For instance, if outsiders never miss a chance to call you awkward for stumbling over a table that one time, the characterization bakes itself into your psyche and is treated as fact, presenting itself as a crippling anxiety.
On his latest LP for POW Recordings, fish don’t climb trees, Watson distills the essence of Seabrook’s deductions to deliver some of the most self-assured raps of his career. Over the course of 11 mostly self-produced tracks, Watson raps with his usual meditative ease, all while embracing the human imperfections we often view as fatal. “I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record,” Watson says. “I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through.”
On Fish, the only voice that cuts through is Watson’s own. He channels his ancestors when he sits down to write, who in turn help guide his pen and steer his artistic instincts. In the physical sense, Watson turns to his father, an accomplished keyboard player who’s toured with funk bands and produced with Three 6 Mafia. The older Watson even helped clear a sample for his son on the title track and contributed to the overall engineering of the record.
Following A Japanese Horror Film and 1997, Watson’s imaginative world-building is once again a core strength. Instead of haunted forests or turbulent clouds however, Fish captures the depths of the ocean through surreal mermaid visuals, drowned out vocal chops, and keys that blink in the distance like a lighthouse tower. Coincidentally, the album arrives not long after the missing submersible was confirmed to have imploded following its vanity excursion to the Titanic, and several of the beats sound like they could have been ringing in the fabled ship’s ghostly ruins. “Spirits” conjures images of an underwater séance, where Watson summons apparitions through a chilling keyboard loop and subdued percussion. Watson breaks from his natural humility on “Tourniquet,” where exotic spliffs threaten the room’s air quality.
Watson’s career arc has loosely resembled that of Earl Sweatshirt, one of his early inspirations and now contemporaries in the indie rap landscape. Both achieved internet notoriety before they were old enough to drink, and in response sought the privacy and solitude of isolation. The video for “Phantom” turned 10 this year, and still stands as a dazzling entry into an underground scene he would consistently push forward in the years since. Expectations did little to weigh down Watson, whose thematic tones shift with each release, but never at the expense of the musical craftsmanship.
I caught up with Chester to talk about his new album, working on music with his father, reflecting on “Phantom” 10 years later, his potential foray into acting, and more.
How did the inspiration first come about for fish don’t climb trees?
Chester Watson: The fish theme is like, as a pisces, it’s kinda woven through a lot of my work. I feel like a lot of artists gravitate to their sign once they figure out what it is or once they figure out what resonates with them about their sign. Definitely just expounded on the idea of piscean energy and what that can be and what that means ultimately.
There’s also that Einstein quote as well, right?
Chester Watson: We don’t really know who actually said it, but they credit Einstein with saying ‘if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll go its whole life believing that it’s stupid.’ That’s just prevalent throughout everything. I read this book and there was this term immune autosuggestion or something like that. I could tell you the book. It’s called Witchcraft: It’s Power in the World Today by one of my favorite authors, William Seabrook.
There is this concept that he expounds on in that book and basically the concept is if you tell someone something long enough they’ll begin to believe it. He worded it in a very specific way. It’s induced auto suggestion. He just had a fancy word for it. It did definitely fall into that thought process. A lot of concepts went into the making of it and the thought behind it. Jeff told me about Drexciya, and they’re like this electronic duo that they’re whole thing is the slaves who jumped off the slave ships and became mermaids. Even that, that’s kinda woven into the imagery with the fish ears and eyes closed. And the half human, half aquatic kinda vibe. Because in that sense you’re a super human but you’re still a fish, considered a fish or reptilian. You aren’t necessarily where any type of stereotype people are putting on you however that may feel or look like.
That’s dope. Yeah, I remember reading that they don’t know if Einstein actually said that or not.
Chester Watson: They just gave him the credit for it. Like, ‘Ah, you smart, he probably said it.’
And no one questioned it.
Chester Watson: I mean, that of itself is a different topic of history, but even then sometimes you’re looked at as the underdog in the situation and sometimes you gotta come out on top.
Which could help you if you thrive off that shit.
Chester Watson: Oh yeah. For some people that’s like a ‘oh, y’all don’t believe in me? I’m ’bout to show y’all.’ That’s a motivator for sure. That’s a battery in some people’s back. Some people kinda shut down when they hear that type of criticism.
What side of that spectrum do you fall into, would you say?
Chester Watson: I’m somewhere in the middle. It depends on who it’s coming from. I’m not afraid of criticism, but certain people’s opinions just hold more weight to me than other people’s. I don’t take criticism badly but it is something that some criticism hits a little harder than other criticism.
There’s definitely certain people you want validation from. You might not want to admit it, but you might trust their taste.
Chester Watson: There is levels but criticism, I try to take it and grow from it. I’m pretty good at deciphering whether it’s coming from a pure place or coming from a place of someone trying to get under my skin.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
There’s also that Einstein quote as well, right?
Chester Watson: We don’t really know who actually said it, but they credit Einstein with saying ‘if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll go its whole life believing that it’s stupid.’ That’s just prevalent throughout everything. I read this book and there was this term immune autosuggestion or something like that. I could tell you the book. It’s called Witchcraft: It’s Power in the World Today by one of my favorite authors, William Seabrook.
There is this concept that he expounds on in that book and basically the concept is if you tell someone something long enough they’ll begin to believe it. He worded it in a very specific way. It’s induced auto suggestion. He just had a fancy word for it. It did definitely fall into that thought process. A lot of concepts went into the making of it and the thought behind it. Jeff told me about Drexciya, and they’re like this electronic duo that they’re whole thing is the slaves who jumped off the slave ships and became mermaids. Even that, that’s kinda woven into the imagery with the fish ears and eyes closed. And the half human, half aquatic kinda vibe. Because in that sense you’re a super human but you’re still a fish, considered a fish or reptilian. You aren’t necessarily where any type of stereotype people are putting on you however that may feel or look like.
That’s dope. Yeah, I remember reading that they don’t know if Einstein actually said that or not.
Chester Watson: They just gave him the credit for it. Like, ‘Ah, you smart, he probably said it.’
And no one questioned it.
Chester Watson: I mean, that of itself is a different topic of history, but even then sometimes you’re looked at as the underdog in the situation and sometimes you gotta come out on top.
Which could help you if you thrive off that shit.
Chester Watson: Oh yeah. For some people that’s like a ‘oh, y’all don’t believe in me? I’m ’bout to show y’all.’ That’s a motivator for sure. That’s a battery in some people’s back. Some people kinda shut down when they hear that type of criticism.
What side of that spectrum do you fall into, would you say?
Chester Watson: I’m somewhere in the middle. It depends on who it’s coming from. I’m not afraid of criticism, but certain people’s opinions just hold more weight to me than other people’s. I don’t take criticism badly but it is something that some criticism hits a little harder than other criticism.
There’s definitely certain people you want validation from. You might not want to admit it, but you might trust their taste.
Chester Watson: There is levels but criticism, I try to take it and grow from it. I’m pretty good at deciphering whether it’s coming from a pure place or coming from a place of someone trying to get under my skin.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
There is this concept that he expounds on in that book and basically the concept is if you tell someone something long enough they’ll begin to believe it. He worded it in a very specific way. It’s induced auto suggestion. He just had a fancy word for it. It did definitely fall into that thought process. A lot of concepts went into the making of it and the thought behind it. Jeff told me about Drexciya, and they’re like this electronic duo that they’re whole thing is the slaves who jumped off the slave ships and became mermaids. Even that, that’s kinda woven into the imagery with the fish ears and eyes closed. And the half human, half aquatic kinda vibe. Because in that sense you’re a super human but you’re still a fish, considered a fish or reptilian. You aren’t necessarily where any type of stereotype people are putting on you however that may feel or look like.
That’s dope. Yeah, I remember reading that they don’t know if Einstein actually said that or not.
Chester Watson: They just gave him the credit for it. Like, ‘Ah, you smart, he probably said it.’
And no one questioned it.
Chester Watson: I mean, that of itself is a different topic of history, but even then sometimes you’re looked at as the underdog in the situation and sometimes you gotta come out on top.
Which could help you if you thrive off that shit.
Chester Watson: Oh yeah. For some people that’s like a ‘oh, y’all don’t believe in me? I’m ’bout to show y’all.’ That’s a motivator for sure. That’s a battery in some people’s back. Some people kinda shut down when they hear that type of criticism.
What side of that spectrum do you fall into, would you say?
Chester Watson: I’m somewhere in the middle. It depends on who it’s coming from. I’m not afraid of criticism, but certain people’s opinions just hold more weight to me than other people’s. I don’t take criticism badly but it is something that some criticism hits a little harder than other criticism.
There’s definitely certain people you want validation from. You might not want to admit it, but you might trust their taste.
Chester Watson: There is levels but criticism, I try to take it and grow from it. I’m pretty good at deciphering whether it’s coming from a pure place or coming from a place of someone trying to get under my skin.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
And no one questioned it.
Chester Watson: I mean, that of itself is a different topic of history, but even then sometimes you’re looked at as the underdog in the situation and sometimes you gotta come out on top.
Which could help you if you thrive off that shit.
Chester Watson: Oh yeah. For some people that’s like a ‘oh, y’all don’t believe in me? I’m ’bout to show y’all.’ That’s a motivator for sure. That’s a battery in some people’s back. Some people kinda shut down when they hear that type of criticism.
What side of that spectrum do you fall into, would you say?
Chester Watson: I’m somewhere in the middle. It depends on who it’s coming from. I’m not afraid of criticism, but certain people’s opinions just hold more weight to me than other people’s. I don’t take criticism badly but it is something that some criticism hits a little harder than other criticism.
There’s definitely certain people you want validation from. You might not want to admit it, but you might trust their taste.
Chester Watson: There is levels but criticism, I try to take it and grow from it. I’m pretty good at deciphering whether it’s coming from a pure place or coming from a place of someone trying to get under my skin.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
Which could help you if you thrive off that shit.
Chester Watson: Oh yeah. For some people that’s like a ‘oh, y’all don’t believe in me? I’m ’bout to show y’all.’ That’s a motivator for sure. That’s a battery in some people’s back. Some people kinda shut down when they hear that type of criticism.
What side of that spectrum do you fall into, would you say?
Chester Watson: I’m somewhere in the middle. It depends on who it’s coming from. I’m not afraid of criticism, but certain people’s opinions just hold more weight to me than other people’s. I don’t take criticism badly but it is something that some criticism hits a little harder than other criticism.
There’s definitely certain people you want validation from. You might not want to admit it, but you might trust their taste.
Chester Watson: There is levels but criticism, I try to take it and grow from it. I’m pretty good at deciphering whether it’s coming from a pure place or coming from a place of someone trying to get under my skin.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
What side of that spectrum do you fall into, would you say?
Chester Watson: I’m somewhere in the middle. It depends on who it’s coming from. I’m not afraid of criticism, but certain people’s opinions just hold more weight to me than other people’s. I don’t take criticism badly but it is something that some criticism hits a little harder than other criticism.
There’s definitely certain people you want validation from. You might not want to admit it, but you might trust their taste.
Chester Watson: There is levels but criticism, I try to take it and grow from it. I’m pretty good at deciphering whether it’s coming from a pure place or coming from a place of someone trying to get under my skin.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
There’s definitely certain people you want validation from. You might not want to admit it, but you might trust their taste.
Chester Watson: There is levels but criticism, I try to take it and grow from it. I’m pretty good at deciphering whether it’s coming from a pure place or coming from a place of someone trying to get under my skin.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
You’ve talked about in the past how your music is for people who aren’t 100% confident in themselves all the time. How do you strike that balance of letting your music speak to your vulnerabilities while also maintaining that rapper bravado?
Chester Watson: I think, just in the sense of life, I want to be human. I don’t want to be seen as a rapper on record. I want to be seen as a human, I want to be seen as a person. Because it’s just like bro, at the end of the day, I’m gonna go through shit. And I’m just kind of spitting what I’m going through. And if people relate to it, which, as humans, most people will.They’re gonna feel where I’m coming from because I’m being honest. I’m not trying to boast or do, sometimes there is records like “Tourniquet,” where I do that.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
But for the most part, my music is very honest. It’s like a harsh critic of yourself is what a lot of my music is, and it’s just real. It’s just like, I might f*ck up. I might do this, I might you know, go off track, but at least I’m still focused on the bigger picture. So I feel like that’s what a lot of my music is just trying to get people to see the bigger picture in that we’re all human and ain’t nobody really better than anybody else. We’ve built a world that relies on money and numbers for justification for things. And that’s not bad, but you know, that’s just something that, it can get to certain people if they feel like they’re not living up to those expectations. Sometimes you’re gonna be on top, sometimes you’re gonna be on bottom. And I just feel like me, just trying to translate that into my music.
You mentioned “Tourniquet,” which is a crazy record. The flow at the end is really interesting and feels very contemporary. Mainstream trends feel like something you don’t really care much about, but is there ever a desire to show that you can execute some of these flows and styles with the best of them?
Chester Watson: I feel like it’s unsaid just because I work with Kent [Loon] so much. It’s not that I can’t make that style of music, because I make the majority of Kent’s music. It’s just that I choose not to for my own stuff. And I think that’s more of a choice. But with “Tourniquet,” I make this stuff all the time. That’s probably one of the better songs I’ve made in that style. It was just like, let’s introduce that in an actual official way as opposed to me just doing it on the side with Kent.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
I read that you reconnected with your Dad in Memphis over the past couple years. What was that experience like?
Chester Watson: That was dope. I probably lived with him for half a year. At that point, that’s when I was making 1997. He recorded that whole song. He recorded a good amount of A Japanese Horror Film as well.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
Oh shit, he was involved with that recording and engineering process?
Chester Watson: Yeah. My dad’s a keyboardist, engineer. He’s worked with Three 6 Mafia, like this man has plaques. He’s legit. I never really talked about it because I didn’t want people to like, you know, base anything of my talents on that because I didn’t want people to think, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna put that out there. I don’t really put too much of my personal stuff out there.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
I respect that. Would you ever hop on one of his beats?
Chester Watson: Hell yeah. I’ve asked my Dad to play keys for me because, bro he’s nasty. Disgusting on the piano. He’s so good. It’s gonna take time because he’s still traveling and stuff like that, but one day we’re gonna make some shit.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
You don’t see that in rap too often. That’s like LeBron trying to play with his son in the NBA. Or Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. if you will.
Chester Watson: That’d be hard. That’d be fire. We’re gonna do it. He had a band called Voodoo. They were like a jazz band. He’s super official. He’s definitely got accolades. He put me on, just working with him just kinda grounded me in reality, you know what I mean? Working with your family in general is grounding. That helped bring me back down from, just like a lot of stuff with life.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
You’ve rapped a lot about channeling ancestors and familial spirits, and on this project they feel like a recurring theme. In what ways do you tap into your lineage when you sit down to create?
Chester Watson: I tap into it often. Definitely when I’m composing a full album. Like I’ll tap into different people. It’s kinda like the Ben 10 Watch, and you just pick a person and turn into them for a minute and then you turn it to another person. And you’re just kinda channeling different people. MF DOOM, for sure, with all the vocal chops on all of my albums. That is heavily influenced by him. At this point, he’s an ancestor, so rest in peace to him. Sun Ra with the avant garde jazz influence on my music. Just old jazz in general. Nina Simone, I like how she holds her notes. I try to mimic that when I sing. Cab Calloway, same thing. How he kinda came on and attacked songs. Stuff like that I definitely tap into when I’m thinking of how I’m going to approach a beat or how I’m gonna approach a song or how I want it to be laid out. Kendrick does something I got from him where he’ll kinda weave in a certain phrase into all his verses. There’s certain techniques I pick up from just listening to people that I implement in my writing and how I approach stuff.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
That’s dope. I know you meditate and are very spiritual, does that help you tap into these influences on a more spiritual level?
Chester Watson: I feel meditation, in essence, is just having a free flowing mind. So I feel like I’m in a constant state of meditation. My mind’s always moving. It’s never too stuck on one thing for too long. It’s kinda always moving and changing and evolving. So in that sense, I’m kind of a conduit for any energy that I come into contact with, whether that be a thought or something I’ve seen.. Like if I listen to a country song and I’m like ‘damn, that bassline was kinda hard.’ I’m probably gonna try to do something that sounds similar to that bassline, but like more of my wave. I kinda pick up from anything. Colors, like ‘damn I wanna make a song that sounds like something pink.’ Or ‘I wanna make a song that feels like a cloud or the water.’ I take influence from and vibes from everything because you get a vibe from everything you see. If you go and sit next to some water, you’re going to have a different vibe from than if you sittin’ in the city. I try to capture those feelings as detailed as possible within the music and within the writing.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
That’s super sick. It’s cool you’re mindful of that too. It’s like you can consume any of the influences around you and it might get baked into your intuition the next time you go to create, either knowingly or not.
Chester Watson: That’s exactly it. You just kind of store it in your brain as an experience. And then you write about it when it comes time to let that out, you know?
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
Yeah, that’s super relatable. I write a little bit differently than you do, but I feel like reading other people’s shit, you like indirectly pick up stuff from them the next time you go down to write, you know?
Chester Watson: Exactly. You can’t control how it’s gonna influence you.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
What was your process like for producing the beats on this album? Does it vary from project-to-project, or is the procedure kinda similar?
Chester Watson: It’s kinda the same. On this project, I was sampling more, but I was playing more keys. There’s not really any guitar on this project, whereas A Japanese Horror Film, there was guitar on every song pretty much. So it’s like, I use different instruments probably throughout the entirety of a project to make it feel cohesive, and I just probably won’t use those instruments anymore. Or I use them kinda sporadically for my other music. I use a lot of the same hats from A Japanese Horror Film but that’s just because that’s my sound. Even then there’s a common thread through all of my music no matter what I use.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
How have you been able to maintain this level of high-quality consistency for over 10 years now?
Chester Watson: Yeah bro, for over 10 years, it’s just kind of crazy to think about.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
Is that pretty wild?
Chester Watson: It is wild just because I don’t feel like I’m even old enough to be like, ‘yeah, I’ve been doing some shit for 10 years, bro.’ The fact that that’s reality is crazy, but it’s a testament to the love that I have for music, one. And the effort that I’m willing to put into it. To even be in a position to say that I’ve been living off of it and really breathing music for 10 years is a blessing. I don’t take it for granted. I try to keep it in mind, and always have value in my music because of that. This shit has to mean something, bro. It can’t just be sound. You can make cool sounds all day, but if it don’t mean shit, it’s not gon’ stick.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
What kind of memories and emotions come up when you look back on the “Phantom” video?
Chester Watson: Just being young. We did not know what was gonna happen. When we saw that “Phantom” video, it was like, we all knew ‘this shit is sick.’ Like, next level sick. The way that is just blended and felt like ‘damn, this is the best shit that we’ve ever seen. This is like high quality shit.’ And we were 16, 17, still in high school. We had no clue. I had no clue exactly what it was gonna do. We knew that it was gonna be fire, but before that video, we had only gotten like 2,000 plays or something like that on a YouTube video. To jump from that so quickly was just like, looking back on it was just like, ‘damn.’
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
It was a moment.
Chester Watson: It was a moment. It was definitely a moment in time. I felt like I was so young that I didn’t really get to fully seize it. But you know I’m glad that it still happened because it paved the way for what I do right now.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
Was it weird reaching that level of success so quickly at a young age and then trying to build off of it?
Chester Watson: It was weird. At that point, you literally have a lot to live up to. And you know, we did back it up. “Trident,” “Picbascassquiato,” “Creed.” We followed “Phantom” up with some f*cking bangers so it wasn’t like it was wasted. It was strange, bro. I was going to high school and then coming home. And my video had, like 30,000 more plays in the day than when I went to school that morning. I wasn’t around my friends. I had just transferred from Florida to Georgia. So everything in my life was changing at that point.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
Did any of that success make you want to retreat into the darkness a little bit and focus on making cool creative shit in solitude?
Chester Watson: I think it made me want to chill. I think also, because of that I was expected to have a lot more resources than I did. Like I was still 17. And once the homie who had a camera moved, we couldn’t film videos. We were still running into stuff like that where maintaining everything was just, it wasn’t hard, but we had to be very creative. And luckily that’s when SoundCloud was still going crazy so all that SoundCloud stuff was beneficial. Dropping stuff on SoundCloud made sense back then. Now it still does, but that’s not necessarily where the flow of traffic is anymore. There was a lot more that was different than it is now with how we were able to move. When “Phantom” popped off, streaming was just getting kicked off. This was like 2013. That’s when Odd Future started blowing up, couple years before that, which paved the way for a whole bunch of shit I feel like as far as the internet era of music. Blogs played a big role in all of that. I felt pressure but it didn’t feel like anything that was impossible.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
Is there anything on your list creatively that you haven’t done yet? Score a movie maybe?
Chester Watson: I wanna be in a movie. I wanna act. You gon’ see Chester Watson on the big screen. ‘Like holy shit, is that f*cking Chester?’ I wanna do some shit like that. I feel like I would be a good actor. I would just have to get a role that’s accurate. I don’t even know what role I would be. I feel like I could be a villain. Definitely score a movie, or score like an anime. I’ma do voice acting for sure. So like a TV show or something. I like anime a lot, and cartoons.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.
A Flying Lotus collab would be sick.
Chester Watson: Shoutout FlyLo. They shoulda let me voice Yasuke.