From Modest Mouse to Eminem

People ask what this sounds like. The honest answer is a list, and the list does not cohere, and that is sort of the point.

The list

The ones that surprise people

Modest Mouse is first on the list for a reason. Not a rap influence — a songwriting one. Isaac Brock writes about dread and geography and the size of the country in a way that got into me early and never left. A lot of what people hear as strange structural choices in my songs comes from there.

The Mars Volta taught me that chaos can be composed. There is a difference between a mess and a controlled detonation, and the difference is entirely in the planning.

The rap spine

Eminem for density and nerve. People call me Eminem coded and I know what they mean.

Westside Gunn, Joey Bada$$ and Action Bronson for three different lessons in texture — how a record can sound like a place, how to carry a lineage without copying it, and how specific a detail can get before it stops working. It never stops working. That is the lesson.

Tyler, The Creator for permission. Watching someone build an entire aesthetic world and refuse to stay in the lane assigned to them changes what you think you are allowed to do.

Kanye West, because how could anyone making this music not be. That one needs a longer answer and it gets one.

The independents

Chance the Rapper, Childish Gambino and Logic are on here for the business as much as the music — proof that the path exists without a traditional machine behind you. When you are funding a decade out of your own account, that proof matters more than any single song.

Domo Genesis is the quiet one. Restraint. Knowing when not to.

What comes out the other end

Indie rock structure, prog arrangements, boom bap texture, comedy timing, and a lot of Texas. Visceral, sometimes cryptic, always truthful.

It does not fit a playlist category cleanly. Ten years in, I have stopped treating that as a problem to solve.