Swollen Members
Interview with Mad Child by Black Dog Bone
You’re on tour, where are you now?
Swollen Members just finished 4 shows in the East Coast of Canada and now I am starting my first solo tour, which is the Mad Child tour.
Do you do a lot of music as a solo artist?
I am just working on my solo career now. As well as being in Swollen Members I am starting my solo career and it is a pretty exciting time for me getting my solo career going.
How have you been surviving with the changes in the music industry with free digital downloading? Is it bad up in Canada too?
It’s the exact same thing. I don’t know if you know but I had a four year drug addiction that I went through. In 2006 we put out “Black Magic” and had all the success with that album in Canada all independently plus good indie success in America and worldwide. Then I became addicted to percocet and then oxycodone. I lost just about everything over a four year period. From 2006 to 2010 I was like a zombie. I lost three million dollars to my drug addiction. I came from nothing and built up a little empire and then I lost everything to my drug addiction. For the last 8 months I have been completely sober.
It’s a miracle that you survived and are able to carry on with your music career.
Thank you, brother. It is a miracle because I am blessed for every day that I am alive. One of the cool things about it is that now that my head is back on straight and we are back to work and putting out great music and doing shows again you wouldn’t believe how many guys come up to me and tell me how my story has helped them during their drug addiction and helped them get off drugs too. That is an incredible feeling, bro. One of the things I like to do is share the information about what I went through because a lot of kids, young men or women don’t know what steps to take to get off the drug. Once you are a drug addict, especially to pain killers, heroin, or something like that, then you are living in a trap. When you share some information that people might not know and they hit you back a few months later and tell you, “Man, this worked for me, thank you so much!” For instance, a lot of people don’t know about the drug suboxone which is the miracle drug to get off of heroin, oxycodone, and percocet. You don’t get stoned when you take it; it’s just something that makes you not want to do drugs anymore and then you can go about living your life like a normal person again.
Do you get addicted to that also?
No, you don’t get addicted to it, but it is something that you take until you are ready to stop taking it. It’s not like methadone because people who take that are still getting stoned. When you take suboxone you don’t get any different feeling. It is like when you quit smoking cigarettes and people take a drug to help their brain help them forget about smoking. That is what suboxcone is.
How did you get so deep into drugs?
When you have a lot of success people believe in you and are like, “Okay, this guy has lots of money and gold records!” They were thinking maybe I was just having some time off and I was a strong person and I would be okay, but what they don’t realize is when you get off track it is bad. By the time everybody realizes what it is it’s too late or you hit rock bottom, which is what I did. I thank god that my family, my friends, my group and everybody stayed beside me during those hard times. You need a good support system. Kevin Zinger at Subnoize was great because I was a real difficult person to deal with when I was coming off those drugs. You go through a lot of chemical imbalances and you try to find your footing again. It is the biggest craziest thing I ever went through in my life. Also the people that care about you and love you are going through it as well. You are not only hurting yourself, you are putting your loved ones through a difficult time too. I am very lucky to have good family and friends.
What led you down that road when things were going so well with your career? Were you depressed?
It was a combination of both. It was the fact that things were slowing down because “Black Magic” didn’t have much commercial success. It definitely had that underground credibility and I am very proud of that album. We had super strong singles and that was cool, but we didn’t have the same success as when we were doing festivals all the time and everything was going real crazy. The four year road of success that we were on was coming to an end. Also our management left us at the time of my association with the Hell’s Angels. My management company left and it seemed like a lot of things were going bad. We had a deal with Virgin Records and that went away because they bowed out of that. A lot of things that happened in 2006 were bad. We had this four or five year wave of success and then that wave just crashed.
Did you lose your fans during that time?
No, we didn’t lose our fans, we lost our support system. We went from having a great management team. a great label partner, getting a deal going to the next level, and then everything just went down. Also we were tired because we were touring for five years straight and it was time to take a rest. We weren’t upset. We were not like, “Oh, it is over!” We just needed a break because we toured for about five years and worked our asses off. After “Black Magic” we just wanted to relax for a while. I got a little bit of a social life again and began going out to party. It was a combination of all those things. I started going to parties, hanging out with certain crowds that were into going to parties all of the time. When you go out more than once a week partying and you are single, drugs and alcohol become a big part of your life. It wasn’t like I made a decision to become a drug addict but I did make a decision that I was going to take some time off and have fun. It just spiraled out of control.
Did Swollen Members all meet in Canada? How did the whole band come together?
They are from Canada and I was living in San Francisco. I was sort of homeless and I was working while Prevail was doing the same thing in San Diego. He came and met me when he was coming to Vancouver. I moved back to Vancouver and we met at a house party. When we started rappin’ back and forth for an hour and a half, and I kid you not, the whole party was dead quiet listening to us rap back and forth for an hour and a half. We realized that we had chemistry so that very night we decided to start a group together. It was me and Prevail who started the group together.
What about the other member?
Rob the Viking lived on a small island where my biological father lives called Gabriella Island where only 5,000 people live. I used to go up there in the Summer to visit my dad and I met Rob that way. He was so talented that I asked him to come to my house in Vancouver and live with me for free and join our group. and that is exactly what he did.
You all come from different directions. Each person probably brought different things to the group?
Yeah! Rob brought the sound for us that was just a perfect fit for us. That’s why when I first heard his music I was like, “Come live with me!” He just had this sound that was at the time and still today had the same depth, credibility, and emotional feelings as our friends Alchemist and them. Prevail and I were sort of abstract, perfectionist MC’s that were into dark poetry and drawing inspiration from Medieval times and Conan movies. Prevail was a wordsmith and he used big words, and I was a big fan of the whole Hieroglyphics movement. I drew a lot of inspiration from movies and Prevail drew a lot of inspiration from books, but we were both deeply into the art of wordplay. Some groups will pick a topic and do a song about that topic. We would do one verse with 16 topics in one verse. We would bounce around and there was like a painting of an abstract picture. It was more surreal and about provoking emotion and making it to where once you listen to the song 50 times you will hear something that you didn’t hear the first time.
When you say dark poetry, what do you mean?
One word that describes dark poetry would be honesty, because a lot of rappers are not that honest these days and I feel that our music has a lot of truth and honesty in it. We reach within and talk about our fears. It is like trying to describe a dream because you can describe a dream but you have to do it a certain way. A bad dream is a perfect example of what I mean. It’s being a little bit vulnerable but being comfortable enough to express the truth and be able to talk about your inner thoughts.
When you were growing up in Canada, how different was life there compared to life in California?
I lived in San Francisco for two years so I lived in both places. Vancouver always had its own Hip Hop scene like many other places. It was a tight knit community and it would have Hip Hop nights going on each week but you would always see the same faces. I felt it was kind of the same when I was living in San Francisco; it’s just that there the scene was bigger. If I went to all the local events three times a week in San Francisco I would always see the same local stars and Hip Hop heads there. It wasn’t a whole lot different from many other places. In Vancouver you get the same music that other places are getting, but let’s face it we are in Vancouver. TV shows and videos are not the same as in America because you are dealing with a country that has one-tenth the population of America, so that means less money. Canada has an amazing government system where they give grants to help artists nurture their careers. They are very, very supportive, but you still cannot compete with other places on things like music videos. People in America are spending more money on music videos. As far as the actual Hip Hopscene itself it was very much like a scene in any other city.
Swollen Members were one of the biggest Hip Hop groups to come out of Vancouver. Who were some of the other artists around when you were getting started?
A lot of people in America get taken up under somebody else’s wing who has already made it, but in Vancouver it wasn’t like that. There was one group called The Rascals, who had some Canadian notoriety or success, but they were on the opposite spectrum of us and we were not part of their crew. You could almost say we were kind of friendly competition. We didn’t have anyone to help us; we had to learn the ropes ourselves. We achieved our success without anybody really giving us any advice. We achieved our success by learning as we went and by realizing that there is a whole other world out there. While other artists were waiting for that opening slot in Vancouver to open up, we were out in Japan or Germany, traveling all around the world doing shows. We would sleep wherever we had to sleep and drive to wherever we had to drive to get to perform. We spent years rocking shows worldwide and that is what helped us become a worldwide group instead of just being a Canadian success.
What other big cites in Canada have a lot going on with Rap?
I would say that Toronto is the strongest that it has ever been because they have Drake, Kardinal Offishall, Socrates, and Chocolate. They hay have a lot of rappers that have achieved success. K’Naan is huge and somebody that we are very proud of and I am a big fan of his as well. Toronto is definitely holding the title for having a strong unity. That is one thing I would like to see for Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary. Vancouver can do it but a few things have to happen. Toronto is a good example of what Vancouver can do if we work together and have a support system for each other.
What is Vancouver like as a city?
Vancouver and San Francisco are like sister cities. They are comparable and have the same feeling in many ways, from the climate to the originality of the people in the city, as well as being a beautiful city. Vancouver is a good place to live and so is San Francisco, as I can say from experience. They are two of the best places to live on the West Coast for sure. Los Angeles is a different place altogether, but I also love LA and San Diego is dope too. I also want to say that I like Seattle a lot and Portland too!
After all these years has Swollen Members changed a lot musically? What kind of sound are we going to get with this new album, “Dagger Mouth”?
The whole music industry has changed since we started. Like I said I spent four years being a zombie on drugs and I come back four years later and the whole game has completely changed. I used to run my own record label and I had my own employees, but now the concept of running a record label that way I don’t think makes sense during these economic times. Yes, I want to have a record label again and Battle Axe will reopen but it has to be a different animal and structured completely differently and have different focuses than a label would have had back in 2006. As far as the music is concerned, our last album “Armed to the Teeth”, I was on drugs when we were recording it and I was coming off drugs when we were finishing it. Now that I have nine months completely sober I see things differently and I see things clearly. It’s funny that after nine or ten years in my career I have come back full circle to when I started. What was pure to me when I started is the exact same ten years later. The importance of being honest in my music and not following what everyone is doing and being true to ourselves and what is true to our hearts is most important. Believing that our fans will love something if we love something is important. Everything has come back full circle to that. You go from this whole experience in life from being this underground rapper selling weed out of your apartment. Then you build this thing up, achieve many awards and accolades and platinum records, traveling the world and getting on covers of magazines, then coming back to the same place you started. While you are going through all those twists and turns you stop believing what people say, because you can ask 100 different people the same question and you will get 100 different answers. You just have to believe in yourself and make music for yourself. I think that is the most important lesson that I have learned. I refuse to make music now in this time in my career that sounds manufactured. I made the mistake of having to make the music for all the wrong reasons to keep making money. I will not make music to make money. If the music is embraced by my family and friends and allows us to make a living then that is the ultimate goal. I will not make music just to achieve commercial success. I will never do that again.
When you go to myspace or different blogs online you hear all this music that is not getting played anywhere that is original and really good. What music are you listening to now?
At this day and age with all this music going around I tend not to get lost with the music at my finger tips. I like to look for music that gives me inspiration. I might listen to some music that I love and will go get inspired to make a song. You have to watch a great movie or listen to great music to get the inspiration to write great rhymes, especially the kinds of rhymes that Prevail and I write. There is a lot of thought involved as far as the structure of our rhymes with mathematical patterns and what we are saying and how powerful are the words. As a fan of music and as an artist I have to be careful because there is so much stuff out there and I can see now how listeners are so quick to go onto the next thing. I want to be one of those artists as a member of Swollen Members and as a solo artist that when they hear my music they don’t go to the next thing. They stop and soak my music in. I want them down the road to be like, “Do you remember that summer when that Swollen Members album came out?” Just like when I was a kid and the first time when the Beastie Boys’ album came out. I want to be part of people’s life experiences like that and not something when they click on a button and listen to like three songs and quickly say what they think about it in a blog without even listening to the whole thing. That is not what Swollen Members is and that is not what Mad Child is. So to answer that question I am open to hear new music but I am careful. When I find a new artist I stick to the artist. I know I like Kanye West, I know I like Yelawolf, I know that I like Jay Electronica and those are my picks when I ask my girlfriend to make me CD’s. She knows what artists I like. I know that I like Drake when he spits hard but I don’t like when he does R&B music. I know I can go back and listen to some old Souls of Mischief. I know what I like so I am a little bit closed minded in a way, because there is so much stuff out there that it is hard to tell the good stuff from the crap. It is a little much for me, honestly. What are your thoughts?
What do you mean?
The fact that anybody can put music out on the internet now and it is mixed with everything else. Let’s just say that you and I were into Hip Hop and when we were younger we had 20 Rap stars just like in skateboarding when there were about 20 skate stars in the early 90s and maybe 100 rappers. We had the people that we knew we loved but now we are in a world where you can go on your favorite blog site and there is a 100,000 different songs each day. How do you find the difference for yourself being a Hip Hop fan? Do you embrace the fact that so many people are putting out music or is it overwhelming to you?
When Hip Hop music first came it was totally different from Punk Rock or Pop or whatever and when you went to the record store you would go to whichever section you liked. But on the internet now Rap has become so big that there are different categories of Rap. You have Japanese Rap or UK Grime or so many different genres of Rap. Now you might just want to find people who sound like Kottonmouth Kings, so you concentrate on those kinds of artists and you will find music that you like.
That makes a lot of sense. So you say if I like Kottonmouth Kings then I can go to other places that plays music like them and find it? That makes sense.
You can go to a Kottonmouth Kings Myspace and see their friends and know to go through all these people and a lot of times their friends sound similar to what they are doing.
I like Tech N9ne. He’s one of my favorite rappers and I can go to his site and can find other artists they are promoting and more than likely I will like what they are doing as well. I appreciate your advice because I have only been on the computer for about six months and I am new at this still. I just started doing twitter about 7 weeks ago, so I just started this. I am just learning how to do the social networking sites and use the search engines to find music.
Do you ever get inspiration from the natural world, like from the wind and the trees and the wilderness in Canada?
That is so cool that you bring that up. That is one of my favorite things to do along with watching movies. I have two dogs, a pit bull and a Chihuahua, so I like to go into the forest and walk into the mountains. That is a great place to clear my head. I love the North West and the forests that we have. I love that feeling of walking through the daytime because it is a little bit gray and it is beautiful. I feel most at home when I am walking through the forest here in North Canada. That is crazy that you say that because I never talked about that before.
Does that kind of thing influence your music?
It influences my music and it influences my clarity to create music. For instance one of the houses I lived in before was a great house but the rooms were real small. I had a hard time getting really creative in those rooms. Now I live in a loft with two floors and a big open area and it is easier for me to write and have that extra clarity and space. Too much clutter in a house makes it harder for me to write and free think. If you see some of our newer videos like “Mr. Impossible”, that is my loft where I live and it gives you an idea of this nice white clean space. I love walking my dogs and have fun being back in nature. It puts me back in tune with the earth, myself, and god and that enables me to be creative.
That’s great. The more time you spend in nature the faster you will heal.
You got that, brother.
As for making the beats, who was really getting the sound for Swollen Members?
Rob the Viking is responsible for the Swollen Members music sound and we have also done music with our friends Evidence, and Alchemist has always been a bro of ours. But Rob the Viking has always made most of the beats.
Were you influenced by Punk Rock, Folk or any other music?
I was very much influenced by Punk Rock as a kid and I used to go to all the concerts like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Attitude, DOA and all those hardcore Punk groups. I was a little skateboarder so I was into Punk Rock before I was into Rap. I was into Punk in the early 80s, and then when LL Cool J came out with “Radio” and Beastie Boy, Eric B. & Rakim and that stuff started coming out I felt like I had found myself. I loved the Punk movement and I still like it today but I really found myself when I was first getting into those albums. ’86 is when I first found Hip Hop.
Punk Rock and Rap music have a very similar energy.
And plus for me Punk Rock and Rap both fit into being a skateboarder and in that lifestyle. As far as Folk music, I am a big fan of James Taylor who is one of my favorite artists. He went through a similar thing like me because he was a heroin addict. I didn’t know it back then, but listening to his music now I understand what his lyrics mean. Willie Nelson is one of my favorite artists and I have him tattooed on my arm. I got to hang out with Willie Nelson on his ranch and he saw my tattoo. I also love Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Hendrix, AD/DC, and Led Zeppelin.
When is the new Swollen Members record coming out?
It is coming out April 14th. The album is mixed and mastered and is ready to go. Our first single is with Saigon and our next single is called “Fire”. We are shooting a couple of videos next week. I am also working on my solo stuff too. I just finished doing 9 solo shows and shooting a video in the last ten days all in a row.
Will your solo music be very different from Swollen Members?
Check out “Dead Man Walking Vol. 1” online. I just shot some low budget videos in my apartment. You can go to Mad Child and you can hear a couple of our new songs. I just put out an EP on iTunes and the first week it went number 2 on the Hip Hop in iTunes in Canada. We didn’t even promote it; I just let people know on Twitter and Facebook.
When you came back did you get a lot of that old fan base?
It is incredible to know that you can go away for four years and your fans are still there ready to embrace you. The shows and the clubs are still full. It is fuckin insane. I can’t go into how incredible it is to see that everybody is still here to support us. It is really overwhelming. To meet kids at those shows who have gone through a drug addiction and are going through a drug addiction and to be able to talk to them about it is nothing that I have never experienced before. Knowing that my experiences are helping people straighten their life out whether it is 2 people, 20 people, or 2000 people makes me still feel like I am making a difference. It is a rewarding experience that is much different than having financial success or commercial success. It is a spiritual success!
Do you still have a dark feeling in your music?
Yeah, if you just got off a drug addiction after four years and lost three million dollars and are in debt then you would probably have some dark music too. It is fair to say that there is plenty of darkness in my music. I am walking as a light but there is definitely darkness in my thoughts and in my music. I am fighting demons every day, shadow boxing with the devil every morning when I wake up and every night when I go to sleep.
How do you feel as a person?
I feel proud of myself that I got off the drugs, but I feel overwhelmed with how much repair there is in life. I owe my parents money, I owe my loved ones money, I owe my friends money, and I had to walk away from 90% of my social life because the people in that part of my life are still doing drugs or are still living a certain type of lifestyle. I had to walk away from all of that to save myself. It has been an incredibly trying time in my life and one of the most difficult times I have ever gone through without a question. My world is being replaced with people who are a positive influence and who are helping us take a step towards what we once created and what we will create again. I had to walk away from people who I don’t have anything against and they were great people but they were just mixed up in stuff that I can no longer be a part of.
I think it is really good that you are signed to a label like Subnoize because they are supporting you in what you’re doing.
It is great and we are more like partners. Battle Axe Records is something that is still going to come back to the forefront. Subnoize is an amazing label. They allow you to do what you wanna do and they support your music. All the guys are incredibly supportive and it is making a huge difference, they having been really patient with me coming off my drugs. It is pretty crazy doing all those pills and trying to come back to yourself; it doesn’t happen overnight to become levelheaded again and make the right decisions. It has been a long time to take this journey and they have been real patient with me and real supportive and I am so grateful for that. They are a great label and we feel like it is a great fit for Swollen Members.
It is a great thing that your band stuck together through it all.
It is the same thing because it is family. Most people would have walked away from me by now. When I put my own life on hold I put their lives on hold, because we weren’t making music, we weren’t doing shows or nothing. That was very unfair and they didn’t leave me and stuck by my side and believed in me. Just hearing myself say it is hard.
