Josh Davis, the shadow lurking behind DJ Shadow, wants you to know he’s not a nostalgia act — but he’s not afraid to rummage through his old musical diaries either. The Mountain Will Fall might be his most ironically titled album yet, considering this guy’s work ethic refuses to collapse under the weight of his own history.
“I haven’t done an artist show since 2012,” he says, making air quotes you can practically hear. “You know, it’s all my own music, a little bit of the old, a little bit of the new, with visuals and stuff like that. I mean, obviously the primary goal is to continue to be inspired when you’re up there — because the last thing you want to do is give people the impression that it’s not challenging.”
Shadow’s big secret to not sounding stale continues to be digging deep into the vault. “Since the last tour, I transferred a lot of my old 8-tracks, my old multi-tracks… a few years ago I took a couple months out just to do that process. So I have access to a lot of elements from songs that I haven’t had access to for any of the other tours,” he says. Like cracking open a time capsule stuffed with awkward teenage poetry — except it’s breakbeats and scratches instead of bad rhymes about Becky in homeroom. “It’s intriguing… there’s definitely grimace moments. But it’s not like I was trying to do a guitar solo or anything totally out of character,” he laughs.
The Mountain Will Fall is Shadow’s pivot from sample-heavy labyrinths to something more — brace yourself — “contemporary.” He smirks at the term: “It’s an odd word to put in the DJ world, contemporary. But I feel like as long as I take a long time between albums, it’s not really that hard to find new directions.”
He’s under no illusions about what keeps him relevant. “I didn’t get into doing music to be in the conventional album cycle. Fortunately, I’ve always been on labels that haven’t forced me to be something I don’t want to be,” he says. He takes the long road, letting new ideas brew: “When I think of all the ideas in electronic music that didn’t exist in 2009 and 2010 that exist now… it pretty much guarantees my album is gonna be completely different.”
He credits that patience — and his allergy to the mainstream — for sidestepping the ageism that haunts most pop artists. “I don’t really push my face as an asset,” he says dryly. “I’ve never put my picture on my album cover. So as a result, a lot of people don’t know what I look like — and they don’t know how I’ve changed through the years. It’s less of an issue.” He shrugs. “I think if your music becomes backward-looking rather than forward-thinking, that’s the point when a lot of artists complain about ageism. Because they kind of courted that.”
Instead, he’s pushing boundaries, even when it means asking Timothy Leary to hang out with “Three Ralphs.” The sample for that song is delightfully oddball: “It’s not the most original sample I’ve ever pulled out, but the amazing thing about sampling is you can listen to something 15 years later and think, ‘Actually, that’s kind of funny.’” And then there’s Ernie Fresh, a rapper Shadow plucked from the ether. “It’s really hard to find someone who knows how to write authentically old-school without resorting to clichés. Usually people go back to the ’80s. He went back to the early ’90s. There’s a big difference.”
Even if his mom had to Google what a Billboard Dance/Electronic #1 really means, Shadow’s not sweating the stats. “I take all that with a grain of salt,” he says. “But I’m trying to get better about celebrating stuff like that.”
One thing’s for sure — DJ Shadow’s mountain isn’t falling anytime soon. If anything, he’s still busy climbing.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
