12. J DillaDonuts
I’m pretty good friends with Egon who was the A&R guy for Stones Throw. Maybe it’s no wonder the albums leaked in unfinished form because he’d send me beat tapes that J Dilla and Madlib would make. You’d get his CD with hundreds of tracks from J Dilla – they’re all online now – and the same kind of thing for Madlib. You got the sense that those guys were always making beats. And when Donuts got released, it basically had all the best stuff from those beat tapes. But it’s amazing to me how coherent they are and how well they work as an album – from what were seemingly unrelated two-minute snippets of instrumental hip-hop loops. It resonates with me as an album. It’s turned me on to so much of the music that he sampled. At the time I was really into finding records with drum breaks and records with samples – that’s how I made a lot of my music back then, was out of those records. He got me into that Dionne Warwick track ‘You’re Gonna Need Me’ that he samples on Donuts. That’s such an amazing track and he turned me on to that. He turned me on to the Eddie Kendricks record, People… Hold On, which is another one of my absolutely favourite records. He got me back into 10cc. It’s also that aspect, of being a doorway into other things. We were on tour loads that year and we never, ever listened to music as a band. There was either silence, or people working on their own music on headphones or listening to stuff or doing whatever. But those two records [Donuts and Madvillainy] we could agree upon, and we’d listen to them over and over.
