Cool Times: MC Almond Milk Interview

Getting old is inevitable. Everyone at least once comes up to a point in their life when they feel they must make certain key decisions about what it is they really want or should do in life. It is common during these periods in our lives to look back and see what we can learn from the past. We look at past memories, past mistakes, past opportunities, both realised and missed, and find out how to apply ourselves in the future with all that experience under our collective belts. In art, as much as life, this is a constant problem:

"When we are younger we dream big and have the time and energy to fully commit ourselves to whatever we are passionate about, shout "D.I.Y 'TIL I DIE!" and actually mean it, but then life gets in the way. You get into relationships, you get jobs that could become careers, you choose places to live, you become an adult basically."

So explains James Scott, aka MC Almond Milk, on a typically dreary day in a bar just off Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street. We are talking such big, serious themes because of his upcoming album Full Day, Cool Times. The record is the first time, as MC Almond Milk, Scott has taken time to fully consider his life up until this point and make it the central focus of his work. Through his previous solo work or his collaborative act with Jonnie Common known as CARBS, Scott has generally shied away from talking about himself too much in his music. For instance, his last release – last year's Smell The Audi collaboration with Jay Rolex – was a far more light-hearted affair, rapping about things such as their mutual love for football, so why so serious now?

"I made this record around the same time as the Jay Rolex collaboration, which was a fun experience but when it came to writing this one I decided to write much more heart-on-sleeve about what was going on in that period of my life, regarding things like my relationship, my career, my music. I'm approaching my thirties and I've made a lot of life changes in the last year perhaps reflecting that. It felt good, cathartic even, to write about myself and what I was feeling, even if it was fairly self-indulgent."

As a result, Full Day, Cool Times is by far the darkest thing Scott has been involved with since his work with Conquering Animal Sound. It's filled with lament and melancholia but retaining Scott’s trademark self-deprecating sense of humour. The records looks to the past, especially on tracks like 1995 that tracks Scott's life in five-year intervals, mapping out his youthful enthusiasm through to the slow realisation that life doesn't always take you where you hoped and often leads to disappointments. "It charts when I first got excited about playing music outside of school in 2005, to my successes with Conquering Animal Sound in 2010 to 2015 and thinking, 'What am I doing here? What is this all for?'" Scott explains.

All this time spent ruminating on the past in Full Day, Cool Times means Scott takes a long, hard look at his present self both in terms of his life and his art: “A lot of that is to do with where I was going with my career both working and with music than my relationship specifically, and when I was writing at the time I was making some big changes for my life. I exaggerated some details partly because the more dramatic details make for more interesting music but also because it’s cathartic for me. My partner and I are much better now, but there is a constant debate in my, or any artist's, head about whether one should be committing to making your art free of distractions like long-term relationships. But then you cease to really be a human if you don’t have downtime with a partner, so I know ultimately this is what works for me.

"[Album track] Yuptae Dollface asks the question 'Are you building your life around someone who can’t give you what you need?' i.e. Are you okay with being in a relationship [with someone] who is fannying about creating rap music when you have a successful career and more traditional job prospects? I wrote this when I was transitioning from working in bars to a steadier, daytime job, which has helped me immensely.”

This theme of exploring how the past influences the present is all over Full Day, Cool Times and it even touches upon entire “lost generations” and religion. The album’s centre-piece – Was Swept Away, I Think That Always Happens – is a Fitter Happier-inspired spoken word piece based on a YouTube comment Scott found on a video of an 80s American Rock song:

“The guy is clearly fixated on this sound and felt how music seems to have lost something since. I related to it, even though it’s a ridiculously exaggerated comment, because on 1995 I have felt similar feelings of nostalgia and a yearning for a lost past both in my life and with my music. It’s pretty much verbatim, he says 'every generation’s culture gets swept away but between the war on terror and the rise of the internet ours was particularly drastic', as if our generation has nothing left but his parents' produced something worthwhile.

Meanwhile, album closer Pics or it Didn’t Happen concentrates on Scott’s religious upbringing and how it used to give him self-confidence as a child: “It’s an anti-religious song in some regard, but again it’s to do with the past. I was brought up religious and I used to be a lot more sure of things as a kid, I used to believe in someone, both God and my own-self confidence, and that is something I don’t feel so often anymore, which is inevitable with age I suppose.”

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as Full Day, Cool Times also finds Scott at his most self-confident as a musician, which is largely why the album works without becoming too hard of a listen. Scott happily admits that he is generally “driven by collaborations with my friends, but it gets harder and harder to get other musicians to commit on a full-time basis, so you end up having to do things yourself” going full circle on his younger version of "D.I.Y ‘til I Die!"

Scott does utilise his friends and frequent collaborators on his latest album; he re-works an old Jonnie Common song on album opener Wet Wednesday, Pt. 2 based on his initial mishearing of the lyrics but also to “draw a line in the sand on that part of my musical career”. But he also has guest spots from Gav Prentice of ULTRAS to sing the stirring chorus of Lost in Drakies, and Julian Corrie (Miaoux Miaoux / Franz Ferdinand) to play and sing on Black Coffee partly because as Scott admits “both those songs were inspired by those guys anyway, so it made sense to get them to feature. 

Ultimately, Full Day, Cool Times is Scott’s first completely self-produced record as MC Almond Milk, something he hasn’t done since his Japanese War Effort days. “I feel really comfortable with the sound I am producing now, probably for the first time ever. There was a point where I took side steps and was obtuse. I gave up singing for rapping when I first moved from Japanese War Effort into MC Almond Milk.

"I realised I can be more creative and don’t have to be totally fixed in terms of rhymes and rhythms which really suits this new record’s lyrical content. I couldn’t become a sampling guru in terms of 'record-digging' like Jay does. My background is folk-pop or dark-electronic music; I scrapped an album of both these styles because I felt neither was good enough. Now after moving onto rap and creating beats, I’ve incorporated those earlier styles into my rap music.”

So injury-time scrapper Me IRL is the album’s one concession that there is a positive outlook to be had still from music and art for Scott. "Me IRL features the idea that music will always be something there for me because I love to do it and that is the most important thing. Success and disappointments come and go, but music is ultimately what drives me, so hopefully, with that in mind, my next album won't be quite such a tough listen." Either way, it will be exciting to see the outcome.