Buck 65: “They all thought that I had completely lost my mind...”

Richard 'Buck 65' Terfry's career in hip-hop spans nearly a quarter of a century. The Canadian rapper, producer and DJ is incredibly prolific, with more than thirteen albums to his name, including more than a few classics. Lionized by leftfield labels such as Anticon and Strange Famous and eventually signed to Warners, with whom he has been releasing albums since 2002, he is relentlessly experimental in his approach to music, fearless of taking in everything from folk and blues to punk, electronica and, as this interview shows, “classic '70s rock ballads” and applying it to his mercurial understanding of hip-hop. A vital, consistently excellent rapper and producer, he has remained a perennial oddball outsider in the realm of the genre, and enjoyed a thriving reputation as an impressive live act.

This year, wounds still healing as a result of a recent divorce from ex-wife and former collaborator Emily Terfry, he returns to the fray with an honest, intense, surreal and emotionally-driven album, many tracks on which will be “wildly unlike anything I've ever done before,” according to Terfry himself. He talks frankly about the emotional fallout of the divorce, and his driving need to convert that base matter of suffering into some form of artistic gold. A performer well-known for his energy and gregariousness, he sounds weary and fragile when discussing the inspiration for the new album, with frequent long pauses as he considers his responses. But the impression that emerges is that of a man battered but not broken by his experiences, and ready to return with what could be his greatest album yet.

“It's looking like it's going to be a pretty heavy record,” he explains almost apologetically, stating in no uncertain terms that the record is about his recent divorce. “Not only did I feel the need to express that in the lyrics of the songs on the record, I also wanted to find a way to convey the feeling of the last year of my life in the music,” he explains. “I think what that has meant is that sonically, this is going to be a pretty different-sounding record to any record I've made before. I really wanted to create a sense of a lot of empty space, as a pretty straightforward metaphor for the state of things in the last year or so. I also wanted it to sound kind of cold. So it's largely electronic.”

This is something of a departure for Buck 65; he usually works with sampled drums, or on occasion a live drummer: “I wanted to keep that part of it as cold as I could, and to keep a lot of it pretty sparse, to create that sense of empty space,” he explains. Having worked with the same studio team on and off for twelve years, a small team of new producers have co-helmed much of the album, leaving their mark: “It's a challenge, and it's taking me out of my comfort zone,” he says. “I'm definitely excited about it... I think a lot of it is really going to surprise people.”

Working with producers such as Anticon's Alias on one track, and with electronica producers Marten Tromm and Sunclef on a host of others, Terfry has embraced the genre of 'future beat,' mentioning Tame Impala, J-Dilla, Flying Lotus, Madlib and Flaming Lips' producer Dave Fridmann as big influences. “It's electronic, beat-based music, but a lot of it seems off-kilter – the time signatures are sort of challenging,” says Terfry. The sound is firmly rooted in hip-hop: “There's a certain palette that comes from the way hip-hop developed, through the use of drum machines, drum breaks,” he asserts. The record was brought to completion under the guidance of esteemed producer Dean Nelson, who has worked with everyone from Jamie Lidell and Beck to Thurston Moore and Stephen Malkmus. The album also features drums from Justin Peroff of Broken Social Scene.

Terfry is driven to create, rather than choosing to, and his recent emotional upheavals proved this: “I went through a stretch earlier this year, I guess it was in the summer, and I decided to take a vacation,” he remembers. “I thought it was a good idea at the time. I realised on my first day that I was on my own. I had cleared my schedule. I made the promise to myself that I would just try to not do anything, just take it easy. And I realised that was about the worst thing that I could do. I was still struggling through the whole situation with my divorce, so the more time I had to sit there and think, the more tortuous the day became. I realised I needed to do something – I'm just not capable of sitting around and doing nothing right now.”

His wife's departure took its toll: “It was almost as if I was... I don't want to say helpless, but... I had to make a list of things to do, and it would include basics like: 'Eat. Bathe. Brush your teeth.' I'd put all those things on a list, and then keep the list in my hand and go about that as though that was my work for the day, my duties. Something that I could focus on to just keep me on the rails as best I could. Without it, I wouldn't do any of it. I wouldn't get off the couch or out of bed all day, and would just spiral deeper and deeper. I needed to take these absurd measures with myself. Eventually, I knew I had to do something with all the ways I was feeling.”

He told himself: “'Well, at the very least, you'd better make something out of this. You can lose everything else. Just try to get your shit together enough that you can use all of these strong ways in which you're feeling, and to turn it into art. At least do that much, especially when there's that much burning intensely inside you.'”

The process of creating art from such intense emotions was taxing: “What I was doing was almost forcing myself to keep my own head held underwater,” Terfry explains. “I was forcing myself to spend lots of intense time with something that was very painful. Because what you're doing, when you write about something, is you are facing it; you're staring it down. Submerging yourself in it.” Eventually, this process paid off. When Terfry completed a demo, “this powerful feeling would sweep over me,” he says. “The terrible feelings would be overtaken by a feeling of: 'Holy shit, that's strong stuff. That's really good.' And then I would actually have a day when I would feel good! I'd go through the day in a good mood. It was a pretty rare occurrence. The first good day I had after my wife left was when that started to happen. So it was really a case of seeing first-hand the truth of the old cliché about catharsis through art.”

He started recording new songs, most of which will remain exclusively on his SoundCloud page, rather than featuring on the new album. One of these songs was “crowd-sourced” via Twitter: “I posted up a message to my followers saying: 'What would you want to hear in a song? Give me ideas, and I'll incorporate as many of them as possible.' I got hundreds of responses... I barely had to write the thing at all. It was like a giant mountain of words and phrases and... stuff. I just kind of wove it together and then posted it up a few hours later. So those tracks were mostly there just to try and prevent me from losing my mind,” says Terfry.

The tracks see the rapper embracing surrealist, cut-up techniques and strange imagery, a contrast to his often direct, storytelling-based approach to lyrics on his last few albums. “It's definitely something I've been feeling lately, the idea of going back to some of the ideas of surrealism and even Dadaism,” Terfry explains. “I guess there's a common thread... absurdity. Trying to take something that on the surface seems absurd, and maybe more than just seeming absurd, it absolutely is absurd, but still try to use that to convey some sort of feeling. I began dabbling with these ideas, and that has definitely carried over to the stuff I'm working on now for the new album. In fact, it's probably gotten even more intense. There are a few songs in particular where really that's what it's all about.”

One song presented a real challenge, when it “ended up sounding like a classic '70s rock ballad, with shades of Perfect Day by Lou Reed.” He even surprised himself: “I've never done anything like that before – I'm not rapping, just singing. I have no idea where the hell this song came from. I was explaining it to the guys in the studio; that this was what I wanted to do, and they all thought that I had completely lost my mind.” The song started out as a piece for solo piano and voice, with lyrics directly influenced by surrealism: “I really wanted to make a song that was a completely heartbreaking song, but where the lyrics were completely absurd,” Terfry explains. “I gave it basically like a twenty percent chance of working. I said that to the guys in the studio, I told them it was a crazy idea that might not work at all. If it doesn't, we'll toss it aside and move onto another idea. But it seems like it has really worked, which I'm excited about. I just find that for me, it's an interesting artistic challenge. One which I have toyed with a bit, on and off, for the last several years. I've taken an interest and have studied surrealism and Dadaism, and absurdity in art.”

One massive project that went almost unremarked in the mainstream media was Buck 65's release of three free albums under the names Dirtbike, Vols. 1-3. Featuring collaborations with artists such as fellow Canadian rapper / producer Cadence Weapon, they showcased Buck 65's trademark experimental hip-hop in a raw, unrestrained form. “As simple and as scrappy as they are – and they're pretty shitty recordings, I just made them at home, I did them without a budget – I really like those records a lot,” Terfry recalls. “When I sat down to make them, I had one simple idea in mind, which was to try to create something which would be failure-proof.” He sums up what has caused him to consider his previous works failures: “I was able to narrow it down to two things: sales and reviews. I can make a record which I'm very proud of, and then have it released, and because I'm a sensitive asshole – like a lot of musicians I guess – if it gets a shitty review, then all of a sudden I'm trying to second-guess myself. I'm thinking: 'Maybe it wasn't as good as I thought it was.' Or it doesn't sell, and again, same reaction.”

His solution: Dirtbike. “I thought okay, before I go into this, before I even sit down to write, I'm going to decide that I'm not going to try and sell it, and I'm not going to offer it up to the press in any way. I'm not going to hire a publicist to push it, whatever else,” he explains. “I was just going to let it exist, and if anyone was interested, it would be there. But there's nothing at stake, nobody has anything to lose. It's not going to feel like anyone has wasted their time or money by listening to this – it's just there if they want it.”

This was tremendously liberating: “I realised when it was finished was that it had a completely different, deeper, more subtle psychological effect on me as I was making the material,” he continues. “It just freed me up completely creatively, I wasn't second guessing anything that I did, whatsoever. So for example, if I wrote something, I never stopped myself to ask: 'Is this an idea that might sell, is this an idea that people will like?' I never concerned myself with that at all. It felt like something I wanted to do, and I just went ahead and did it. This was basically the most self-indulgent thing that I had ever done.”

But rather than creating a bloated, over-elaborate mess, the result was pure, uncut Buck 65: “What I realised when I started to get a reaction to the work is that if somebody is interested in your art, no matter what you do, whether you're making music or something else, is that's kind of what you want,” he says, warming to his topic. “It's kind of what you expect from a creative person whose work you like – you want them to get self-indulgent. You don't want the creative process to be polluted by outside factors. You don't want someone who's making a painting to be already thinking about selling it, or thinking about what art critics might say about it. You want them to express themselves as purely as they can.”

Pleased with the work, and still excited by it, he intends to release Dirtbike Vol. 4 after the new album is done with, and is reconsidering his whole career in light of the sense of achievement the free albums gave him. “What does my relationship with my record company mean, if I can get everything I need out of this by doing it on my own? That's one that in some ways, I still need to figure out. But the bottom line is that I knew this was something I was going to have to continue to do. I realise I'm going to have to continue making music in my own home, on my own terms, forever, because that's what feels best.”

Looking back on his career, he's hard-pressed to say how the changes in the music industry have affected him: “I've never really had a hit. I've never been the kind of musician that's as likely to have the big payday. I've never been the hot, 'it' guy, even in an indie sense. You get bands who never have a hit, but then they become trendy and you start hearing their music in TV commercials or in films a bunch; I never really became that guy, either... I've never really made any money. Ever.” But the feeling of personal satisfaction he got from returning to his roots on the Dirtbike albums is a career high to equal his beginnings in the 90s hip-hop scene: “When I look back on those days, before I signed my big deal, I mean... I look back on those days fondly, like everybody else. But I think that just had more to do with the spirit of it, and the fact that I was doing it with my expectations so low. I was just doing it for fun; I was making music in a very similar way to the way in which I made the Dirtbike albums." 

Beyond the release of the new album, Terfry has literary ambitions – he is currently working on the second draft of a novel, which he hopes to publish in 2014. He's still flirting with the idea of trying his hand at film-making too: “I can already imagine some aspiring film-maker reading this and rolling their eyes and thinking, 'Oh brother, here's another person from a completely different world who thinks they can walk in and just do this without going to school for it,' y'know?” he says. “I would love to experiment a little bit, try my hand at it and see where it could go. In fact, over the past few years, film has been as much if not of greater interest to me than music or writing or anything else.”

Far from moving away from music, Terfry still sees it as a vital, inescapable part of his life: “I will end up back where I started – making music in my house that nobody hears,” he predicts. “I don't have enough of an ego to assume that I will keep on building my audience, making it larger and larger until the day I die. I assume it will peak at some point. Maybe it already has. And then it will just kind of dwindle away to nothing again, but I will always be making music.” For Terfry, music is “something I need so I don't end up jumping out of a window.” It's an escape, a purpose, a calling, and one that he has always embraced: “If I manage to stay healthy, maybe one day I'll be an old man with a bad back, bent over a desk somewhere, still pounding out music.” Thankfully, that day still seems very distant indeed. Buck 65's back – and what didn't kill him has made him that much stronger.