Tunde Adebimpe on the Keys to TVOTR’s ‘Seeds’: Silence and Sitek
Tunde Adebimpe, lead singer of TV on the Radio, has finally followed the band’s producer and guitarist Dave Sitek west and relocated to Los Angeles. But during the making of Seeds, TV on the Radio‘s fifth studio album (scheduled for release on November 18th), he was continually flying back and forth between his new and old homes: Adebimpe had a gig in Brooklyn that was a weekly residency, even though he wasn’t really a resident while it was going. As it turned out, the jetlag helped him focus: “When you’re making things, it’s good to get into a floating, groundless headspace.”
Now that he lives near Sitek, Adebimpe enjoys wandering over to the producer’s home studio to marvel at his friend’s constant productivity. “He’s always telling me, ‘I had this dream, and I woke up and went into the studio,'” Adebimpe says with a laugh. “You made 15 songs in three days? That’s nuts. I guess this is normal for you, but it’s crazy.”
What was the starting point for Seeds?
After the last tour, everyone needed a break. There were no set dates to get back together, and I didn’t know if that was going to happen. That was fine: We’ve been doing this thing for 10 years, I’m proud of what we accomplished, and it’s a good time to stop. And then we started hanging out again as friends, and we decided to work on two songs. The “Million Miles”/”Mercy” single was the result of three weekends of working on stuff. I don’t want to call it muscle memory, but if you practice doing a backflip for 12 years and then you do a backflip, you don’t think about it too much. It was so painless, the idea of getting together once in a while and making two or three songs was really appealing. We kept doing that, and it was fun, and then it became obvious that we were making a record.
What do you need to do to get into the right headspace to make a song?
I need yards and yards of silence to be in that space. I try to warn people a little ahead of time that I’m not going to answer an e-mail unless there’s a real emergency. And I use Voice Notes on my phone: as you’re walking home from the grocery store, something comes into your head and you hum it out. The important thing is to get all of those Voice Notes out of your phone, because if I get hit by a car, it’s not going to be pretty when they start going through them. It’s going to be all sorts of off-key, random-gibberish singing and really shitty beatboxing.