Amir Questlove–Thompson
speaker
268 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Amir Questlove–Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We might have to do lunch and a half or, you know, like things that only office people understand. And I learned long ago, like this is why I'm really big on micro meditation and, you know, just sitting in a quiet room for like 10 minutes before I go on, because sometimes you have to. just calm yourself down so that you can really focus on what you have to do.
But a lot of times, um, artists are in their own heads and they often talk themselves out of, you know, the, the magic because they're, when you're worrying, you're almost praying for something bad to happen. Like that's my definition of worrying like, Oh, I hope I don't mess up. You're basically saying, Hey, I would like to mess up just subconsciously. So as a result, uh,
And most artists will stall, take their time, be an hour late, be two hours late, not show up at all, hijack their career in the name of fear. And as always, like once you do it, then it's like, oh, that's all it was. No big deal. But yeah.
you know, I'm used to it because I've been doing this for a couple of decades, but oftentimes I'll pull an artist to the side and just be like, okay, I want you to listen to my voice. I want you to inhale, exhale. I do that a lot to them, especially the new artists that are like nervous and scared.
No, see, people in their heads and, you know, it's a tightrope walk and I get it. Like, It's easy to think like, what if I fail? What if this doesn't work? What if no one likes me? But, you know, there's another side of that coin, which is like, what if this works out? What if everyone loves me?
You know, again, leading to the slide, Doc, one of the biggest themes is, you know, there's a fear of failure, but the bigger fear is actually the fear of success. Like, what if it does work?
Ooh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let nothing you dismay. Our hymns, what about...
The angel voices O night divine Oh night, oh night divine. Oh yeah, yeah, wait, wait, ooh, that's a good turn.
That's blues, see that? Yay.
Don't stop dreaming Don't stop believing Cause you know that our time is coming up
Yeah, it's a very unique recording. The drum is... kind of the post-neo soul set, like one of the artists that I really dig his work. He has a really soulful voice. When I listen to music, I like rawness. I like mistakes. I don't think there's good notes and bad notes or flat notes or sharp or pitchy notes, but this is just, it's almost like they're allowing us, him and his mom are allowing us to
sort of eavesdrop at the family gathering where they're just singing to each other. This is a really raw version of the song, so it kind of hits home to me.
Yeah, like we would often have Christmases in very unusual places, probably one of the best places ever. There was a resort in San Juan, Puerto Rico called the DuPont Plaza. And my father would do a residency down there. And I believe like back in the 82, one of my favorite Christmases ever was. Like, it was real tropical, and that was the first tropical Christmas I had.
Like, I spent two weeks with my family. Although they were gone for, like, four months, I would fly down there occasionally. And this is the year that Michael Jackson's Thriller came out, so... You know, it was a simpler time where buying a Mirror One record was like the entire world to him. You know, now I have to buy like an entire library's jazz collection from like some university.
But back in 82, you could just give me a Thriller record. And that was like everything to me.
It is. You know, there's these two really influential DJs that have really inspired my DJ career. They're from the Boston area. They're called Amir and Akon. And those guys, they're the DJs that your favorite DJ's DJs listen to. And they're always playing really obscure music that's really under the radar.
And I believe DJ Amir is the one that put me on to this particular piece, which has a good drum break to it. And I think it came out in 1977 by a group called The Bionic.
Very much so, yes. I mean, drums are, that's my calling card, you know. And for me, there's a lot of really obscure Christmas records that might, they'll do their version of Little Drummer Boy or something like that.
Really?
Showing 221–240 of 268 · page 12 of 14
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