Interview: Ta-ku Makes "Soul Music," Loves Dilla, and Is Founding a Barbershop Empire

Complex talked with Ta-Ku following his show at MoMA PS1.

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A couple Sundays ago, Ta-ku played his first-ever U.S. show at MoMA PS1 in New York. The venue was, effectively, an open house for much of the afternoon, with hundreds of attendees strolling back and forth between the galleries and the white pop-up concert dome in the courtyard. At nightfall, after an artists' panel discussion of community-building and passion-life balance, Ta-ku and his drummer and bassist played Songs To Make Up To, the album Ta-ku released in June.

Alina Baraz and Flume joined Ta-ku on stage. And, for the very first time in his career, Ta-ku sang to a crowd. He was clearly nervous.

As Ta-ku was running around Manhattan a week after his PS1 set, now fresh from a Thursday morning recording session, Complex met up with him downtown by the High Line. We discussed both Songs To Make Up To and his earlier Songs To Break Up To, "soul music" vs. trap music, Dilla, barbershops, and the odd elusiveness of CyHi the Prynce.

I think of your music as a terminal synthesis of hip-hop and R&B. Is that about right?
That’s awesome. Those are definitely my influences. I made sample-based hip-hop very early on. I’m very much influenced by the golden era of hip-hop, ’94-’98, and then going into more electronic music as I evolved.

I read an interview where you simply said, “I make soul music.” What do you mean by that term?
Rock music can feel like soul music. Folk music, to me, sometimes, can feel like soul music. I think anything that evokes a lot of emotion or feeling, to me, is soul music. Of course you’ve got the more conventional, Marvin Gaye, Motown, even neo-soul, and all those guys. But because I kind of delve into so many different genres, I just kind of encapsulate it into one soul music kind of thing.

When you started making music full time, who was in your community?
I was on Soulection. My labelmates and peers are Kaytranada, Sango, Esta. I’ve worked with Brownswood for Giles Peterson.

You were working with CyHi the Prynce at one point.
Yeah—where is he now?

He's put out a bunch of music in the past year or so.
I think he’s dope.

He's in a weird place with G.O.O.D. Music right now, I think.
The same thing happened with that dude Rockie Fresh. Same thing: They got put on, they got signed to this, and they kind of dissipated.

But the CyHi thing happened literally out of the blue. When he hit me up, it wasn’t even his manager; he emailed me. He said, “Hey, I’m signed to G.O.O.D. Music.” Unfortunately, I hadn’t heard of him before that. He was like, “We made a video about my mixtape, and we’re gonna use your beat.” I was like, “Oh cool, is it in the background?” He’s like, “No, it’s one of the songs!” I was like, “Can you send it to me?” And then he sent it to me, and I was like, “Man, this is dope!” I wasn’t gonna be like, “I need money,” I was like, “Yeah, use it!” I wanted to work with him more, but after that he was working with some really big artists.

How long ago was this?
That was back in 2009. No, maybe 2010. I need to pick up that mixtape.

You haven’t heard from him since?
No. We swapped a couple emails about wanting to work on some stuff. I love rappers, [even though] I’m not a big fan of rap, but rappers can be quite selfish when it comes to collaborations. That’s understandable. They hustle for beats. 

Let's talk about the album. Why do Songs To Break Up To and Songs To Make Up To exist in duality? Why isn't the new album just something different altogether?
Songs To Break Up To happened when I broke up with my love interest back in 2013, and I delved into this pretty sad place. I just wanted to write my way out of it. I felt like writing about the experience really helped. I was actually surprised that I could put my feelings on the record like that. When I put it out, I felt a bit vulnerable. A lot of people seemed to relate with it. Everybody gets their heart broken.

When I put Songs To Break Up To out, I had already started feeling better again. I didn’t necessarily fall in love again or meet anyone, but I was just happy being myself and not having to rely on having someone. That’s what Songs To Make Up To is about. It’s more or less making up for the lost time that we waste when we’re down in the dumps. A lot of people think it’s about making up with the person you broke up with or about finding someone new—and it can be that. But for me it was just about learning to be OK again. They were both really fun to make.

One thing I’m always envious about when I’m at a live show is that, unlike you, the artist, I can’t see how the whole crowd is reacting to the music. As you were on stage playing the album and singing, what did you notice?
At shows, a lot of people are on their phones. When you’re DJing, a lot of people aren’t necessarily tentative, but they’re just grooving to it. It’s not your conventional show where you can kind of get busy with it and have a dance; you’re kind of standing and watching. I was a bit nervous about that. Normally I’m nervous on stage.

Well, yeah: You sang!
For the first time!

How did you feel about it?
Great! I was just saying to my friends that the venue is amazing. Whether I sucked or not, I think I was just happy that everything was almost perfect, and that the crowd was quite discerning, and nobody was there to turn up. I’m a low-key kind of person. I don’t like going to the clubs very much. It felt just right.

You talked about being vulnerable when you made Songs To Break Up To but then feeling better about it by the time it came out. How do you feel about Songs To Make Up To now?
Just on a musical level, or label level, it’s been my most successful record of all I’ve released, which is really, really cool.

Before Songs To Break Up To and Songs To Make Up To, I was delving into a lot of different stuff. I made trap for a bit. I made dance music for a bit. But I’m happy people have embraced the sound, because I think this is the sound that I want to define me if I ever stop making music.

Why were you making trap? Why that sound, in particular?
The energy is so infectious, and the production in trap is very high. It takes a certain kind of frame of mind to make music that’s so stripped back but has so much energy. It just commands a certain type of attitude from anybody listening to it or rapping on it. It just makes you feel like a badass.

Trap gives you this demeanor that you don’t get from other music. Don’t even compare it to screamo or hard rock or heavy metal, because even though there’s quite aggressive music, it’s not the same as the trap. You’re writing the in-betweens and you’re still grooving, but it’s aggressive. It's commanding.

But then, on the other end of that spectrum, you love Dilla. What about Dilla speaks to you?
When I first heard Dilla, I was surprised at how much soul his music had but how simple it was. Normally you relate soul to this big orchestra or a big D’Angelo band: You’ve got the strings, you’ve got the drums, you've got backup singers. But with Dilla, he could just have a bass line, light keys, and some really open drums, and it sounds just as soulful. It takes a really special ear to create that. When I first heard “Fall in Love,” which is just a sample and really sparse drums, I don’t even think there’s much bass in that song. I thought, “This is just incredible.”

When I’m traveling, I don’t listen to hip-hop. I don’t even know when I listen to hip-hop anymore, but I love it still. I listen to a lot of neo-soul, Dwele, and stuff like that.

I guess "soul music" is a good compromise term, then. It's a category but, as you describe it, a free-form category.
You’re describing the music instead of saying that’s what it is. Whereas house music is house music: You can’t feel “house-y.” You can feel soulful, but you can’t feel “hip-hop-y.” 

Fair enough. OK. So what's up with this barbershop that you apparently own?
I co-own a barbershop back home. It’s myself and my partner, who is a barber himself. He’s the head barber there. I want to learn how to cut hair, and I started, but I just ran out of time. I do all the social and visual directing for the barbershop.

How many other barbers do you have?
We have eight at the moment. We’d like to open one in the states. 

Plus you're involved with a streetwear brand, right?
I started this hashtag #TeamCozy that was more or less telling people to use a hashtag to show what shoes they wear when they fly. You don’t want shoes that are like too tight; you want to feel comfortable while you’re on a plane. That’s where it started from, just me taking photos of my shoes, but then the hashtag started getting really popular. Now it’s at 120,000 followers on Instagram. We had such a strong following of photographers and people that were into shoes and sweatpants and stuff like that, and we turned it into apparel.

That’s such a 21st century story.
A business that started from a hashtag. It sounds ridiculous saying it, but it happened.

In the past year, I’ve met several musicians who, apart from their music, are frantically passionate about other stuff. Is that just the new reality of what it means to be a full-time musician in the 21st century?
I think so. As a musician, you see how the Internet works. I think a lot of musicians are just creative people in general, and they wanna try and see how much they can do before they get old.

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