TS: What’s the significance of the title “Broken Ankles?”
GT: Umm, I mean we were throwing out just a bunch of different things. I don’t think it’s like a direct reference to anything. It’s obviously a basketball reference, but I also like the idea that I think on the record to me, something that my albums are normally known for is kind of a quick pace of change up, and it’s not that crazy on this album compared to what I normally do. I do think there’s elements of that with songs where the beat can change up 2 or 3 times within it, or these little breakdowns and Freeway’s kind of constantly like moving and changing direction, and the final product is a collage of all these songs and one thing I always do on all my albums is I wanna make them kind of a complete listen, where every track is linked together and is actually continuously flowing so there’s no stop in the music, like everything is a very smooth transition. So it works like that on this album too where very different styled songs are tied together and moving kind of quickly so I like that idea of, you know, on the basketball court, kind of a broken ankles sort of thing, you know like shaking someone or juking someone. I feel like that our album has elements of that. These kind of quick movements that can kind of shake someone off, but I felt like Freeway and I had that chemistry to keep that going without it being a mess, riding that line between it being detailed and kind of crazy and unique, but something that still was very cohesive.
TS: So recently at a secret show at the Brooklyn Bowl, you guys premiered “Tolerated,” and I know that you mentioned that you’re not entirely done with the project just yet, but I just wanted to ask why did you choose to premiere that particular track, then and there?
GT: Well we kind of had different timelines of when we were gonna drop stuff, and we were both on the Rock The Bells festival. We were gonna debut one of the tracks on one of those dates, but the last two Rock the Bells dates got cancelled. So the first one of those was in DC, and that’s where we initially planned to debut a track, that was kind of the goal from months back. So once that got cancelled, we were like, I still wanna do this, we’ve been kind of working on it I thought it would be a lot more exciting to do it live as a way to debut it as opposed to just on the internet, especially cuz I just feel like a lot of collaborations are done through the internet where people don’t even meet each other or hang out, and I feel like Freeway and I have had a relationship where we’ve seen each other a lot and this has been a pretty face-to-face collaboration, so I thought it would be cool to do it live. So we’d scheduled kind of a last minute show in Brooklyn, not a secret thing, but I think it was announced with like 24 hours notice and I was excited to bring him out, and I think that song might be like the first or second song on the record and is, I would say, the most kind of hyped. I think that with my shows there’s a certain energy and an in-your-face kind of party vibe and I think that song would translate the best with the energy and vibe that I do live and it was really mind blowing and exciting to actually do it live just because I’ve been playing shows for years now and there’s always this certain energy, but having a live emcee on stage, someone doing vocals kind of took it to a different level for me.
TS: Awesome. So considering this was your first time really ever collaborating one-on-one with somebody on an album, is there anything you feel you learned about yourself or the music-making process from this new experience?
GT: Absolutely. I am definitely a control freak especially with this project, just obsessed with getting it the way I want it to be, and when you work alone that’s really easy to do, you kind of get lost in your own world, so I do think doing this with Freeway was kind of eye-opening and just…you gotta give and take a little bit. Like I said, this wasn’t as easy as just going in and recording 5 songs and being done. I think we both had to give and take. There was changes I wanted to make, changes he wanted to make and I was actually excited about how hands-on it got with both of us just in terms of the collaboration and just giving suggestions and changing this or that. I didn’t think it was gonna be like that. I thought I would kind of give him the beats, he would rock through the songs, and that would be it. But yeah there was surprisingly a lot of communication and sometimes I think it’s a difficult thing when you have to be direct with someone about something if you’re not feeling it, or they’re not feelin what you’re doing so yeah that was definitely eye-opening. I thought it was just gonna be a little bit more casual but it turned into something where…I’m never happy putting out something that I’m not feeling 100%. That’s something I never wanna do, so that was something that I brought to the table and I think Freeway respected that. I think he was into being pushed, and I was into him pushing back on me. It was just a lot different experience than I expected in a good way. It was drawn out and more intense in a fun way, so that was definitely eye-opening.