Pigeon John

Dragon Slayer presents itself as rather dramatic a title for Pigeon John‘s latest LP. Yet you consider his own surprise at being able to last this long without a recent release — aside from the Root Beer EP with former L.A. Symphony bandmate Flynn Adam, and it might just be a proper moniker after all. The SoCal rapper’s smooth party grooves made audiences move on Summertime Pool Party back in 2006, but since then, the waters have been rather quiet.

Working with General Elektriks’ Hervé Salters, Pigeon John says Dragon Slayer is perhaps his tightest album yet — a concise 40 minutes of exuberant hip-hop with “all the fat trimmed off.” Here he talks about his re-emergence, where he’s been for a while and why the cutting room floor was so messy.

SSv: Where did the vision for Dragon Slayer begin to come together?

Pigeon John: I think that these songs are a couple years old, but it didn’t come together until the very end as far as how things would sound, which songs would go first and all of that stuff. There’s never a theme for me until things are actually done. You make a bunch of songs and then things just start to come together naturally.

SSv: All of the songs are a bit older?

Pigeon John: Well, not all of them. Some are newer, but some do stretch back a little longer.

SSv: I wanted to ask about Quannum, and specifically are you involved in more things there than just releasing your music?

Pigeon John: Yeah, I got signed to Quannum around 2005, and they’re a great team for all of the support. We all go out on tour to support each other and musically we all work together. So it’s a great little family. I work on songs with other artists, but I don’t make other projects like a separate entity or anything like that.

SSv: What’s the difference between Dragon Slayer and Summertime Pool Party?

Pigeon John: With this one, it’s a little bit of a shorter and more direct type of release. That’s what I was hoping for and going for. With Summertime, there was more fat on the meat, if that makes sense. So I think with Dragon Slayer, I wanted it to be a leaner release and kind of more focused 40 minutes. Working with Hervé from General Elektriks, it really gave it a lot of focus as well.

The traditional way is to produce a rock or pop record with just one producer in a recording session, but Summertime had a lot of different writers and producers, so I’d done that throughout the years. This was a direct attempt to say that I wanted to write the songs and then work in that traditional producer mold to see how that goes with the beats that I’d made. So it’s been really exciting that way since I hadn’t done a whole record like that yet.

SSv: When you say you want to trim the fat, what does that mean the cutting room floor looks like?

Pigeon John: Bloody. Bloody with white meat everywhere. It’s a mess, bro. [Laughs] It’s a fuckin’ mess. I do have some songs that didn’t fit the release. I’ll get to use those as bonus songs, obviously, and give those away. Other songs, I’ve heard some artists and writers mention that songs won’t fit the current project and then the next time around, they totally work. So I love when that happens when an old song sticks around for a long, long time and then fits with the new project. It’s pretty fun when that happens. “To Do List” was supposed to be on Summertime Pool Party, but it didn’t really fit. It was always a small little song to me, but for some reason it made sense on this record.

SSv: You laughed about the bloody cutting room floor, but I would think it’s also a vulnerable thing.

Pigeon John: When I’m alone doing it, it doesn’t feel that vulnerable. For some reason, it’s just like editing. I don’t know how to edit a book, but you know it’s for a purpose and stuff. So the songs don’t die, they just don’t fit right there. So I just treat ‘em like songs. I love to throw on a bunch of songs, throw it on shuffle and then just drive around town and see what it might create on accident. So when a song doesn’t make it, it’s not personal at all. And she knows it, too. We still get along. [Laughs]

SSv: You mentioned working with Hervé. What did he bring to the table?

Pigeon John: Two heads are better than one. We literally play naked before every session. We really get into the zone. But directly, making a beat alone and making a song alone, I’m too close to see its potential sometimes — or even its weakness. I’m just making beats and stuff, so I loved working with Hervé because he can take every song and play it out on piano and say, ‘This is your song.’ Then he could almost recreate or reproduce in it a backbone of my production and then blending his. So for both of us, it created a different type of sound because we were both in the mix.

That was the first time he had done that with a hip-hop record and the first time I’d done that with a full record of mine myself. So we forced ourselves to only use what was in the room. We couldn’t fly in any strings or anything fancy. It just had to work within this box. We had a lot of fun within that box. We created the same type of instruments on every song, so there’s a tone to the record that I never had before because we use the same instruments and the same keys and stuff like that.

So that was super fun. I would leave him a song, go and get some lunch, come back and it’s like, ‘Wow, this song is freakin’ fresh.’ It wasn’t because it was freakin’ fresh, but because of what Hervé did to it. [Laughs] It became not mine anymore, but in a great way. It’s just teamwork. I definitely want to continue this pattern because it’s been a blast.

SSv: You released a lot of albums earlier in the decade and then there’s these few years since Summertime Pool Party. Artistically, what’s going on there?

Pigeon John: Last summer I released a Root Beer EP with me and Flynn Adam from L.A. Symphony. We toured that EP pretty hard and it kind of connected to the Summertime Pool Party. I was having a beautiful sweet daughter. I was moving back into the city. Shit, there was so much. Then there were changes in the label, so that slowly created this long period of time unexpectedly. It was like, ‘Woah!’ It’s like being on a ship and you just get further and further from land. You’re like, ‘Okay, we are on a trip now. I thought it was going to be a dinner thing.’

But one thing that I’ve definitely enjoyed is that I have no idea how I’ve made it. I went these last four years without a goddamn job, so little things like that keep me in love with the mystery of what is going on and how it’s going on. That also makes me excited about this new record. This is the longest I’ve ever went without a new album. Plus four years ago, the industry has changed and now there’s no such thing as magazines anymore. It’s all just crazy, freakin’ crazy. But it’s exciting for me personally.