Photo Credit: Billboard
A true pioneer within the music industry, Diplo recently sat down with Zane Lowe to discuss the colossal year ahead of him, the future of his famed dancehall outfit Major Lazer, upcoming projects, and even the forseeable future of Jack Ü and much more. Head down below to read some of the highlights from the extensive interview.
Talking about the future of Jack Ü, the producer officially confirmed that he would be solely focusing on Major Lazer for the foreseeable future. Taking a break from working together with Skrillex, Diplo put an end to the rumors of the duo releasing new music.
“I think right now I’m just trying to make Major Lazer. Last year I kind of did everything and I wore myself really thin trying to do all those projects but this year it’s all about getting the Major Lazer stuff out. We have a lot of records we wrote together me and Skillex but I don’t think its time to put those out now. Just trying to concentrate on this Major Lazer material.”
The Mad Decent boss man also dished out details of Major Lazer’s latest single “Run Up” with PartyNextDoor and Nicki Minaj.
“This record got kinda like an Afro Beat kinda vibe to it. Something like Nigerian or from South Africa. It started out like kind of a reggae record, we just built it up and it’s an infectious dance song… I tried to get Nicki to do records with us for a couple years now. We happened to find the right one that made sense for her. She’s inspiring man, it’s crazy. I’ve never had an artist be so disciplined on cutting a song like this. She wrote sixteen different verses for this song.”
With several possible collaborations currently in the pipeline, Diplo shed light on how he has been working with the likes of several hip-hop heavyweights including Travis Scott, Migos, Lil Uzi Vert and many more.
“It’s cool right now there’s a lot of rappers in LA. A lot of young guys like Travis Scott again, Migos, MadeinTYO, Lil Uzi Vert, just doing records like that. And of course just writing. I’m not trying to go out there and find all the pop stars to work with, we’ve always worked with our friends. Even with ‘Cold Water’ and Justin Bieber we had done a lot of music together for the last couple years.”
Having worked with Danish singer-songwriter MØ earlier to craft the chart-topping 2015 hit “Lean On” with Major Lazer and DJ Snake, Diplo revealed that they have linked up once again to work on a brand new track.
“Just working with MØ doing something for her for our album, finishing up production on that track doing something different. You know we produce our records until like the day before they’re due. We write our records early. It takes like four or five months to actually produce them. So I have like sixteen versions of one record — totally different sounds.”
While Major Lazer fans have been tirelessly waiting for the trio’s follow-up album to their highly acclaimed “Peace Is The Mission” LP, Diplo talked about the uncertainty of their forthcoming album “Music Is The Weapon“, and how they have been trying get new music out to the people, one song at a time.
“It’s crazy when people come see our concerts and I just feel like we want to concentrate on a song. Every time we put a song out we want people to know this is the song. We have over thirty songs so at any point it’d be easy to just drop the album but I’m not sure people digest our music like that anymore. They don’t listen to our album as much as they listen to a song or watch our videos.”
Having toured and put out music extensively over the past year, Diplo talked about his plans to sit back and invest more time in producing new music in 2017. With Major Lazer being one of the hottest grabs within the festival circuit during recent times, his intentions do seem to be rightfully justified.
“I wanna sit back and tour a lot less. That’d be the goal but I think I never expected for Major Lazer to do such big numbers when it comes to releasing music. I thought it was an agony until two years ago. It’s just the music landscape changed a little bit to where people are interested in this kinda of music.”
Listen back to the full interview below.
H/T: Dancing Astronaut
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