Check out the second half of my interview with electro legend BT. In this part he talks about collaborating with Jes and the process of creating Every Other Way, how he fuses emotion with meticulously detailed electronic composition and what he sees as his role as a musician.

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Camille: One of my favorites on the album is the “Every Other Way” track with Jes.  How did you guys come to collaborate?

BT:  She is following me in a car right now, that’s sort of random and funny.   We met on Tiesto’s tour.  It was amazing, it was such a fun summer.  That was 3 summers ago.  I got to go out every night and just get handed a mic and sing for 70,000 people, it was a blast.  I’m usually encumbered by all kinds of gear and stuff.  I made 2 great friends that tour, one’s Jes and one’s Christian, both of whom I worked with on “These Hopeful Machines” and we just really, really hit it off as people.  She’s amazing.  It’s funny, we talk about that day of writing that song and it was really one of those sort of uber-magical songwriting moments where it’s like “Is fairy dust going to appear?  Am I going to see a rainbow?”  It was perfect.  Everything about that day was just absolutely magical.  We wrote that song probably in 15 minutes and then we sat there all night with me playing acoustic guitar and Jes and I both singing and we just sang it over and over and over again.  My daughter and my mom and a bunch of friends were over and just sat and listened to us play the song over and over again for like 3 hours straight.  The final production of that song took over 2 months, it was actually the better part of 7 weeks of 18-22 hour days of doing nano-molecular programming work on it, but writing it, we wrote it in 15 minutes and spent the rest of the day singing it.

Camille:  You’re notorious for really getting detailed in your electronic composition and meticulous detail, but you also manage to work in a lot of emotion.  How do you manage to fuse the two together?

BT:  That’s a good question and I actually have a very concrete answer, I think, or at least one sort of leapt into my head as you were asking it.  It’s subdivided into 2 very distinct processes for me.  The first being the capturing something that’s altruistic, that just comes out of you and that you don’t have to fight with to get it out.  It just wants to speak through you and that always happens really quickly, that kind of initial cathartic push of emotion, if you allow it.  It’s actually really scary, it’s scary like jumping off something tall.  It’s the feeling of letting go.  Songwriting is a really interesting process because to do it properly it involves being more vulnerable than you really are in any other part of your life and people that do this will understand what I’m saying.  If you really allow yourself to be completely open and vulnerable and no bullshit, no pretense, you just say what you mean, say what’s on your heart, and you put it out through your fingers, and you speak it with your instrument, it’s a scary thing.  It’s less scary when you’re alone because, Trent Reznor said once to me he has to be alone so he can suck out loud until he does something good and then he can play it for everyone.  There’s less of that vulnerability if you’re just alone because you’re comfortable with yourself, but when you’re collaborating with someone, being that open and vulnerable is an awe-inspiring but frightening experience and beautiful all at once.  So that phase of it is really short and it’s capturing something that’s meaningful enough that you want to work on it hard and you want to put all that analytical detail into it because otherwise you’re going to become sick of it if you half meant it or you 99% meant it.  There’s really not an in between state with it, too, with it.  It’s like being kind of pregnant.   You’re either pregnant or you’re not pregnant.  So there’s that initial piece and then the more technologist in me and from a compositional vantage point, I’m then trying to make something that’s evocative, that ‘s new, that has interesting use of timbre and tonality and harmonic structure and compositional form and sound design and technique.  That part is much, much longer and in fact, it’s funny I played at Twitter over the weekend and one of the guys that started Twitter, Ev, and a couple of the guys from there and I were talking after I did the show for them and they were saying about the detail in my work, that they found it really, really impressive.  I’ve noticed that the people that really appreciate the detail in my work are people that create things themselves.  It’s interesting because, I think my fanbase are media creators.  The people that really, really enjoy and appreciate what I do are people that understand what goes into, not necessarily that they’re musicians, but many, many of them are, but they understand the hard work and integrity that goes into creating things with such fine detail.  They were just talking about this and then I told them that and they seemed to love this.  They were talking about it after.  I told them that I can relate much more to my friends who work at Pixar, who are animators.  My friend Dylan, when working on a show, will call me and say “Me and my team of 16 finished 3 seconds this week” and I’m like “That’s awesome, man!” and I really mean that.  I’ve spent 2 weeks of my life before, everyday, day in and day out, getting up in the morning, taking a shower, eating my breakfast, putting my shoes on, walking down to the studio and sitting there for 18 hours for 2 weeks working on 2 bars of music.

Camille:   But it’s worth it in the end, right?  And you come up with the end result?

BT:  It’s subjective, right?  Like, it’s worth it to me and I think that when people reflect on my body of work in a couple hundred years, it will make a little bit more sense than it might now.  But it’s meaningful to me.  It’s really easy to phone this stuff in.  I have friends that are very, very successful artists and producers that sit down and they write 6 pieces of music and they finish them in a single day and that’s cool and for them that works.  There’s no part of me that emotionally can relate to that because I just have to put every single atom and molecule where it feels intuitively correct for them to belong for me to feel finished and if I don’t feel finished I never play it for anyone.

Camille:  One last question, actually you reminded me when you were talking about Twitter just then.  I know that a couple of weeks ago, you shared a story about rejection in the music business on there.  You walked into the guys office and he turned you away.  Why was it important for you to share that?

BT:  What I love about Twitter is that people use Twitter differently.  Twitter is a technology that I think is phenomenal and it’s a culture that I’m proud to be a part of because the stuff that’s there that’s genuine is so deeply genuine that it’s remarkable.  I use Twitter like a public diary and I know that a lot of the people that follow me on there are aspiring artists and musicians and again, people that aspire to create media that they want to share with people.  I think that someone peering in on someone’s life, like my own, there’s the potential to think “wow, so things just kind of lined up and happened” and I think it’s really important for people that aspire to create and connect media to others to know that people like myself that are blessed enough to do that have been horribly rejected and that in spite of that, that we got up and we kept doing it.  So why it’s important to me is maybe there’s one person there that read that, that’s making something important that has been rejected repeatedly and that was going to quit and maybe in 5 years you’re going to hear their music.  If this sounds abstract and speculative and “what if”-ing?, I’ve actually watched things like this happen before.  I can think of stories about this too.  When I met Blake Lewis on “American Idol”, he’s now a good friend of mine,  I met him, he gave me his CD, and I said “Oh my God!  This guy’s great!  Can we get him to open my next show in Seattle?” and so he opened for me a couple times and then he came to my screening of “This Binary Universe” and the next day he auditioned for “American Idol” and he went all the way to number 2.  Not like any of that had anything to do with me, but what was great is I was able to acknowledge someone with ability and just kind of be like “you’re awesome”.  Sometimes, I know for myself, that’s all I ever really needed when it was beginning for me.  I guess what I’m saying is, more than anything, in some little way if I’m able to have an impact that inspires someone to continue doing what they love, then I feel that’s a part of my job description too.  What I’m trying to do, ultimately, is create things that move the human narrative in some small, positive direction, even a hair.  I’m an ant on a ball of dirt spinning in infinite space, so are you, so are all of us.  But whatever it is that I can do, to connect the dots, to create some sort of positive thing and leave some sort of positive thing here in the time that I have, that’s what I’m doing.  Like I said, I consider it to be a part of my job description.

Thanks BT!