Everlast Shares His Songwriting Process With Joe Rogan

Do you sit down and write on a piece of paper? Or do you write while you're playing music? No, yeah. For me, writing is a visual process. Visual? Yes. And I can't... If I write it down, it becomes two-dimensional. And I've written lyrics that I thought were genius and actually committed them to paper and saw them and they... It's like they dissolve from this three-dimensional beauty to like, oh, it's two-dimensional garbage. It's fucking bizarre, I know. It's not always like reasonable, but it's my process at this point. How's it visual? If you really listen to my songs, they're like photographed. It's like flipping through a photographic album almost. If you really listen to like what I'm doing, it's like very visual. I see the pictures. I equate it to like, did you ever watch the show Oz? Remember the poet guy who was illiterate, but he drew pictures and that's how he recited his poems from pictures. It's similar, but it's kind of reversed. It's in my brain. It's there. So you're seeing your visual in terms of like the stories of your painting, like the guy outside the liquor store. Or the imagery, yes. Or like a song like Black Jesus where it's like just kind of cultural, like fucking pop culture reference after reference leading down a path of just like stream of consciousness pop culture references. I'll go on tangents. But it'll be all within an energy inside the brain. Once I commit them, even like after the fact, like when you turn in like music to like entities, like shows or whatever, they want to know the lyrics so they can know if they should put it on air or this, you know, it depends on whatever, if it's public network. But even when it comes to that, I have to recite it to somebody and have them type it. I can't, it'll just kind of taint it to me. Wow. That's interesting. In my hand, you know what I mean? In another hand, it doesn't bother me. But like for me to come to do it, it breaks a barrier of some sort. Everything vaporizes. So how do you capture the various beats? Do you record it as you're coming up with it? There's a few different ways it happens for me. Like if I'm doing like a hip hop-ish or pure hip hop project, there'll be a beat involved always first, you know, I mean, there'll be somebody have a track and we'll be like, oh, that's the track we're going to commit to this and we'll write lyrics to it. And it'll be just kind of like I said, I'll drive around a lot with rap stuff and just let it bump and see what words start popping up. I like wordplay and bouncing wordplay, but it can't just be wordplay for the sake of it. It has to like tie into some sort of like idea. When it comes to a song, it's usually I string together some simple chord progression and start and see. And if I, once I've seen something I really like, it'll just like I said, pictures will start coming up and you kind of just try to describe the picture a little bit. And sometimes you, you come across poetry when you're describing the picture and you be like, that's good. You know what I mean? There's a lot of like, nah, that's not good. There's a lot of that. It seems like a mere process to stand up comedy, a mere process. Except I get to hold on to mine. Even if they record it and make it special, I still can play mine. And that's, that's what I was like, man, comedians are just, that's a little bit, it's a different commitment because like you're, you're bringing, you're like, it's almost like a child you're raising that you have to watch the life of it finish in a weird way. I'm not, you know what I mean? We both have children. That's extreme, but like you're, you're taking this idea from kind of garbagey idea that you know, there's a premise there and then like over a fucking series of fucking shows or nights or fucking maybe months you, you find it, you know, with different audiences and then you got it and you, you get to rock it for maybe six months good in all these places and then you go and record it and make that special. If you're lucky enough to be on that level, you know, it's almost like I almost envy the comic. I wonder if you guys ever envy the comic who doesn't quite have that yet so he can like, he has this, you know, bevy of material that he hasn't had the trash yet. You know what I mean? I just talked to Roy Wood about that. It was just on right before you. That's one of the things that he said that you shouldn't do TV for like 10 years. Like don't do, it's like a catalog man. You come up with that idea that the first time you do anything that people get to see, like be hardened, like be a polished samurai of standup, you know, but I disagree. I say, let them see everything. Let them see all the bullshit, all the stuff that sucks. All the terrible jokes. Who cares? Just keep going. Especially if the progression is there and then it's like, oh, you see what happened. Just keep going and it's good for everybody. People don't want to think you're just like someone who just figured it out instantly. No, it's good to see these sucked. It's good for everybody. It might be bad for your ego, but it's good for you when your ego takes a hit. It's always good. It's always good. It puts everything in perspective. You know, don't you think like as an artist too, like the thing that gets in your way more than anything is your ego, right? The thing that gets in the way more than anything is the way you view yourself. I wouldn't produce my own records until like maybe two albums ago because I felt like if I'd made it through an album without being like seriously challenged, I didn't make the best record I could. And then just being involved with a bunch of really seriously good producers, I learned to challenge myself and even the records I've produced for myself, there's other guys involved producing with me that I know are going to be the ones if that's something, hey, that's sucked. You know what I mean? You can eat that guy around or even a guy just to challenge even how committed you are to certain ideas. You know what I mean? How much time do you spend going over like when you have a song and you're like, I think this song is solid. Do you, outside of singing the song, do you ever go over the song and ponder like what you're saying or how you're saying it? Like how do you, because your stuff is so, it's so interesting because you're telling these stories of your experiences in these songs and a lot of them. And you're also having fun and you're also talking shit. You're having a good time with them as well. But when you decide, okay, this one is going to be recorded like this, how do you make that conclusion? For me, it's, again, if there's not like, because I can also, even if I'm not doing necessarily a straight rap song, there's times when I get a track from a producer that I just love the track and I'll build something around that. Other than that, it'll again start with a guitar and I'll either create a very rudimentary drum beat and lay down the guitar and maybe a vocal. And I have a very unique voice. So between the guitar and the voice, tones start appearing that resemble other instruments to me. It almost starts telling you what to do. Oh, that sounds, I could hear a Rhodes in there or the bass line should do that. You can hear that. And the guys I surround myself with are beasts that hear the same, they know, oh yeah, I hear that. Let's do, you can start, a song will tell you what to do with it if you really listen to it. I believe that. Because I kind of, one of the things Santana told me that I always held onto was like, and I've experienced this once or twice where I've written very similar songs to friends of mine or people I know that was like, whoa. Maybe not sounding, but like the ideal, oh wow, I wrote something that was exactly, and he said like, we're all just Santana that are like catching energies and shit and like bringing them in and we're making something out of that energy. And sometimes people catch that same energy and similar things happen. So I always look at my ideas like this, but also because I don't write them down, I equate it to like my children like this. My ideas are like little animals that are wild and I see them and I think they're amazing and I want to, and I'll play a song until I know it. So it has to stick around. I train it to stay. And if it stays the next morning, this kind of answers your question, the next day. If I write, if I'm onto something and I write a song, I'll sing it 200 times if I get it close to done and then I'll go to bed. And then if it's there in the morning in the same form, I'll record it. If it's gone, it wasn't mine. And that's happened a lot. Dude, that's a brave move. I have the opposite cowards approach. If I get an idea, I'll run away from everybody with my fingers in my ears and write it down. Now hear what I said, I'll sing it 200 times. You know what I mean? So if I've done it 200 times and I don't wake up and know it, it's fucking trash. I write everything down. It's not supposed to happen. I have the total opposite approach in terms of writing comedy. How many specials have you made in your life? I never counted. Rough, yes. It's like eight or nine. Alright, that's how many albums I've done in almost 30 years. So it's like I'm not turning them out like that. And again, because of that, there's not like this crazy archive of garbage that's going to be released when I'm dead. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because even songs that I start to record, if I get halfway through it in, I'm like not even satisfied with it, it gets erased. There's a few things out there that I probably wouldn't have released, but they're like from House of Pain days. And they're not bad. I'm just like they weren't for, they didn't have a purpose. I think it's good for people to see bad shit from great artists. I do. I think it's good. It's good for everybody. I have no problem. I mean, I'm the guy that I'll fuck up live and talk about it for five minutes at a show and be like, yo, at least you know it's not on fucking tape. Right? I'll be like, that's real shit. You know what I'm saying? I'm with that. I'm just like, it's my process. It's like just the way I do. Like, you know, again, also I think I have to do it. I have some really hardcore producers like DJ Muggs and my man Dontae Ross. These were dudes that would be like, that fucking was garbage. Do it again. It's for so long that that's, I'm a, the first time now is going to be decent. You know what I mean? So it's like, I got to push myself for it to be better than decent. You know, you know, otherwise I just clip it. Yeah. That's the only way you could be as productive as you are. Like you have a, you have a well oiled approach, you know? And I don't put out a lot of music. Yeah, but when I know for a fact, when you put something out, you're happy about it. Oh yeah. I'm content. That's when you put it out. Content with it. That's, you're in a great position, man. You can kind of sort of decide what to do and when to do it. Playing three of the biggest songs in the nineties with what it's like jump around and put your lights on. Well, that was 2000 I think so, but that little period, I know I wrote those songs, jump around with mugs, what it's like and put your lights on totally on my own. That provided me with something that I cherish. Like some people cherish private jet rides, which is I can do whatever the fuck I want and still live pretty decent, not super rich guy or anything, but like better than average. No, you got a good life. Take care of my family, but creatively I could do whatever the fuck I want. And it's a beautiful thing, man. That's the older I get. Like I'm on my whole new shit. My slogan is fuck it. I'm 50, man. That's my new shit, dog. I'm on like, I don't, you ain't going to rattle me, man. I'm 50. I don't even care. How's that? If you're good. There you go. I'm just trying to have fun, live my life, go home, hug my kids and fucking know that nobody fucked with them at school and then they had a great day and then my universe is complete.