Noisey.com chops it up with emcee / producer extraordinaire, Lord Quest.

Noisey: How was your experience working with Schoolboy Q in the studio?
LordQuest: It was cool. He’s one of those people whose energy you have to really read. He’s a very laid back person. The way you see him on stage is not how he really is. He’s really chill and jokes a lot. If he doesn’t like a beat, he’ll just start doing other shit. He’ll start like rolling or talking to somebody, but when he actually likes a record he’ll start mumbling or rapping to himself. That’s when you know he’s interested. He’s a really dope person.

Explain the style of your music.
I don’t want to say backpacker. That’s a lot of stuff I grew up listening to, like the whole Justice League movement, I was huge on that stuff in highschool. I would just call it soul music for me because it’s stuff that I identify with. I always try to make it a point to be honest with my music. I remember when I was in high school there was this song that me and one of my homies did. Everybody was like “Yo this was dope” but it wasn’t honest. We were talking all this shit about shooting niggas and selling drugs and all this crap. One of the older cats at this school was like “Yo you shouldn’t talk about that shit because if you don’t really do that, then you’re not portraying your true self. There are people out there that look for stuff like this and they’ll test you. They’ll check you on all that to see if you’re really about that, and if you’re not, you’ll look like a clown.” I never forgot that. A lot of the stuff on “Still Shopping” is just real. I won’t talk about drugs, I won’t talk about shootings. I’ll talk about girls to an extent because obviously everyone’s had their experiences, but I’m not gonna be like ‘I’m pimpin, I got hoes.’ That’s not me, that’s not my character.

How did your beats sound back then, compared to now?
Wack! They sounded amazing to me. The way people viewed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, or “Niggas In Paris”, that’s how my beats sounded like to me. When I hear some of my earlier beats now, I’m like, what was I thinking?! These sound like Nintendo beats, very one-dimensional, no depth, no texture. You know when I first I tried to teach myself on FL Studio, which I still use to this day, I deleted it out of frustration. I just gave up. Five months later I heard 9th Wonder’s work on that Little Brother album [The Listening]. I was like, this is dope, and he became my biggest inspiration at that time. I downloaded FL Studio again and I’ve been doing it ever since.

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