Mr. Hudson: Straight No Chaser | Hypebeast

Interview with Mr. Hudson

Ben, very nice meeting you. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got to where you are now?

I’m just a fairly typical kid from the suburbs, but I’ve always had a taste for American stuff. I was always obsessed by Back to the Future and I loved American sports because I was rubbish at British ones. I wasn’t good at soccer or anything. I got okay at basketball and tried American football as well. Surely enough it served me well when I arrived in Hawaii and Kanye and the guys were surprised that an Englishman could do a decent layup. I guess it’s just a funny story how I ended up here.

Most people actually think that your connection with Kanye developed overnight, but from what I understand, it actually took some time, no?

The thing is it took me a long time to figure out my sound because I always wanted to showcase the best of both worlds. I wanted to be a songwriter and didn’t want to neglect that part of my craft. I also wanted to learn about production. I started getting into stuff like J Dilla, Kanye West and Outkast, those might be some of the most obvious places to start, but you know, being an Englishmen, it’s not like being in New York. I didn’t necessarily have everything available to me. It took me awhile to fuse those 2 things, songwriting and a what we call urban production. Then I made that first album, A Tale of Two Cities, which actually never came out here (America), just in the UK, which is where Kanye heard it and thought it was good music.

How long did it take to begin working on your album?

We were working on The Blueprint 3 in Hawaii and also started doing 808’s and Heartbreaks before we finally got around to my record this year. Here we are, Summer 2009. Its been a long grind, its be a long time coming for me to be on whatever floor of this building, talking to people on the phone about the album. You know, it’s crazy.

It definitely is. I was reading about your journey in various overseas interviews and it’s been a wild one.

Yes, I’m the new kid on the block.

So Mr. Hudson began as a band correct, not just a solo project, but rather Mr. Hudson and The Library?

Yea, I mean it’s one of those things that’s hard to do on a project like this, perhaps. It’s kind of like Prince, where he has a band and it’s important to him, but he still remains just Prince.

I can understand. So will Straight No Chaser follow a sound familiar to that of your new single, Supernova, or will it be more geared towards the sound of A Tale of Two Cities?

It’s bigger, it’s wider and it’s louder. It’s more future human arts basically.