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pretty good reads. i like how he actually has explanations for why he does music the way he does. partial swipes below
http://americansongwriter.com/2007/03/k-os-the-school-of-mccartney/
“After I secured a record deal, I listened back to one of my CDs and threw it against the wall-the CD exploded into pieces on contact-saying that it was bullshit. The reason I felt that way was because I didn’t mean what I was saying. I was listening to everything that ranged from The Fugees to OutKast, and I realized that I was just saying what I thought my heroes would say.
“The truth was that none of those lyrics were mine; I didn’t own any of it. And that’s when I started to take off all of the disguises-the Triple Fat Gooses and everything else that I was hiding behind. I went back to my childhood to look over things that I’d written when I was 15. I listened to my old recordings before I had a perception of what hip-hop was. I became truthful with myself. I realized that, hey, I really like The Eagles. Hey, I really like The Beatles. Hey, I really like Frank Sinatra. So when I got back to the songwriting process, my lyrics were coming out through hip-hop, but now there were different influences driving my sound. So that’s what happened when I took my time off; I stopped being embarrassed by my musical influences and finally began to use those influences to my advantage.”
http://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/k-os/
Songfacts: When you write lyrics, do you write them in one shot for a song?
K-os: Great question. Tricky question. I don't know where my lyrics come from. I have no idea, and it's always going to be a mystery to me. Sometimes I listen back to some of the stuff I wrote, and I don't know how I ended up rhyming this with this. It just sort of happens.
And that's the one part of my music that I never really can say is calculated. I make a piece of music and sit around with it - music comes first 90 percent of the time. I've got the bed track and I've got my headphones on. I'm out for a walk or I'm in a car with the music blasting.
Then I just start saying stuff on top of it that the music feels like what it should say. The song's already telling me what it should say.
Paul McCartney says that most of the songs are already written, you just happen to be the person that is chosen to capture that one. Paul McCartney said he wrote that song "Yesterday" one morning when he was on a boat. He just woke up and he wrote this thing. He went to all the members in the band, to George Harrison, to Ringo, and asked, Have you heard this song before? And they're like, No, never.
Finally he got to John Lennon, who was probably a little more critical. He's like, No, no, you wrote that. And that's how he wrote "Yesterday." But he swore it must be something he'd heard before.
So a lot of times you write stuff lyrically and if it sounds good, it's because it's a culmination of every great lyrical song you've ever heard, and you've just taken all of them and done your own version. I think that's probably the bottom line of where lyrics come from.
So it's never a one-shot thing in the sense of I sit down with a pen and a pad. But it's definitely a one-shot thing that once you're on that train and you're riding it, it just all starts coming to you.
https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/music/the-miseducation-of-k-os
Q:Toronto is in the midst of a flourishing cultural revolution thanks to artists like Drake and The Weeknd. It’s easy to see a through line between what you were doing and what those artists are doing. Do you see yourself as a godfather to that scene?
A: For me, I see that as someone like Saukrates. He’s the godfather to me. So you have to keep it in check. Yes, I’ll take that because I think I did do a lot of weird things musically but that’s the only thing I want to be recognized for: a dude who took chances. When I had a $400,000 record budget I made an album like Atlantis which mixed genres way before that was happening. But the godfather title I only take it in a musical aspect. I think I’m a pretty dumb business man. I’m the guy who says no to iPod commercials. I’m the dude that walks out of his New York record office in the middle of meetings. I’ve always done stuff to not care about business.
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