Even though that sometimes creeps in there because you’re always on the edge of a knife. Do I think he meant to die? No, I don’t think he did. You ride the line, you don’t know how close you are sometimes.
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Did he know Mac was in trouble? “I mean, we were in trouble,” he says, twirling one of his thin, bleached dreadlocks, “but you don’t realise it all the time. “It scared the shit out of me,” says Bruner. Bruner spoke to him the night before in the morning, he was gone. But it was the last performance Miller would do: a month later he died, aged 26, from an accidental overdose. Bruner struck up a close friendship with Mac Miller – you can see their doe-eyed bromance in their Tiny Desk concert video in August 2018. Yet despite this upward trajectory, the lows have been tough to take.
He is now an eccentric visionary as likely to appear on the cover of experimental music magazine The Wire as he is to perform on primetime American chat show Jimmy Kimmel or have his songs covered by Ariana Grande. After Drunk’s success, Bruner puts it casually, he felt “like I woke up in a different place”.
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Until then, Bruner had been best known for being the oddball bass player who contributed to Lamar’s seminal To Pimp a Butterfly – winning a Grammy for the track These Walls – as well as nimble noodling on childhood pal Kamasi Washington’s acclaimed jazz album The Epic, various releases by Flying Lotus (his longtime co-producer), including their soundtrack for Donald Glover’s hit TV show Atlanta, and on Mac Miller’s 2018 album Swimming. It featured stars such as Pharrell, Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller, appeared in best album lists everywhere and made genre hilariously irrelevant as he took out big, fat, fluorescent marker pens and liberally daubed over jazz-funk fusion, cosmic soul, prog, R&B and lurid comedy skits like a 21st-century Frank Zappa.
In 2017, his screwball, falsetto-funk album Drunk, a 26-track joyride through subjects as disparate as police brutality and being friend-zoned, had taken him to a much wider audience. His new album is titled It Is What It Is, as if serving as a shrug of acquiescence at how unexpected and vicious life can be, after a few unusual years. That attitude might sound a little nonchalant, but this has become a bit of a running theme. And probably had the intention to let it in just enough so he could get to stay president. This lockdown is “what has to happen because our president’s a jackass. “I think I’ve just accepted that everything is terrible,” he says. As with so many musicians this spring, the rest of his tour has been cancelled.Īnd yet, Bruner seems unfazed by the global pandemic taking place outside, or the fact he is about to release a fourth album in the middle of it. A week previously, Brad Pitt had been spotted at Bruner’s LA gig – “it was pretty wild,” he concurs. A theatre looms opposite, its neon sign unlit, the words “postponed” glaring out front. Just like any other pre-show interview, we are sitting in a hotel restaurant. “It feels like the opening scene in The Big Lebowski, tumbleweed blowing down the street,” says the 35-year-old, real name Stephen Bruner. We meet in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in mid-March, when things have already started seeming strange. She said to me: ‘Man, I loved him too, but I wouldn’t get him inked on me.’ And everybody laughed.”
“They were close friends and played together. So I think he may have moved a little too quick.” Or when Joni Mitchell mocked him when she saw his leg tattoo of his bass hero, Jaco Pastorius. ’ And then he promptly did the James Brown in sandals, but I think he had just had hip surgery. And he goes: ‘That’s not how you do the James Brown. “I was drunk, dancing, and he walks up and he’s got them platform sandals, and he’s got his shirt all shiny and stuff.
Such as the time he met Prince at one of the late star’s infamous house parties. But, having worked with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Childish Gambino, Pharrell Williams and Erykah Badu, he has enough entertaining stories to last a lockdown. Not only has the bass-playing, kitten ear-wearing, genre-blurring musician just released a new album – let’s call it a self-isolation soundtrack. I f anyone was destined to make our current situation more bearable, it’s Thundercat.
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