Music
Discover the new Stones Throw pairing of soul singer Mayer Hawthorne and hip-hop producer Jake One.
What happens when you put Jake One (the Seattle hip-hop producer whose beats have been rapped on by State Property’s Freeway, G-Unit's 50 Cent and Mobb Deep’s Prodigy) and Mayer Hawthorne (the Grammy Award-nominated Los Angeles soul singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist) in the same room? The answer is Tuxedo – Jake One and Hawthorne’s new disco-funk-inspired duo.
Before listening to Tuxedo’s self-titled debut album (out now on venerable indie label Stones Throw) it seems like a bizarre coupling, but once you hear one of Tuxedo’s upbeat songs, like early single Do It, the project makes perfect sense.
We spoke with Jake One and Hawthorne. They told us about how they bonded through swapping mixtapes. Read the interview below and check out some specially curated playlists that explain how their disparate sounds came together.
Watch Mayer’s YouTube playlist below.
You became friends by exchanging mixtapes. What sort of music were you bonding over?
Jake One: We met through hip-hop more than anything. At the time, Mayer was in a rap group called Now On, and I had been making beats for a long time. What I was doing in rap had a side interest in funk and funk records. They weren’t records I was sampling, but that’s how we connected.
Hawthorne: We met through rap, for sure. Then we exchanged mixtapes, and they had some of the same songs on them. They were songs and artists that nobody else cared about, like Jerry Knight and One Way. It was pretty obscure, early ’80s disco funk. Now everyone wants those records. Nobody cared about them back then, but we loved them. We like a lot of similar music, and that’s why this project works as well as it does.
Watch Jake’s YouTube playlist below.
Why is Tuxedo the best name for this project?
Hawthorne: Well, Jake didn’t think it was a good name at first! We knew we wanted a one-word name, like the early ’80s funk groups we love: Chic and Shalamar, Plush, Odyssey. We knew it had to be a classy word because that’s the vibe of what we’re doing, musically. I came up with Tuxedo and was so surprised nobody else had used the name before. Jake didn’t like it at first, but he eventually came around.
Jake One: I didn’t, initially. It’s definitely a classy name and I was afraid we’d have to wear tuxedos and I was trying to avoid that. But I eventually came around to that too.
What do you think’s the ultimate music venue to experience a Tuxedo show?
Hawthorne: Somewhere you can dance. The whole album’s based around that. There don’t need to be lots of seats, just somewhere people can dance. There has to be a really dope dance floor. Whatever that place was in Saturday Night Fever, with the light-up floor. That building’s probably some sort of cold press New York juice bar now, with sustainable farming in the back. But that’s exactly where you want to be, down on that dancefloor.
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