Slam poet and rapper Watsky is currently touring in support of his latest release Complaint. Similar to past albums, the artist supplies fans with a heavy dose of introspective themes delivered with his signature sarcastic humor. We had Watsky stop by to chat about the latest album and the secret behind his touring moves, which you can check out HERE.

While Watsky discussed what he wanted fans to take away from his live show and the importance of incorporating his poetry into his performance, we also learned a bit about songwriting, show mishaps, embracing the road and much more.

An album with no featured guests:

"I felt like putting no features on this album for sort of the same reason that I wanted to do a lot of the vocal arrangement myself and be involved with more levels of the music. I don’t want to be the least sonically compelling thing on my track. I don’t want people to just say I’m listening for the lyrics. I want my album to pass the car test and I want to do it on the strength of my own vocals. So I figured it would be an album where people would either love it or leave it based on whether or not they liked my vocals. I didn’t want to put in a lot of bells and whistles or when someone is listening to the track because this featured artist sounds great because they like them.

"I wanted it to succeed or fail on the merits of my own songwriting."

On song meanings:

"I don’t want anyone to make assumptions also because some songs become composite of multiple things, too. I have this song called “Sloppy Seconds,” which is probably like of my previous work this is on that’s had the most traction and it’s like a composite of three or four different people. It’s an honest song, like I know exactly what I’m talking about in different moments of the song, but people want to know “who’s that song about?” It’s not really about anyone.

It’s sort of like a dream when you put one person’s head on another person’s shoulder and then you look away and look back and that person is a new person again. I think you can have honest songs that draw from different moments in your life."

Being more in the moment:

"At the beginning when we were playing to 150 people, I put a lot of pressure on myself because I love playing live so much and I didn’t want it to collapse.

I had this mentality at the beginning like, ‘if we screw this up any tour can be our last tour.” Now that we have this loyal fan base that comes back, people have been coming to this tour and being like ‘this is my fourteenth show seeing you!’

Like, how did you stitch that many shows together? They’d go to two or three shows per each tour! It makes me feel like I can relax because I know that if we work hard and are grateful, the audience is going to keep coming back. It’s not based on a song and it’s not based on whether or not that particular show went perfectly. It makes my show better because I’m not in my head about anything except being in the moment and trying to experience that song. I’m not worried about one little technical thing going wrong. Even now I feel like if something technically goes wrong, it’s actually a good thing. It’s an opportunity for something unique to happen in the show. I feel like people in the crowd can see what an artist is really made of when something messes up, so me and the band just have this freedom and joy that has sort of built and ramped up over the years."

Working with a fire alarm:

"This was a show in El Paso. Little tiny room there and the fire alarm goes off because of our fogger and it’s like *imitates alarm noises* and we start incorporating that into a band jam where we cannot compete with this obnoxious fire alarm that’s happening, so we’re going to make it like a horn that’s happening in the music. It was a little show, this was a few years ago with like 60-70 people and it became a beautiful, sloppy mess with this giant fire alarm honking over the jam we were doing."

Home is the road:

"I’ve been a little homesick. I miss my girlfriend and I miss my friends, but

I can’t really use the word homesick because I don’t really have a home. Home is the road.

I’ve lived out of a suitcase for more than seven years because before my seven years of touring with the band, I played spoken word gigs as a poet on the college circuit, which is its own little insular circuit for like four or five years. Just me and a little rental car and a microphone, like the way a stand-up comedian travels. So if you count that, I’ve sort of been on the road for like 11 or 12 years and I’m used to that. My home kind of moves wherever my luggage moves, but I do miss my people. I miss snuggling and all that cupcakey stuff. It’s good to be back in L.A. for a couple of days."

Mixing up the set:

"The way I’ve been grappling with that is with different versions of our set. Not just get locked into one set of the course of a tour. I don’t have Grateful Dead-style flexibility, but I do like to be able to call out a tune and switch up the set in the middle if we feel like the mood is changing a certain direction. I have six versions of my set for one tour and people might get a slightly different version of it depending on what city they come to."

Working with Next VR

"We had this opportunity on my last tour, the “Welcome to the Family” tour that I did in the fall, to work with a company called Next VR and they’re connected with Oculus. They approached us to do a show as a VR experience and I was a little skeptical at first, not because I don’t like the idea of doing a show in VR, but because I hadn’t realized the technology had truly caught up to the intention to put the show in people’s living room. I’ve always felt like you can’t replicate that concert experience unless you’re there in the room. I still believe that to an extent, but there’s a large group of people for whatever reason, whether its geographical distance, financial hardship, or physical disability who just can’t be at a show and maybe can never be at a show. I feel like it’s important to try and serve those people and give them the best possible concert experience if you can. When they ran this livestream from our Boulder show, I was blown away. The mix was great, the picture was great, there was no latency between the picture and the sound, and I felt like this is not a travesty of a live show to watch this. We worked with them to re-release it and did for our first tour stop on the “Complaint” tour we did a digital tour stop. It was like if you can’t come to this tour, we’re going to stream this for free, it’s going to be at 7 p.m. west coast time, and I’m going to put it up closed caption for people after this tour ends. It was really gratifying and I heard from so many people who really felt emotionally connected to that experience."

Dynamic live show

"When you play with jazz musicians, it’s not like everyone is up there doing *imitates stereotypical interpretation of a modern jazz musician.* When you have a jazz background you can play any style. The people in my band can go from a Latin groove to shredding and playing rock to mathy, complicated, time-signature stuff into some headbanging shit. I think we have a really dynamic live show. I’ve tried to make sure that I’m not the weakest link musically on stage because I play with so many trained musicians. We have a really tight, dynamic show. People will come and be surprised by that."

Catch Watsky on his Complaint Tour, with remaining dates listed below.

Watsky's Complaint Tour Dates:

4/2 -Dublin, IRE @ Academy

4/4 - Paris, FRA @ Les Etoiles

4/5 - Amsterdam, HOL @ Paradisco Noord

4/6 - Ghent, BEL @ Charlatan

4/8 - Hamburg, GER @ Molotow

4/10 - Copenhagen, DEN @ Loppen

4/11 - Stockholm, SWE @ Fryshuset

4/12 - Oslo, NOR @ Parkteatret

4/14 - Berlin, GER @ Binuu