Tone Glow 199: billy woods
An interview with the New York-based rapper about death, growing up in Zimbabwe, and leaving behind the people and places you love
billy woods
billy woods is a New York-based rapper and the founder of Backwoodz Studioz. Born to a Jamaican literature professor and Zimbabwean civil servant, woods lived in Zimbabwe throughout his childhood before moving to the United States in 1989. It was there that he saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and eventually bought Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). He would start rapping himself in the late 1990s, and has released numerous albums both solo and in collaboration with others in the years since. His newest solo album is GOLLIWOG (2025). More recently, he released a reimagining of the album with August Fanon called gowillog (2025), and an Armand Hammer record with Elucid titled Mercy (2025). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with woods on April 17th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss the politicized nature of Zimbabwe, cutting off limbs, and making a covenant with his mother.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: How’s your day been?
billy woods: Pretty good—very domestic.
Right, you were telling me earlier that you were with your kids. What sort of things do you feel like you’ve learned from being a father?
One thing that definitely happens is that you become aware of the ways in which you are like your parents. You also learn a little bit about the gap between the idealized version of yourself and what you actually do.
What’s an example of how that’s played out recently?
In my mind I was always like, no way I’m going to have kids and cater to what they want to eat, to the extent that they’re like, “I just want french fries.” (laughter). With my first child it worked out, but my second child was more picky and around 3 years old, his diet shrank considerably. I found it all frustrating and annoying. A lot of times you’re like, “I want this child to get enough nutrients to be healthy,” but you also think, “I want to get through the day.” He’s 3 years old, so it’s hard to make rational arguments. You can’t say, “Hey, if you don’t do X in the future, you’re not getting Y.” The future to a 3 year old is an amorphous idea, at least to my 3 year old (laughter).
Right now he’s into particular types of rice and pasta and french fries and pizza, and he’ll occasionally eat meat or fish. He’s always been on the no-vegetable diet—you gotta trick vegetables into things. Ridiculous. I always thought, “Nah, we’re not doing that.” But I will say, I’m still a believer in not doing that, but I need him to get old enough where he understands what the future means.
You talked about understanding more about yourself and how you’re the same or different from your parents. Can you share more about what it’s been like parenting and how you think it compares to how your parents raised you?
Neither of my parents grew up in the United States. They met here after coming from different countries and meeting at grad school in New York. I’m 5, going on 6 years old when we end up going to Zimbabwe, to Southern Africa, and I grew up closer to how my parents grew up. Well, not my mom. It’s just such a different dynamic there. Neither of my children have gone yet. And who knows, maybe they’ll have to flee this dumpster fire, but that’s already a big gap right there, of growing up in a developing country. I was going to Jamaica a lot and my kids haven’t done that sort of thing.
Reading was important to my parents and a big part of me growing up and it’s the same for my kids. But it can’t be scaled in the same way. There were much fewer forms of entertainment accessible to me. When we moved to Zimbabwe, there was one TV channel and it started at 5PM on weekdays and went offline at midnight—not that I was up that late at that age. By default, I watched less TV and read more. The importance of words and art and imagination is something that was there for me and is there for my kids. I have lots of issues with how I grew up, but I did always feel loved, and I hope that’s something that my children feel from me often.
How do you make it clear that you love them?
You say it! You just say it! You physically hug and kiss them and say how you feel. And sometimes saying it is explaining why you have consequences for doing something but that you still love them. You have to model that for people around you, making it okay to express your feelings, to express your love. That’s important.
When you think of Zimbabwe and growing up there, what sort of things come to mind? What things defined Zimbabwe for you?
Man. That particular moment in time, the energy that was in the air when we got there… I think about the weather. We were talking about TV, and I think about the color test screen before the TV broadcast started. The screen had these strips of different colors and this timer and graphic, and I was sitting there at 4:45, waiting for He-Man or whatever else to come on. I think of the food. I think of the military—at the time it was everywhere in Harare. I think of riding my bike. I think of how I’d be riding it to school and tying my tie before I got to class. I think of how British some of the things were: people spoke with a British accent, we had school uniforms, you had “forms” instead of “grades,” we played soccer and rugby and badminton and cricket.
I think of my father. He left the country before my 4th birthday once the Internal Settlement had started. Everything about him, to me, is synonymous with that period of time. Physically, he was a big man. As a child it felt like that. He also had a big personality. I think about the food that I only ate there. I think about the very dark times we had there as well. I could go on.
Earlier you mentioned that you knew your parents loved you but that there were problematic things. You’re talking about Zimbabwe being dark. Does anything stand out in terms of impacting how you thought about the world and your place in it?
Death. Lots of death. Maybe had I stayed in the States or if my parents had been Americans, I wouldn’t have had the same interaction with it. I saw my first dead body when I was 7 years old. And when my father died, as per tradition, his body stayed in the house overnight. At a certain point, you could describe it as a civil war or a period of repression or quasi-genocide depending on how you want to qualify things. The government forces were fighting against real and imagined dissidence in the Ndebele part of the country, and they’re a different ethnic group from the main ruling party. They’d broadcast things like, “X number of terrorists were killed” and you’d see bodies with flies crawling all over them on the news. Those things left an impact on me.
It was impactful because I was in Zimbabwe and Jamaica and then I’d go to the US and see how different the people lived. I grew up in the city in Zimbabwe, which is a comparatively very privileged situation than that of most people in the country. Although, my father eschewed signifiers of wealth to a comical degree. He drove the crappiest car even though he was in the government. He was pretty dedicated, at least in some ways, to his Marxist ideas. But I was privileged in many ways in terms of the context of the country. I’d go out with my dad to the rural areas pretty often, and sometimes you’d see children and what they had with them was it—they’d have their pair of clothes.
Kids would make these toys—there were these crazy awesome wire cars. It’s kind of hard to explain. It was a Zimbabwean craft. They’d make these cars and bicycles out of twisted wire and sometimes they’d have this little steering wheel so you could drive it—it’d telescope out from the car. Really bugged-out stuff. In the rural areas it’d be like, oh, we’re sitting in an actual thatched hut. Hospitality is a big thing there and a woman would come in with a big basin so all the men could wash their hands, and then they’d serve the food. This was all these people had—you could see everything they had right in front of you. It left an impact on me because I realized that people around the world lived in different ways. When I went to see my family in New York, I loved it. I’d visit my aunts in the ’80s in Manhattan. It felt like the movies. Then I’d visit an aunt who lived out in Queens, and it felt like you were a prisoner in your house because you’d be scared to go outside. My cousin got murdered out there.
I remember moving here and I had never really encountered—and maybe this is less so now—but when I moved back to America, people didn’t know or bother with politics, y’know? In Zimbabwe, there wasn’t this idea that politics didn’t affect you. The country was very politicized. A war had just ended. South Africa was right there, too. Even the weather was politicized! They’d announce the weather and my mother always used to laugh. They’d say, “Drought continues in racist South Africa,” or “Zionist Israel has storms today,” or “The imperialist United States did this.” When my parents had parties or dinner, that’s what people talked about.
It’s interesting hearing you say all this. I definitely feel like politics in America has reached a point where it’s impossible to not think and talk about it. It’s just all very much in your face now.
So much has changed about the consumption of media, even the types of media. And American politics themselves have changed. Ronald Reagan, a man who I don’t think is an amazing American president at all, couldn’t even be in the Republican Party now. I’m sure he would’ve changed and been on whatever bandwagon he needed to be on, but you couldn’t even be on that type of time now. And now there’s this whole mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, which is maybe too generic a phrase. Any crazy belief you have now—and not that people didn’t have crazy beliefs before—but you can easily find a community for it and support each other. Or maybe there’ll be bots on the internet who agree with you.
You just talked about how the weather was politicized in Zimbabwe and that reminds me of this lyric you have on “Jumpscare” where you say, “The English language is violence.” I’m curious how much you think about the power that is present in language, including when you rap. I’m thinking about your parents stressing the importance of reading too, as that feels related. What do you think your rapping is able to do and what do you think it’s not able to do?
As with the duality of all things, it’s intriguing to me that the English language came as part and parcel of the brutal and exploitative violence that brought my mother’s ancestors to the Caribbean, to work sugar plantations. Hundreds of years later, it brought my father’s people under the control of the British East India Company. As part of that massive colonial project, there was this attempt to turn subjects of all of these places, and the United Kingdom colonial project was about turning people into “new people”—people who were and would be British.
The exportation and the imposition of that culture and history—all of that leads hundreds of years later to where my mother knows more about Shakespeare and the English language and the European canon. One of the greatest gifts that she could give me was the English language, and the duality of that is really interesting. Although they did that and created this new person, their dedication to racism meant that they created these new Englishmen, but they can’t allow them to fully be Englishmen either, which is its own interesting trap.
I know when you first came back to the United States you got into Public Enemy. You said in a previous interview that they had this political messaging but that there was this immediacy to their music. How much are you thinking about that with your own work? Surely there are people who are listening to your work who aren’t as attentive to the lyrics; they may just latch onto the production and how it sounds, generally. Are you ever thinking about making songs in this layered manner, where you want it to grab people and for it to then hit people lyrically?
That’s a good question. I don’t know when you got your own music in your life, like the first album you bought for yourself, but when I got back to the States and had our own place, both me and my mom were staying at a friend of my mother’s. This was a Caribbean American woman and her family in Prince George’s County, Maryland. We’re staying with them while my mom tries to find an apartment. One of the first weekends we’re there, they went to the video store. This was Erol’s Video Club, which was before Blockbuster had made it down here. They rented Do the Right Thing (1989). I had never seen the movie. I watched it and I was blown away on many levels—it’s a powerful film. I was born here, and I’d been coming here my whole life, but this is me coming back here to live and not just visit my relatives in New York City.
It’s a powerful moment for me in that it was me getting a view of Black America. I was stepping into it, and it was partly about the music. At the end of the movie on the VHS rental, they have this video for “Fight the Power,” which incorporated clips from Do the Right Thing as Public Enemy is leading this huge march through the streets of Brooklyn. It was all of the things: the imagery, the S1Ws, the gun sight on the guy, it was Chuck D’s voice, it was how crazy and aggressive the beat was. My dad just died, too. This was all very appealing to me. It was about politics, it was about the lyrics. And Chuck D’s lyrics are, you know, (starts rapping) “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me!” There wasn’t a terrible amount of deciphering that had to happen (laughter). I still had a lot of things to figure out, like I had to learn about Yusef Hawkins.
I went and bought the album, and this was later when we moved into the apartment. Unbeknownst to me, I walked in with my little bit of money and asked, “What’s the newest Public Enemy tape?” He pointed me towards It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), I went to get the cassette, paid for it, and I’m listening to the joint and I’m looking through the tracklist and “Fight the Power” isn’t on there! It’s a single made for the movie, and it was so successful that they put it on the album to come. I was at first super disappointed, but I was sitting there, listening to the album and thinking, “Wow, this is great.”
They used to have all their lyrics printed out and I’d read along. That’s how I got into rap music. Since that point, and with some exceptions, I’ve always tried to provide the lyrics—and Genius’ lyrics are all over the place. A big part of it is that I remember what it did for me. Especially with that time in hip-hop, it’s like I was jumping onto a moving train, so anything that was helping me contextualize it was big. So it wasn’t only about the sonics, but coming from a politicized environment, it made sense that this political rap group caught my ear. At the time I was just starting to read Baldwin, so this was what I was primed and ready for.
Do you worry about the inaccessibility of any of your lyrics? Why not correct the lyrics on Genius?
I always thought that you’d want to do it in a physical form. I had a period in my life where I was doing other types of writing and a lot of it was on this website, and one day the person who ran it felt they were done with it—they were emotionally and financially spent—and without a whole lot of warning, they just deaded the site. All that stuff was gone. And this isn’t about that person, I’m not saying anything bad about them, it’s just that when there’s a physical copy of something, it’s good. As for going on Genius… man, let’s talk about hours in the day (laughter). I’m not doing all that. It’s hard for me to even look at my own stuff because some things will be super easy and the interpretations… I’m like, why are you going there? It can be a little depressing. And people’s transcriptions sometimes don’t make sense!
Do you worry about being too ambiguous compared to how you were describing Chuck D?
Not really. When I’m writing, I’m already trying to do so many things that I’m not sitting down with that in mind. A lot of times, I write music that can be very explicitly direct. Sometimes I have songs that are really straightforward and some people still go left. The important thing is to always do what I think is really good—if I get off of that, things get counterproductive. When I write, the first things I think about are words and ideas. Other things come in of course. And sometimes I’ll choose the beat.
Is there a different sort of process you have when you’re working with someone who plays actual instruments, like on “Dislocated,” versus beats?
I have helped produce things and have dug into co-producing, I’ve brought people samples, I’ve sat and been like, “How ‘bout we do this?” But I have made it clear that I am not a producer. I don’t make beats, so I don’t get too caught up in that. It’s kind of like if you’re a server at a restaurant. It’s not making a big difference to you that… for example, we might have a steak coming out and it’s a dry-aged ribeye, medium rare. As a server, whether the person did a reverse sear where they cooked it and then seared it afterwards, or they did it the traditional way, or maybe something else altogether. When you’re the server, that doesn’t really matter, y’know? It’s interesting, you’d like to learn more, but I’ve got a song to write.
I wanted to ask about this line you have on “Maquiladoras.” You say, “You can’t get away if you don’t leave something behind.” I’m wondering, when was the first time you understood that truth, and when did you most recently leave something behind?
Oh man, you’ve got some good questions man. The first time… well, there’s thinking and understanding, and then there’s actually doing it, and then there’s seeing it in retrospect. I think the first true, in-my-gut recognition of that was… oh man, how deep of a story you want?
I’m down for the deepest.
Okay. In retrospect, I recognize it in terms of Zimbabwe. In order to leave, my mother had to leave everything. We left that big, beautiful house. The woman who worked for us and lived in the domestic quarters behind our home, she was a woman who’d been with us for a long, long time. She’d been with us through some crazy things, and she was an integral part of my childhood. She was compensated and my mother made sure the people who were renting the house would still keep her employed, but all of that was kind of crazy. We left an entire lifestyle behind.
The first time that it was real to me in the moment was… I had this friend who was born in the States and his family were West Africans. They were from Ghana. We went through a lot of stuff together. He’s a person I love very much. When college came, I went away to New York and he went away to a trade school. After a year, he ended up dropping out, coming home, and from that point on he kind of bounced between working and selling cocaine. Great human being, bad drug dealer. He got caught up a couple times and then he’d be on probation and would try to get back into work.
He also became an alcoholic at a very young age. I was probably a freshman or sophomore in college when this happened, but one time, I got a really cheap bottle of liquor that some girl I knew had stolen from her grandparents. It was this bottle of super cheap vodka, and she was like, I don’t want to drink this. A different night, I went to link up with him and had a bunch of weed. We went into the woods and got fucked up. He got super fucked up.
I remember that night he told me two things that were very true. I was hustling then, but I was in school and had all these other ideas of myself, and he said, “You are what you do.” I can’t remember how we got into this debate but he said, “You’re a drug dealer. That’s what you do. That’s what your focus is. You already got kicked out of school.” I remember it annoyed me at the time. I was like, “You’re drunk, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” The other thing he told me at the end of the night was, “We’re not always gonna be able to kick it. You’re gonna have to separate yourself from me.” And that upset me a lot. And the funny thing is, he was wasted, he was crushed. I don’t know what things he was going through to say all that, but after that, we didn’t really talk about it again and everything continued all normal.
Years pass and I move back to this area. One of my primary motivations was, I always felt that he looked out for me, that he helped me make it to whatever point I had made it to at the time. It was nothing special (laughs), but I did graduate college. I was like, I need to help him out, he just needs to get out of there. I had some bread from what I had been doing in New York, and I came back home with this idea. We got an apartment in the city, in D.C., and things didn’t really go that way. A bunch of stuff happened, but the apartment that we shared—and this relates to “A Doll Fulla Pins,” actually—somebody tried to rob me. Then there was a violent incident in the apartment, the police raided it, and so on.
Knowing that you have a problem and figuring out how to rid yourself of it can be two very different things. We moved there, but he wasn’t really able to cut ties with the people that we grew up with. The outcomes there were foregone conclusions. I was so deep into what I was doing that I wasn’t really paying attention. At the conclusion of that whole episode, all participants left, to our great fortune, with their lives and freedom—but I lost a lot of money. At that point I was like, I can’t live here anymore. “Just tell everybody else I left town. Here’s three months’ rent.”
I moved in with this girl that I knew, which was very close by (laughs). I was only a block away, so we continued to kick it and stay close. It was an important lesson in how you can’t save people from themselves. I had hopes that me giving him money was me washing my hands of the situation—not wrongly, but I tried—but it went how the pessimistic side of me thought it would. He got deported and is now no longer in this country, but we still talk—he still calls me from time to time. Separating from him… I knew that he would probably sink and not swim. But at that point I had to make a decision, that this was no longer my concern.
That’s a tough decision.
Very, very tough. And things went bad. I still get emotional thinking about it. You come home and you’re like, where is this person? And people tell me, “Oh, he’s usually outside the 7-Eleven.” What? And then you go see your friend outside the 7-Eleven trying to get money to drink beer… it’s a crazy experience. I had to cut a piece of myself off in order to survive. I’ve never told this story in detail before. It’s crazy because years before this he told me that all this would come. Both of the things he told me were really true. He was that type of person. He had that African philosopher aspect to him, which seems crazy because he was an alcoholic and drug dealer. But he told me, “Whatever you do, that’s what you are—don’t fool yourself and spend your time thinking otherwise. If you spend your time selling crack, you’re a crack dealer. It doesn’t matter how many books you read or whatever else you’re doing.” It was a valuable thing to hear, because then you think about what you spend your time doing—don’t lie to yourself. He was a wise person in all of his stupidity. He was smarter than me in those moments, that’s for sure.
I’m thinking about that line on “Make No Mistake” where you say, “People stay stuck in their ways, who am I to judge?”
For sure. “What you should’ve did just sit on your shoulder. What you could’ve been haunts you as you get older.”
Is there a recent story you have of leaving something?
Yeah. I lived in the same apartment for a long time in New York City. Part of that was because, along with the things I just told you about, I had lived in eight different places between 1996 and 2001. Maybe more than that. That year and a half in D.C., I lived in three places. I was in one place while I was waiting for him to get it together, then we moved to Northwest D.C., then all the stuff I just told you happened with the apartment and the next day I’m gone. “Here’s the bread, I’m out.” I’m happy to be alive right now, y’know what I mean? I moved in with this girl I was friends with around the corner. All of that is in a year and a half, from right before Christmas 1999 to probably April 2001. I lived in those three places and then that summer, I was bouncing around. I had some bread. I went to Amsterdam, to New York, to Maine, to different places. I was figuring out if I was gonna move to New York or California. When I moved into the new place I was like, I wanna be here for a minute. And unbeknownst to me, I would stay in that apartment for 17 years.
Me and the landlord of that place had a 17-year-long relationship. It was a poorly maintained, crappy building, but when I moved in it was a two-bedroom railroad for $1100. This was 2001, right after 9/11. Me and this girl moved there and it was like, alright, I can do this. It was that price until 2005, and then it took a big jump to $1400 in 2006. It steadily kept going up and it was at the whim of the landlord. Then he started doing month-to-month leases and my housing situation kept getting more and more insecure. It started like, oh this apartment’s fine, but it’s a deal. And then it went to, okay this apartment sucks and it’s not a deal at all. The apartment depreciated and my rent got up to like $1900. I wasn’t happy about it.
An incident happened where there was a gas leak in the building. The fire department came to handle it and, long story short, they found illegal plumbing in the building. They shut off the gas main to the building and they said, “Until you get all of this plumbing up to code, no gas supply here.” The landlord was like, “Okay, I’ll get this fixed soon.” I told him, “Until you get this fixed, I’m not paying rent.” Our hot water still worked because the boiler was electric, but there was no heat in the building, which didn’t matter at first because it was around the end of summer, but there was no stove. He said he’d have it fixed in a few weeks, and then weeks turn into months and then it’s wintertime. The apartment is freezing cold, I haven’t had a stove in months, and they gave us an electric hot plate—this is not it. It was so cold that I had a little space heater in the bedroom when I slept, but then you’d go into the kitchen and there’d be ice on the inside of the windows. After you took a super hot shower, you’d come out to the kitchen and all the condensation from the bathroom would move there and turn to ice.
So I’m going through all this crazy shit. At least I was smart enough to call 311 to get all this shit documented. And of course, I had a roommate. I didn’t really know her—she was like a college student—and she was like, “We don’t have a stove or heat? I’m out.” I negotiated with this guy and we were just so far apart on the number. He was trying to knock off 30% on the rent. And I’m like, that’s not even gonna cut it. I’m only thinking about my half because I couldn’t get a roommate because this shit wasn’t up to code. In the end, I was willing to concede more than him, and it ended up like $1500 a part and he just wouldn’t budge. I left and was so furious. I lived here for almost my entire adult life, and I had no heat on Christmas! I couldn’t turn on the stove! I wasted so much money ordering delivery. I was really vexed and I took him to court, I won the case, and he had to make all these repairs to the apartment. But I realized that once he’s finished doing that, he’s gonna be a vindictive person. There were a ton of things that needed to be done, and he asked when things should get started. I told him to just do it after I left.
Luckily for me, that money ended up seeing me through the next little spot in my life. And this is when I’m making Hiding Places (2019). Leaving that apartment, I went from living there for 17 years to being like, I need to be out in two weeks. So I left a lot behind, including physically. When I moved into this apartment, I had this artist named James Bon—this artist and producer I’ve worked with—paint this gigantic mural on the wall of the apartment. I was like, I wanna stay here for a while, but I was 23 years old and I had no idea I was gonna move out of this apartment when I was 41. Bon produced a lot of Camouflage (2003) and he was a close friend at the time. I still consider him a good friend, but I haven’t seen him in a while. He was important to my artistic development; his production carried a lot of my early work, when I was smart enough to use it.
The things that you dig out when you live somewhere that long… there was merch that I had to be like, nobody’s gonna buy this. I had to get out of there in two weeks and it was like, okay, these Super Chron CDs have gotta go (laughter). I remember coming back after I put most of my stuff on the curb, and this is another crazy thing about music—I remember I had that song, “Groundhogs Day,” where I was like, “Put my apartment on the curb / Worse for the wear / And left a pharaoh’s curse for whoever next there.” It’s funny because then that all happened, which is why I had another song, “FNU LNU,” where I say (starts rapping) “Flow work like vintage Ghost / Scared, ’cause errything came true that I wrote / Erry misfortune, the pen gloat / Erry blank page stretch like a moat / Erry road lead to an old verse, combin’ my notes.” Like oh shit, am I writing my own future? What’s next then? (laughter).
You gotta write more optimistic things.
Exactly (laughter). So leaving that apartment… it really felt like cutting off a limb without any warning.
There’s a line on “Golgotha” where you say, “Many years ago, my mother and I made a covenant.” What are you referring to there?
She made it clear to me what she wanted to happen when she dies. It’s an important thing to be charged with the responsibility of. And we’re not drunk—we’re sober-minded—and she looked me in the eye and said, “This is what I need from you. I am depending on you and trusting you with this.” It’s a big thing. I have done that to someone else in my life, and it’s a big thing. You don’t just ask anybody to do that.
What did you ask them to do?
Just things I need them to do and where things are. And there are things I don’t want people to do.
What wouldn’t you want people to do?
That would be telling.
It’s clear to me that you appreciate film a lot. Is there any recent film that excited you, that inspired you?
You got good questions, I appreciate good questions. I saw this movie called Aftersun (2022) and that was fantastic. I also saw this documentary that is one of the more emotional and challenging things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s called Four Daughters (2023) and is about this Tunisian woman and her four daughters. The way the documentary was made was also very unique. I really recommend that people see it.
Are you watching movies on a regular basis?
Not as much as I want to. It’s hard to find people who want to watch good movies. I remember the first time I dated a woman who was like, “I don’t really like movies,” I was stunned. And now it’s not that strange to meet people like that. This woman had not watched a lot of movies, and she’d ask me to recommend something and I’d find myself realizing that there are hundreds of great films of all types. I could easily give a recommendation and, any day of the week, she could sit down and watch them. It’s like if someone had not read any books but still had the capacity to read, understand, and appreciate literature… like, any day they could sit down and have a transformative experience. Of course, there’s good movies that I haven’t seen, don’t get me wrong, but she’d say “recommend me a movie” and I could say anything! The Godfather Part II (1974), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), The Remains of the Day (1993), Blood Simple (1984), Cure (1997). Just whatever. And sometimes I’ll think about that and it’s like… that’s crazy.
How does your love for movies translate to how you make music?
It’s all storytelling, you know? Sometimes you’re trying to make it very visual.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Just one, huh? I like a few things, so it’s a tough choice. (pauses to think). This is where I choose between something that’s very practical—where I recognize its usefulness to me and, given my other personality traits, is an essential companion to them—and choosing something that I enjoy in a visceral sense.
Let’s hear both.
The first thing is that, according to my mother, I have a really innate sense of who people are. I love people, and I’m not being jaded at all, but I think I’m able to discern who people are at their core, their behaviors and why they do certain things, all without a lot of effort. For better or worse, it’s usually quite accurate. That’s been a useful thing for me, many times. That’s allowed me to maintain relationships and to know who to pursue relationships with.
The second is that I’m a fun person to be around. If I’m left to my own devices, it’s alright. I’m going to enjoy my time. This is something that came around from being around death and suffering since I was a young age. I’ve always made, and always will make, a strong effort to enjoy my life. I want to appreciate every aspect of being alive that is good.
billy woods’ GOLLIWOG, gowillog, and Armand Hammer’s Mercy are out now.
Thank you for reading the 199th issue of Tone Glow. Every aspect.
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this is a tremendous interview! can’t wait to read more
Amazing interview in both questions and answers