Do You Want More?!!!??! was acid jazz, Illadelph Halflife was a kind of Wu-Tang–influenced hard hip-hop production, and Things Fall Apart was definitive neo soul. We were going into the cocoon again. I wasn’t worried about our audience. They would follow us or they wouldn’t—I was used to losing about half our audience each time and picking up new f

Ben Kenney, who was playing guitar with us before he decamped for Incubus, was there with me,

Stephen Starr: Here’s to a good future.

Paul Humphrey was a session drummer who worked with everyone from Jimmy Smith and Charles Mingus to Frank Zappa and Marvin Gaye. He was also the drummer for Lawrence Welk’s TV show in the late seventies, and his children would sometimes appear with him on the show. Sound familiar?

Let’s say there’s an event and people around me get invited and I’m not invited. Some part of me will feel like a failure. How can you not? The real me knows that it’s just an event, but doubt enters my mind about why I’m not there. Is it because I’m not good enough?

And because it didn’t sell as well as either Phrenology or Things Fall Apart, we felt like we had been deceived. Here we were, selling our souls for greater commercial success, except that it wasn’t greater at all.25

“When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.”™

We were inspired by the Native Tongues collective and their idea of a broader identity that hangs over all the individual acts and unites them. By the fifth week out there, we even had a name for that overarching umbrella, too: the Foreign Objects. It was mostly playacting, I guess, the idea of thinking of a band name and a name for the group that

Playing on the floor at my Grandmother’s Compton, California, house. This is where I stayed when my parents were recording their Congress Alley album in 1972.