It’s hard to believe that we’re nearing three years since the last release of The Roots solo album undun in 2011, but the legendary Philly band will be soon returning with an all new concept album. The project dubbed & Then You Shoot Your Cousin has been in the known from the masses since last year and is being targeted for a spring release in the coming weeks.
Following the fall release of their collaborative Wise Up Ghost album with Elvis Costello, the group has been recently making a transition in their 2nd week in the bright lights for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Check after the jump to see what Black Thought has to say on the groups upcoming 11th studio album and what we can expect.
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“We’re close to being done on it, it’s coming soon, hopefully sometime this Spring,” Thought said. “It’s called And Then You Shoot Your Cousin. It’s conceptual; it’s another concept album in the spirit of undun, but it’s not just about just one kind of character, we create quite a few different characters in this record. It’s satire, but in that satire it’s an analysis of some of the stereotypes perpetuated in not only the hip-hop community, but in the community. I don’t know if that makes any sense.”
“We created some of these characters that we kind of see,” he continued. “We as artists, musicians, Philadelphians, New Yorkers, we as black men, we’re familiar with very many of these characters, and we kind of introduce them to the rest of the world in a manner that makes them more easily understood than maybe seeing it.”
“Hopefully you’ll get something new from it every time you listen to it, you’ll hone in on something different,” Thought said. “It’s short enough to do that, to take in, to digest in one sitting, so to speak. I think right now it’s at maybe 34 minutes; there may be one or two musical things added on to the record that I know is the record at this point. But I don’t think it will be any longer than 36 or 37 minutes in its entirety. So in that, it’s short enough to digest, but it’s gonna be dense. So dense that maybe in one sitting you’ll listen to it and only listen to the piano and string arrangements, and then you’ll listen to it again and you’ll get into the actual words that are being said, and you’ll listen again and get into some of the other musicality. There’s very many layers to this record, but it doesn’t take place over very much time.”