For a droopy-lidded dude who appears forever sleepwalking, Aesop Rock spits verses worthy of Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Not far from two decades into this roller coaster ride, Aesop Rock is speedy, strong and steady — both the tortoise and the hare in a race he made and is bound to win.
“I feel like there’s music where someone’s talking at you or there are people who make music to completely escape from that,” Aesop Rock said. “I need to dip into fantasy.”
His fantasy is a doozy. From his breakthrough “Labor Days” to last year’s “Skelethon,” Aesop Rock’s albums feature fast flows that at first pass are strings of non sequiturs.
But his lyrics are DNA helices of weaving and winding rhymes that leave a story behind, or, at the very least, a luscious landscape of vocabulary.
“I want people to put on their headphones and hopefully there are layers that people can peel back over multiple listens,” Aesop Rock said.
Take the track “ZZZ Top” as a random sample: “Homemade curfew, a thousand o’clock/ And a pot leaf tattoo his friend did drunk/ Like a badge of mystique that technically sucked.”
This painting of a disillusioned guy is one of his more straightforward pieces.
Besides touring to promote “Skelethon,” Aesop Rock lends his lips to a new collaboration with folkish singer Kimya Dawson — a match whose oddity is befitting of Aesop Rock. Their debut album as The Uncluded hits shelves May 7.
It’s been a whirlwind of activity of different varieties for Aesop Rock over the past few years. His five-year solo album drought, a byproduct of his former label’s hiatus, gave him the opportunity to birth ideas like this collaboration, as well as numerous side projects and production duties.
“I had been really stockpiling things that I thought were worthy of a solo album, what I considered the best of the best,” Aesop Rock said.
Listening to “Skelethon,” it’s clear some of the scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor will probably show up later — worthy of release, though crowded out by their homonym-filled brethren.
The progression of this laid-back yet heady style remains an enigma to even him.
“I wish I could say I read a thousand books, but I haven’t,” Aesop Rock said. “I think over the years, it’s just evolved. I keep slowly letting more go.”
Not bad for a kid from a conservative Catholic family who accidentally exposed himself to rap in the early ’90s while kick-flipping with his pals.
“Every year it becomes clearer that if I can find the kids that were like me, if I can look in the audience and see me, I feel like maybe I’m doing something all right,” Aesop Rock said.
Unpretentious in the face of intimidating verbosity, Aesop Rock is getting more comfortable in his own skin as the years fly by.
“I don’t have ‘Here’s what it’s about and here’s the moral of the story,’” Aesop Rock said. “It’s more of ‘Hey man, I’m just this dude, slogging through this [expletive] with you, too.’”
