Isaiah Rashad Dissects 'IT'S BEEN AWFUL'

I didn't want to have a lot of B words. Now you want to say bitch a lot. I got so many women in my family. Me and my brothers are the only men in our family.

After a while, and with different events in my life, made me kind of reflect on my own perspective. And I'm like, okay, I can still be successful without being a pig. Sometimes it's easy, though, to lean on that as a writer, especially as a dude, to be like, fuck a bitch.

And that shit didn't make sense. It made me feel weak after a while, even listening to that kind of shit. That's coming from a lack of self-love. Life's about embracing the haze.

What does that mean? Living in the moment. Seeing where the night takes you. Being up for the adventure.

And there's no better way to embrace it than with Hazy Little Thing by Sierra Nevada. Hazy, citrusy, smooth. Juicy, but not sweet. Hoppy, but not bitter.

America's best-selling hazy IPA for good reason. Hazy Little Thing. Enjoy responsibly. Welcome everyone to a very special episode of Dissect.

I'm your host, Cole Kushner. Today, we're honored to have Isaiah Rashad here to dissect his brand new album. It's been awful. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Congratulations on a very fantastic body of work. Thank you.

How's it feel now that it's out? It's a relief, I guess, you could say. I'm always looking forward. Where I used to be kind of amped about dropping it, I'm like, how can I make sure I keep promoting

this so people, outside of the cult, it gets attached to it. Yeah. Well, hopefully today's conversation helps. I got a thousand questions about the album and I got a lot of lyrics and themes and stuff I want to talk to you about, but I like to start my conversations off with getting to know your relationship with music a little bit more. A question I like to ask artists is, there's a moment in our lives in which music is something that we hear just kind of in the background. And at some point, it transforms into something that we have a real deep, meaningful relationship with.

I'm wondering when that happened for you and if there was an artist or album or a song even that made that transformation possible. I'd say it's this guy in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Mr. Bell. He was my high school band instructor. So around middle school, high school, when I was playing the clarinet and all that, I got into garage band.

And that's what really convinced me and got me into the act of love of making music. just getting garage band. But the artist, specifically, I'm from Chattanooga, so the first artist that really did that for me was Usher.

Oh, really? Man. Yeah. Amazing.

Do you remember a song or an album specifically? U-S-H-E-R. Which one is that one? I should know this.

I'm such a... It's on the My Way album. Okay. It was the My Way album that really did it for me.

Okay. Yeah. All right. But especially around 8701.

That was like 2002. maybe something like that yeah my aunt gave me that and i was convinced at that moment that i couldn't like be a singer for real you could not be a singer could not because i can't do it but i definitely was like man i it got me into songwriting plus you know lyric books and stuff

they used to be in the back of cds right yeah i've always been like in the literature so yeah kind of went hand in hand but definitely middle school mr bill shout out again shout out mr bill so you're into what kind of literature were you into uh originally my mom just had me into a lot of like um you know black uh autobiographical name of civil rights uh icon or or staple and

she had me reading that oh that's cool punishment she just had me reading and writing a dictionary just for and eventually it became practice and stuff that's i've got kids that's like actually a really good idea yeah or something to write do you remember like the first song you wrote or the first rap man i might have it i might be able to have somebody actually say to me like i

would love that it was like the ninth or 10th grade okay recording on those um macbook pros is it pro the laptop or the huge with the colorful yeah yeah yeah but they were like when they first got flat oh right right yeah yeah it was like those where they were like yeah that shit was tight yeah you know what i'm saying yeah but they had like a mic at the top so you're on

garage band you upload your beat or whatever right and we were going in a tech lab when nobody was there like probably during lunch or whatever and just flow so i i was about to flunk like ninth grade because i was spending like my first half of my first half of school trying to get the whatever rap i can get in you know what i'm saying that type of shit do you remember any like lyrics

specifically no i was corny though like yeah it was like some machismo yeah macho macho i'm the shit Of course. How's your relationship with music changed since it's become your career? I look for days where it's like, let me quit code switching.

I look for days where it's not work. Like yesterday it was work. and i knew when i walked into it i wasn't going to do it but other days is like what flow can i catch or uh more or less how can i impress myself like on an artistic level yeah like that's really

what keep me going right like just entertainment yeah yeah so it does feel like work sometimes but still at its best you still have like the connection to it when i'm not in a good head space or in the head space that i want to be in is work it's because i haven't done anything like probably that day like if i get up go to the gym have a little salad then go that's literally my

routine sometimes and then go straight to the studio without stopping in like the lock mode or taking a walk somewhere then yeah because i haven't stimulated my mind so it's like work mode right okay is music for you like a reflection of your life or is it a way to change your life do you find like you are able to change yourself through your music or is it more like a reflection

or maybe both maybe both yeah because i definitely will go back and listen to stuff that i wrote