Minneapolis musician Andrew Broder, aka Fog, has been making music since his childhood in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. Like many musicians, Andrew objects to the emphasis placed on distinguishing between different genres of music, and having dabbled in many different styles, he is now committed to using any of them without professing to belong to any of them.

Andrew now works both as a solo act and, in live performances, in a band with Jeremy Ylvisaker (guitar), Baer Ericksen (bass), and Martin Dosh (drums). He composes all his own songs, sometimes improvisationally, and on his recordings, he plays all the instruments, including guitar, turntables, piano, and drums. At the time this interview took place, November 8, 2002, he was just finishing his second recording as Fog.

Andrew performing for the last time with former band Lateduster on November 8, 2002, at the 7th Street Entry

Andrew's early music life: "just stupid music, making up dumb songs about whatever"
Andrew's music started when he was a kid with piano and guitar. He took lessons for a while, then quit, and is mostly self-taught because he had a distaste for lessons. Between piano and guitar, the guitar was a bit more of a foundation for him early on. Andrew describes his earliest musical creation with the usual embarrassment artists feel about their early work: "... making stupid little self-recordings, I used to play music with my older brother at home, just stupid music, making up dumb songs about whatever, we were both kind of weird kids, and off in our own world, just making up songs ... Music has always been the number one escape for me. That as much as the act of playing, the act of escape has a lot to do with why music has always been a constant thing."

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Escape from what?
AB: From whatever, reality. Whatever life presented. I guess it does kind of come from a feeling of being an outsider, so being able to create something on your own, of your own, kind of makes you feel like you have something to hide in. Music is your hiding place from whatever the world throws at you ... if you don’t fit into what life has for you, you create your own through sound ... Also along the way, I picked up playing drums a little bit, keyboards, whatever, just kind of messing around. Turntables came into the picture basically from just liking hip hop, when I was twelve, thirteen.

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Where did you grow up?
AB: St. Louis Park, which is kind of a void. And then more and more I started hanging out with kids that didn’t go to my school, who went to schools in the city, and started picking up more on hip hop, the culture of it, kind of immersed in it ... the natural thing to do seemed to be to get turntables and start DJing, just because I was a hip hop fan and I felt that was what I could be competent at as far as hip hop was concerned. Writing graffiti too, it was the same time, I was drawing and doing art, when I was around fifteen. At that stage I did everything in my power to deny to everyone, including myself, that I was from the suburbs. But unfortunately you can’t help where you’re from.

This was influential ...?
AB: Just establishing a group of friends, that we all kinda started running around together, and again it was kids that didn’t necessarily go to my school. It’s corny now, but it gave me a sense of identity, or whatever, coming from this place that’s nothing, and being able to see myself as having a bit more of something to say at that time. Everybody at that age wants to find a peer group or whatever, I just happened to find mine in an urban environment, but at the same time I was still a dork, always have been, that won’t ever change no matter how hard I try. (Laughter) Musicians are dorks, it’s true.

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So you got this idea to get the turntables, why?
AB: I wanted to start scratching, just on a very physical level, it’s fun ... So I got turntables and started learning how to mix, which is blending records together, one after the other, matching the beat up so it’s one continuous, seamless thing, two turntables and a mixer- that’s more oriented toward DJing at clubs or at parties, things like that where you’re mixing music continuously and doing it on beat. I taught myself, I didn’t know anyone that DJ’d so I just had to teach myself, and it took me a long time, I don’t know how I learned, I just sucked for a long time, and then one day it just happens and you get it and all of a sudden you’ve got it figured out, just trial and error ... there was a show on KFAI which was called Strictly Butter ... before Stage One was the DJ on there and it was a hip hop show, and KMOJ on Saturday nights, they had DJs on, and also a nationally syndicated hip hop show, so I would make tapes, like pause-button cassette tapes off the radio. Stage One was the one DJ that I listened to, and tried to emulate, cause he’d play really cool stuff, stuff that I was really into at the time, and it was cool to hear someone scratching on the radio, so that was like my big high school Saturday night, sitting at home and listening and taping stuff off the radio, that was it. It wasn’t until after a while that I started meeting other kids who did the same thing.

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How do you get started with the DJ stuff?
AB: You start by doing the dumbest things imaginable. You take anything you can get, like your friend’s having a party with ten people, you bring your turntables there, and mix, and it’s stupid and awkward, but you do it. Maybe someone at that party has another party where there’s forty people there, and you DJ at that one, and it’s a little less awkward, and then eventually someone invites you to DJ at a show, in between groups or whatever. Then I started meeting people that rhymed, other DJs and stuff like that. Actually that’s another thing that graffiti was good for too, the social aspect, you kind of meet different circles of people, and it’s a small city, it doesn’t take that long to know everybody and for everybody to know you. And eventually it got to a point where I started DJing a lot of shows, and making mixed tapes and selling them, people knew who I was and that was it.

Andrew performing for the last time with Lateduster on November 8, 2002, at the 7th Street Entry

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What kind of records were you mixing?
AB: I would go and buy regular hip hop records, but at the same time, it’s whatever stuff was coming out at the time, like Wu Tang Clan, Commons, Black Moon, De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Hieroglyphics. At that point, my goal was to be able to mix and I guess be able to DJ at some imaginary party in my head, which I’m concocting because I have like five friends at this point, I guess that was the point, to make music in a different context than I had been, which was playing guitar in bands, you know? I think I was bored with the idea of jamming on regular instruments and I wanted to do something new, and also scratching, manipulating the records, I think, was a goal too. Getting good at scratching is the same way a kid that has a guitar wants to play Eddie Van Halen, you want to go crazy with the scratching, and be flashy, have all the licks down and whatever. At that point, I certainly didn’t have inclination of any kind of articulate emotional expression with it whatsoever, it was just like, 'I like hip hop, therefore I should be doing this.'

How did you choose songs?
AB: You try to hear things in your head that would go well together, and blend them together, or if you’re scratching, you’ve got a beat going on one turntable, you try to find something that’s going to stand out a little bit more to contrast the rhythm, the same way you would think about a jazz trio, keeping the time, and then someone soloing on a saxophone, that’s what the scratching is, you kind of think of it like that. But when I started, I wasn’t really thinking about any of this, it was just trying to do it, and it’s hard, because I didn’t have anyone teaching me, and then much later, I started to develop, hopefully, my own style with it.

I do get bored easily, and as I went, I kind of realized I wanted to stop emulating what I heard other DJs doing, and I wanted to put more of myself into what I was doing ... So it kind of got to the point, where, ok, I’m going to try some things, I’m going to start to bring some records that are a little weirder, I’m going to start incorporating different kinds of music into what I’m DJing, so I was playing heavy metal records in with the rap records, and 50s records, Japanese flute records, I kind of started to get a little stranger with it, a little more sarcastic with it, and kind of trying to play with people a little but more, because I started to see the monotony of it, especially when you’re doing things like mixing in clubs, which is definitely about playing what people want to hear, and it gets predictable, so you have to find a way to slip in some unpredictability with the stuff that they come to a show for.

Leaving hip hop
AB: As I went on DJing, I started to put more of myself in there, and honestly probably not many people got it, I put out a couple of mixed tapes, which kind of have the same idea, trying to do things a little different from the norm of hip hop DJing, trying to be myself a little bit more, because it didn’t take me long to figure out that I was never going to be really truly convincing with my hip hop credibility, because of where I’m from, who I am, and I didn’t want to either, anymore ... I mean hip hop music and culture has a lot of really beautiful things to offer, but you have to be careful, because like any other style, it can become a religion, and that’s not a good way to approach music, it’s not a good way to think about anything, it’s limiting. Accepting that there’s a certain standard of what is “real,” it’s a real traditionalist kind of idea that exists in a lot of hip hop, if it doesn’t fall within these certain standards, it doesn’t count.

It’s a dangerous way of thinking ... the best compliment I’ll give myself is that I’ve always tried to be a non-conformist, and I realized that there’s a lot of really conformist thinking ... it’s not really a healthy way to approach art, or anything else, in a very single-minded fashion ... it’s the same reason I hated going to religious school, I always had this thing about organized religion, and all of a sudden, I find out that people think about music in the same way, and it’s just as disappointing.

How does Fog start?
AB: It starts because I had been making mixed tapes, and ... One day I just said, offhanded, 'I should make a mixed tape and play a guitar solo on it, you know, just as a joke.' Saying that kinda made this weird light go off. It’s weird how things don’t occur to you. But I had set out to make an album and I wanted it to be all turntables and all scratching. And I just realized one day, 'I play all this other stuff, I have a guitar, I have a keyboard, they’re just sitting here collecting dust because of this little rule I made for myself, you know, like, it’s got to be all turntables, cause otherwise it’s not going to meet the hip hop quota, or whatever'. And then one day I wrote a song on guitar, recorded it, played the turntable part on top of it, and I was like, 'Huh. That sounds really good. This is way better than all the other songs I’ve done so far', cause I had made a few and they were just boring, you know, just really, in my mind, really standard, just some scratching shit. Very solo-y. I played that song for a couple people: 'oh, wow, it’s really good.' It was this weird thing, where it was like 'oh, yeah, I can do THIS'. And all of a sudden, I’m doing things that I know how to do, and it feels really natural.

This is also in the midst of one of those life upheavals ... I’d dropped out of school, and I got really sick, I had pneumonia, and I was in my house for like a month and a half, just really in a rotten frame of mind, just wanting to be rid of everything, just wanting to start over, wipe slate clean, start over, you know, you want to have like a reset button on your life, I wanted to hit the reset button at that point, very much. Making this record was in a sense kind of like that, kind of like hitting the reset button, but what happened was, the songs became more honest, the sounds became more honest, what I was motivated by became more honest, and it just came to this thing where all of a sudden I’m making this record in order to be sane, in order to preserve myself, it no longer was a thing, like 'I wanna make a scratch record', it was like, 'I’m making art because I’m gonna lose my shit if I don’t'. At that point, the stakes get raised, and it becomes a lot more real, and a lot more tangible, and cooler, and more honest, it’s good, I learned to be honest with myself musically when I made this record, or more honest with myself musically than I’d ever been by leaps, you know, by a lot. This is the initial version of the record called The Fog, 1999 and 2000.

The first Fog recording
I made that record, put it out myself, made a thousand copies, I’m doing all this stuff with my four track at home, I then take my four track to the studio of a guy named Jeremy Ylvisaker, who plays guitar in Fog band now, basically because he was the only person I’d ever met who had a studio of any kind. I didn’t know anything about his studio, didn’t know him ... I got introduced to him, and it was like, 'oh, you’ve got a studio? It’s kind of cheap? Okay, cool, good enough'. So I brought my four track there, and added things on to these songs from my four track, added on more stuff at his studio, including singing and words, which I had never done before in my life. So that was another new development, and I figured, okay, I’m going to write down whatever I’m feeling, these things, and I can’t have anybody else sing it, and it was really terrifying, I had never really sung before, not really in front of people or anything, so that got done at his studio, made a thousand of them, tried to get distribution for it, and what little it got out there, it seemed to strike a chord as far as being a new kind of thing, which was great, because I didn’t really think about it at all, I didn’t put too much science behind it.

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Who did you think these thousand copies would make it to?
AB: I don’t know. I guess I thought maybe more hip hop kids would get into it, just cause it’s turntable stuff, but for the most part they hated it, or were just indifferent ... it sucks to categorize people, but [the audience was] people who listen to indie rock, or experimental, kind of like electronic stuff, that’s who got into it more ... Then a guy named Adam Drucker who is a performer under the name Dose One, he is in a group called cLOUDDEAD, he got a hold of my cd through some mutual friends, and he was over in London doing press for his record, cLOUDDEAD, which is on Ninja Tune over there, and he played them my cd, and they really liked it, and they got hold of me, and gave me the opportunity to re-mix it and put a few new songs on it, and put it out on Ninja Tune, which was the weirdest thing ever, because it was just this thing I made basically in my house for no reason other than just wanting to make something, and then all of a sudden, it’s like worldwide distribution, and I’m going to London and playing.

Not that it’s this big huge deal, but, from what I intended it to be, to where it got, is very strange, to me. It’s modestly successful, it’s done better in Europe than it has here, we went on a little tour, and had some really good shows in certain cities, but then in other cities, it’s a very small amount of people ... it’s not this huge success story, because realistically speaking, I’m at a very low level of success when it comes to standards of people knowing about you ... but just the fact that people picked up on it and it was such a personal thing. It was made for no other reason than just personally needing to do it, and then people picking up on it at whatever level, is exciting, and strange.

Performing live
One of the things I’ve tried to do is not play too many local shows. We’ve been fortunate enough over the last couple of years since we started playing to be able to be kind of choosy about it, which is cool, because I don’t like playing in a bunch of bars, because I get really irritated with a lot of talking when we play, and I try not to let it get to me, I know it’s just a fact of life, but I can’t stand it, drives me nuts, and so I figure that if we only play once in a while on a local level, it makes it a little bit more of an event, as opposed to people getting sick of you right away and being everywhere all the time, being on the scene and all that shit, I don’t really care about that.

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What makes a good show?
AB: When people shut up. When you can really really control the energy of a room and not control in a dictatorship type of sense, but in a sense that the sound that you’re making is establishing the mood, and you’re keeping people there, and you’re not losing their attention, and they’re not jabbering to their friend, or at the bar ordering drinks. You’re there to hear music, period. That to me makes a good show even if it’s just a small amount of people, we played in Tucson, Arizona, and there were probably thirty to forty people there, but it wasn’t a bar, it was at sort of an art gallery/performance space, and the people were really really attentive, it was really quiet, you could hear a pin drop during the quiet parts, the space was great and the energy was great and it was one of my favorite shows that we’ve played, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t a huge amount of people. We played shows where there were a lot of people,  and I came away thinking, 'ugh'. The energy of it was just so not there, it felt like I didn’t know why we were there, it felt like it could have been anybody up there. So that to me makes a good show, when I can lose myself in what we’re doing ... it’s a really really good feeling, it’s a powerful thing to have.

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There’s a song ... and it’s really personal, it’s ultra ultra personal, as usual, taking myself too seriously as usual, but there’s a song called What a Day Day. It’s kind of about living in the same place for your entire life and seeing the same people every day and the claustrophobia and incestuousness of a small city such as ours, and the first line of the song goes, ‘It’s great to see the people that you saw yesterday / see them today, and say hey / hey they say and you go on your way / it’s great to be the people that they saw yesterday’. I think it’s hopefully this universal idea that maybe a lot of people deal with of feeling stuck, and the next line of the song is ‘The ex-boyfriends are cowering inside the SA when Hitler marches down Lyndale like the Champs Elysees / I declare today to be What a Day Day’ ... I like the words to that song. Making this record was all easy, it all totally totally came together. I decided that I was going to record it in sequence-the order of the album would establish itself as it was being recorded ... I knew what I wanted the first two songs to be, they were mostly written, kind of.

Every song has elements in it that came about in the studio spontaneously, and most of the words for the whole album were only written in a very loose, random fashion before I started recording, and when I started recording, they made themselves apparent where they wanted to be, and that was kind of the really magical thing that happened, was a lot of things just made themselves totally apparent ... some of the songs started off with just a chord progression and that’s it ... that’s a good example of not believing in improvisation necessarily, all these things are inside of you, they just pick when they want to come out. It was more daunting before I started, and once I started, I knew what I wanted to do ... each record is hopefully just a storytelling.

Some of Andrew's songs

Cockeyed Cookie Pusher (3:06): This song of Andrew's was released by local newspaper Pulse of the Twin Cities, on a compilation of local music called Twin Town High 2002-2003.

RealMedia download (1.81 MB)

MP3 download (3.65 MB)