The genre-bending bass virtuoso has collaborated with Ariana Grande and Herbie Hancock, appeared in the Star Wars universe, and taken boxing seriously. On the eve of his fifth album, Stephen Bruner explains his polymathic mindset.
It's a gloomy January afternoon, and Thundercat is telling me about the time he tried to broaden Snoop Dogg's musical horizons with the mid-'70s work of Frank Zappa. He wasn't Thundercat back then, but Stephen Bruner—bass player for hire—part of a band that accompanied the legendary rapper, which included important Los Angeles jazz names like Kamasi Washington and Terrace Martin, who would later contribute to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.
But their jazz virtuosity wasn't always appreciated. Once, as Bruner was performing a long solo on stage, Snoop approached him and said curtly, "Nobody told you to play all that."
Perhaps as an artistic response, Bruner decided to play Snoop the song “St Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast” from Zappa’s Apostrophe (1974) album—a complex jazz-rock piece with frequent rhythm changes and absurd lyrics. “I threw it at him like a roller coaster of emotion,” he laughs. “He was smoking and he almost swallowed his cigarette in surprise: ‘What’s going on?’ I said: ‘I think so too.’ Then I left the band. Or maybe they fired me: ‘You’re so weird.’ I don’t remember. It was a beautiful moment.”
A career that defies categories
The anecdote is typical of Thundercat: an unlikely clash of genres and personalities. He is perhaps the only musician who can say he has played with both Ariana Grande and Herbie Hancock; who was part of a boyband in the early 2000s (No Curfew, which had brief success in Germany) and who was also a member of the thrash metal band Suicidal Tendencies.
As a teenager, he was as passionate about Slipknot and Korn as he was about the albums of Billy Cobham and George Duke that he heard from his parents – both musicians. His father had played drums with The Temptations, and the prevailing idea at home was that music categorization was more of a marketing strategy than an artistic boundary.
When he transitioned from backing instrumentalist to solo artist in the early 2010s, the transition seemed natural. His albums zigzag between funk, jazz-fusion, electronic pop, yacht rock, hip-hop, psychedelia, and punk – all adorned with extravagant bass solos.
A pop star outside the frames
His look is as unusual as his music: velvet slacks, a 19th-century military-inspired shirt, sneakers with metallic skeleton details, and gradient-dyed dreadlocks. Around his neck, a metal harness with the logo of the alien cats from the cartoon series ThunderCats, from which he got his stage name.
He is an obsessive fan of cartoons, comics and science fiction. “My biggest moment,” he says, “was a small role as a robotic hand in the series The Book of Boba Fett” from the Star Wars universe. “Now I can use it in any argument: ‘Don’t talk to me like that, I was in Star Wars!’”
Music between pain and self-reflection
The new album, Distracted, continues the tradition of bold mixes: soft-rock piano ballads against house rhythms; A$AP Rocky over beats that border on shoegaze; appearances by Lil Yachty and indie duo The Lemon Twigs.
But beneath the playful surface often lies sadness. The album It Is What It Is (2020) was tinged with grief over the loss of his closest friend, rapper Mac Miller. Releasing it at the height of the pandemic deepened the sense of loneliness. “You put out the album and then you’re in the dark,” he recalls. “It was trauma.”
Instead of touring, he stopped to face himself: he gave up alcohol and devoted himself to boxing with strict discipline. The new album is, he says, “a diary of my mental processes” – songs about self-sabotage, failed relationships and doubts about a possible attention deficit disorder. “Maybe it’s a superpower,” he says with a smile.
She Knows Too Much features Mac Miller’s voice, recorded years ago in Malibu. Instead of the previous paralyzing grief, the song evokes joyful memories. “It was like a one-man Rat Pack,” Bruner recalls. “Jokes, elegance, silliness — a clear picture of who we were.”
"Choosing happiness"
Thundercat describes Distracted as “the sound of choosing happiness.” Even if the songs seem dark at times, he insists: “Choosing happiness is a damn hard process.”
His career has changed form constantly, but the essence remains the same. “If you sit still too long, someone will hit you with a beer can,” he says with a laugh, recalling the days when he played at weddings or with Suicidal Tendencies. “The same goes for life: don’t sit still too long.”
Then he walks away into the dusk, his metal armor clanking lightly as he passes – and heads turning after him, as always. /GazetaExpress/
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