You and Donald Glover met while you were composing on Community. What was it like transitioning from composing to producing songs for a rapper?

When we first met, I had only produced for myself and written for myself at that point. The collaborative part of it was really fun. When I’m by myself — composing or writing film scores — it’s very lonely. I’m just sitting by myself in the studio. When you’re with an artist it’s kind of like hanging out with a friend. You shoot ideas back and forth and inspire each other. And you can trigger better work from yourself and from them.

Awaken My Love! was a big stylistic departure from the work y’all had done in the past. How did Donald Glover approach you about his vision for that record?

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It is a departure but I would say if you’ve been to one of our live shows, we’ve always had a huge live band. So I think that’s always been the sound of our live shows. There’s been performances with big string sections and stuff like that so we’d been working a lot with musicians, even though our first two albums were more produced in the studio. Before every show, we go out there at soundcheck and play with each other for two hours — just jamming.

It started out as an experiment. We got our band together in the studio and spent the studio trying out different sound ideas and jamming. We didn’t really know where it was going to go. We probably did 15 songs in the studio and a lot of it was really out there. One of the song ideas that we felt was really special and that we always circled back to after listening back was “Me and Your Mama.” Prior to these jam sessions, Donald and I had been playing around with different riffs. We were playing around with the riff for that song, changing the time signatures — the song starts in 4/4 and switches to 6/8 — and making it more unique.

Donald Glover was very vocal about the Parliament-Funkadelic influence on the album. Were you already familiar with their catalog going in?

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No, I wasn’t that familiar with it at all. Growing up, I was listening to a lot of Metallica, a lot of instrumental guitar music because I started out as a guitar player. Joe Satriani was a big inspiration for me, and then I got into jazz early on before high school.

Donald grew up with it — his father was a big Funkadelic fan. When he played me old Funkadelic albums it was like, Oh shit, I completely missed out on this. It was really fun to start learning about that and discover — going back and watching the videos of their live shows. I remember immediately loving “Hit It And Quit It” when Donald played it for me. It was like, Wow, this is such an amazing composition.