New M.I.A Interview

Here is a very good interview with M.I.A from the village voice. She talks about the production of her new album, her trips around the world, the perks of not working with big time producers, and where she's at musically. Check it out:

****There's a Timabaland track that I guess is a bonus track on the album in the US, and it's on his album in the UK. It's a great song, but there's a part where he's like, 'Baby girl go to your teepee.' What was that?

Don't ask me! It was kind of funny. I don't like to butt in when that's going on. I just thought it was pretty funny at the time, so I left it. It was kind of funny to meet him and work with him. It was amazing because he's amazing at what he does; he's a legend. But by the time that our paths met, Timbaland had already been Timbaland and done all the cool weird shit. He's sampled babies and cows and things, and I was making tracks sampling chickens. And he was like, "I'm done being cool; I want to work with Celine Dion." And I was like, "So you just want to make Titanic?" And he's like, "Yeah, that's what I want to do." In my career right now, I'm not trying to make Titanic. I want my songs to just be what they are, and I wasn't thinking like that.

So that's what "Jimmy" is about? The journalist?

Well, "Jimmy" the song is a really old Bollywood disco song. It was huge. It's like "Thriller." When I was a kid in Sri Lanka, it meant a lot to me. My mom used to get me to be a professional party buffer. I used to dance a lot as a kid, so people hired me out at birthday parties. That was my theme song. I used to do a performance to "Jimmy." I used to have a cloak and a cardboard guitar, and I'd do this big disco-dancing number and get all the kids to dance, and then they'd pay me and I'd leave. So that song to me is really really personal. And I was in this place, in Liberia, and it was really heavy. I was doing lots of heavy, heavy stuff, not really thinking about romance. And obviously I'd been in this weird relationship before, and I'd come out of it, like "Maybe I should just do this mad trip and go meet this person." And it's just a mash-up of all those things, whatever I was going through that week. I wanted to redo "Jimmy" for a long time. When I was in India, I'd already recorded the strings and everything for it. But I'd never attempted to do "Jimmy" the whole time I was with Switch because it was just one of those songs; I had to be drunk enough to be that disco. It all came together that week.****

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Thannks to TimboFan for the link.