Mac Miller’s estate just released his posthumous album, Circles—and his close friend and collaborator Thundercat recently visited Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show, where he reminisced on his relationship with the late rapper.
The “Them Changes” artist summed up the last year as “traumatic” for him as he grappled with the passing of his friend. “I was coming home to shoot the video for “What’s the Use?” and he was excited, we were talking about tour. What it was going to be, making jokes, as we would,” Thundercat recalled. “That night as he was going to bed, I said, ‘I love you,’ and he said it back.” The next day, he woke up to the news of Miller’s passing, and “it scarred the hell out of me.”
The duo collaborated on “In the Morning” and “Hi,” and he said the Pittsburgh artist’s “creative energy” had a big impact on him. “The moments that me and that man shared when it came to the creative energy and stuff like that, I’m happy that I got a chance to experience somebody encompassing like that,” he said. “Because everything does tend to isolate you in certain respects. It’s like, you go too far off into one world, you tend to become biased.”
He also recalled how Miller played him the demos for Circles. “I don’t know if it was his birthday party… I remember he had played me the whole of everything,” he said. “He didn’t have a defined anything to it. I remember he was just asking me along the lines of, ‘What do you think about this?’ And I was like, ‘To be honest with you, Mac.’ I was like, ‘I think you need to do all of this. You need to give people a full picture.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know how it’s going to translate.’ Because you know, I’ve been seeing Mac as the songwriter the whole time.”
Back in 2018, Thundercat made a surprise appearance at Miller’s Tiny Desk Concert, flying out to D.C. in the middle of his European tour. On the anniversary of his passing, the bassist reminisced on that memory:
In August, he reappeared on Tiny Desk Concert with Ty Dolla $ign, paying tribute to Miller with a rendition of “Cinderella.”
His experience with loss ended up seeping into his own work, and his forthcoming album, It Is What It Is, will reflect how he’s changed. “I was changed forever, even if I didn’t want to, it just changed me,” he told Lowe. “That’s just one example of the thing of It Is What It Is.”
Then he summed up his friendship with Miller: “That was my guy, man. That was my dude. You only have a few dudes. Because of social media, you can see stuff every now and again, like me and Lotus or me and or something, but it’s like… Me and Mac, we were a couple idiots.”
It Is What It Is will arrive on April 3, and it features Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and Steve Lacy.
Catch up on all of Thundercat’s lyrics on Genius now.
