HipHopCanada: You've got a lot of new projects coming out these days: not one but two new albums, both on your own label Crown Loyalist Recordings through Universal Music Canada, right?
k-os: Right. That actually is more of a form of evolution than anything else. I've been signed to major labels since 1998, that's when I got my first deal with Capitol. So it's been ten years and I went from EMI to Universal last year and before I did that I was talking to EMI about the same thing and everyone agreed that it was time for me, now that I understood how to make records and had made four of them, that it was time for me to start doing my own thing. At that time when I was at EMI there was a young man named Shawn Hewitt, he had a record coming out and that was going to be the first thing on the label but unfortunately when I left EMI that meant that I wouldn't have that. He toured with me for two or three years, so if you want to talk about vision or the type of bands that I would find etc, it would be guys like that. Guys I've been on the road with or friends or people whose music I've been watching for a while. That was a vision to create something where I could be director of my own destiny and then eventually down the road I'd sign bands, but for now it's a way for me to protect what I make and what I write. The vision is to make sure with Crown Loyalist, and the name kind of infers it, just to stay true to my artistic ideals and attract artists whose task it is to, within this pop world, still remain loyal to the roots of their music and their own artistic vision and try to be as original as possible.
HipHopCanada: Cool man, your new album YES! has recently come out and it's your fourth studio album: where do you see the greatest progression, or evolution as you had mentioned, musically in your new album?
k-os: It's going to be hard for me to put my finger on that 'cause I don't know musical theory but my knowledge of that stuff, without actually learning anything about it at all formally, has gotten better. Arrangement maybe, that's what I actually had the most fun doing is arranging pieces of music. After it's written or after it's taken its form I'll spend days and days and days just trying to arrange it in an interesting way but still keep it three and a half minutes, keep it as a tight dose. But to me arrangement this time around is what, if you listen to the songs, makes it seems different but at the same time there's old tricks of the trade which make something so different just seem standard if you arrange it a certain way.
HipHopCanada: You've got a lot of instrumentation on YES!, more sitar and tabla-
k-os: Santosh has played with me since the beginning so we've always had tabla and all that. Using guitars to sound like the sitar was kind of our thing back on [Joyful Rebellion], like on "Crabuckit" and "Man I Used to Be" and I took a break from then when I did Atlantis and was investigating some more rock sensibilities but yeah, that's definitely back so you'll notice that for sure.
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