KYLE KELLAMS: This is Ozarks at Large. Here's a name you're probably familiar with if you've been listening to KUAF for a while. Jasper Logan. Jasper, who used to work here, recently came back to the Carver Center for Public Radio to perform songs from his newest album, "Family First." It's part of KUAF Live Session series. The full interview and performance now available on our website, the KUAF YouTube channel and on NPR Live Sessions.
Ozarks at Large's Daniel Caruth spoke with Jasper about the motivation and process behind the album. He says the title of the album came to him after recording the intro track "Family Name."
LOGAN: My whole process for working on music, usually I just throw darts at the wall. Just create a bunch of stuff until something sticks, until I make a song. And usually it works, I make a song. And then out of this song, so many themes and thoughts and feelings come out of that and I go, oh wait, there may be enough for a project here.
And so that's what happened when I made the intro track "Family Name.” And that song was really about my relationships with my mom, my brother and sister, and then also with just Chicago in general. And my whole, and then family now, starting a family now and intertwined all these different feelings and all these different emotions, emotions of I feel like I'm not good at that, but I want to be better at it. You know what I mean?
And so it was a matter of, I feel like I'm not good at it because I've been trying to chase everything else, trying to be successful, trying to be important, whatever all that stuff is, insert whatever. And I feel like I've neglected this part of myself. Family. And I wanted to make a change from that.
So the whole project is kind of centered around that theme and these emotions of how do you shift your focus and energy from what the world tells us to achieve, succeed, do all of this stuff. To really evaluate what's important to you and putting your energy into those things.
CARUTH: Well, in the first track that you played for us and that you did, you're talking a lot of it. You're talking to your daughter. And a lot of that is also you. It's very confessional. And it's also talking about asking her, what is your culture? But I'm also wondering, being away from Chicago, being here in Arkansas, starting a family, how has it changed how you view your own relationship with your culture, with who you are? Have you had to reevaluate that? And how has it changed over the last few albums to this one?
LOGAN: That was a huge theme in it. And I think through the song "Culture," I was able to explore all of that. But that song is about me dropping my daughter off at school. And then her asking to listen to Taylor Swift. And it's like, yo, we make you, there's tons of other great music you can listen to other than Taylor Swift. Even though Taylor is great and I say that in a song, there are a lot of great Taylor Swift songs that I love, but it caused a sort of existential crisis.
I'm like, man, here's me being Black, African American from Chicago and my daughter, who is African American from Arkansas. And when you're Black, we all kind of have this similar lived experience. So we all grew up going to church. We all grew up going, there's multiple experiences that we can call back to and be like, that's our culture essentially.
And so there was a fear, a little bit of me that was like, man, have I removed that from my daughter? In this effort to provide better life? She goes to a private school. All of those things that I didn't experience and that were not, growing up, part of my quote unquote culture. And that now is part of hers.
And so it was like a real crisis of, man, did I, what is that? And is that even still our culture? Because as good as those things felt, in a lot of ways, some of those aspects of our culture may have been negative, have caused negative things in my life and other people's lives. And I don't want my daughter to have any of the negative traits.
And so it was an exploration of what do I feel? Not even an answer of this is right, this is wrong, but more so just an exploration of what this is and this is how I feel over here, but also this, but also this. And I feel like that's the whole album, is just moments of that of, this is neither right nor wrong, but this is just what it is.
CARUTH: Or reckoning with a responsibility you feel as a dad, as a parent, to your kids.
LOGAN: Yeah. And is that in conflict with my sort of perceived notion of passing down my culture?
CARUTH: Absolutely. Well, in talking about all of those aspects of passing down culture, speaking about the instrumentation of the album and the sound, I mean, you're name checking people, you're pulling some sonic references. What is the sound that you're going for? What are you trying to infuse this with? Because it is a bit more, compared to your other work, is a little bit more confessional, a little bit more intimate. Can you talk about that?
LOGAN: Yeah, that's a good question. I'm always influenced by what I feel like is the Chicago sound. And so that's the soul samples. And I feel like a lot of Chicago rap music is very confessional, is very, what do you say, heartfelt. Talking about your personal experiences, day to day life, all that good stuff. And so I always approached music from that standpoint.
But now being down south, there are some other things that I've sort of learned to incorporate as well. And I think this album was probably my best attempt at merging those two worlds. Usually I feel like my other projects have been all one or the other. All very sound in Chicago or whatever. And I feel like this time I did a decently good job at kind of merging those two worlds in both sound and content wise.
I think a lot of times content wise my music is very reminiscent of how I grew up, what I experienced. And so this was one of the first times that I feel like I effectively communicated content from what's happening now. And I think that was surprising for me, but it was also interesting because I think that made it take longer.
So I mean, this took like three years in the making. But I think a lot of that time was because I spent time just living and actually soaking it up so that when I got ready to put pen to page and create, all those experiences just started coming back in the moment. And I was pulling from things that were current versus things from the past, if that makes sense.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
