Ten o’clock at night a few weeks ago I called Tilson, one the MCs for Seattle’s fantastic rap/rock trio, The Saturday Knights, at his home in Seattle. The release date for their debut full-length on Seattle’s Light In The Attic Records, Mingle, approaching fast, I was looking forward to speaking with the band again. It had been a year since our last conversation, a year in which they assembled the new record, the finest concoction of genre I’ve heard since the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique or Licensed to Ill. It seems fitting that this rap/rock/funk group is signed to Light in the Attic, a label that combines reissues like Karen Dalton’s In My Own Time (the label also launched off a series of Free Design CDs) and the consistently excellent Jamaica-to-Toronto series, while also hosting a roster rock solid with the “indie cred” so necessary in today’s music market: enter Austin’s Black Angels and Seattle’s The Blakes. The Saturday Knights, defying any explicit categorization or description, wouldn’t fit on any label that didn’t also defy categories and niches.

I had to call Tilson a couple times. I was sitting on my couch in Manhattan, eating a falafel platter from the place downstairs, generally amazed at how well the speaker-phone feature on my new cell phone was working. When he picked up, he was cooking.

“I’m here working on masterminding a spinach, leek, potato, and secret ingredient concoction,” he said, with a little bit of pride.

The metaphor wasn’t lost on me—Genre-Mixing Musician Experiments With Recipe! the headline would read)—but it’s easy to imagine the Saturday Knights around a boiling cauldron standing like the Weird Sisters, tossing in this and that until, in a burst of bright light and flame, a record suddenly mingles out of the smoke and onto the stereo.

“What I think I’m gonna do for these people,” Tilson continued, “just because I love black people so much, and I love people period, is go with the black-eyed pea hummus, because the fellows don’t see that too often.”

Behind Tilson’s voice I heard someone groan. I laughed. I’d forgotten what it’s like to interview the Saturday Knights.
I first spoke to the band about a year ago, by accident. I was on the phone with their publicist at Seattle’s Light in the Attic records, chatting about something inconsequential—I believe it was a pondering over what it would sound like if the Black Angels covered the Black Crowes, and vice versa—when the phone was usurped by Tilson, his fellow MC Barfly, and DJ Suspence, there in the office for a reason that went unexplained. I tried to ask questions about the band—I had their excellent demo, which was at the time getting heavy play on local radio station KEXP, and was looking forward to a full-length—but they didn’t want to talk about that. Instead, we talked about donuts, coffee, and, at their urging, hypothetical donut-flavored coffee, and hypothetical donuts stuffed with coffee instead of jelly.

This was the band whose opening demo track, “Motorin’” contained the line: “This weather’s so cold I gotta carry a heater and drink a lot of cognac,” and was followed later by a track titled “Ass-Kicker’s Haircut.” They joked, punned, and spoke in uroboros patterns that dissolved so quickly I couldn’t do anything but shake my head, and wonder what it must be like to see this trio of minds in concert (excellent, by all accounts). When the conversation was over, I had been initiated into the band as their “Literary Expert.” Or at least something like that. To be honest, I can’t be sure exactly what they decided my role was.

On the phone with them again, I had my prepared questions in one hand and falafel in the other. Tahini dripped on the ready notepad, where a rough outline of the piece I wanted to write about Mingle was sketched out. There were gaps for quotes I had naively hoped to elicit in the interview. But only a few moments into the conversation did I realize it was all for naught, and remembered the previous year’s conversation. How? I wondered, midway through a renewed discussion about salad ingredients (chickpeas and the Black-Eyed Peas), could this band, that had made such an impressive demo, and then followed it up with Mingle, a full-length so detailed, so mature, so fucking accomplished—how could they be so off-the-wall at the same time? I mean, putting together a decent 4-track demo is one thing, but how the hell did these guys record, mix and master, a whole album?

My opening question: “So I was hoping we could talk a bit about the songwriting process for you gentlemen.”

Tilson’s immediate reply (he’d noticed, I realized too late, that I hadn’t asked in the form of a question): “Sure, we can talk about it. Got any ideas?”

I tried to back-pedal: “Oh, yeah. I’ve got a few specific questions…”

Tilson: “No, I mean any songwriting ideas!”

The group laughed. This was how they wrote songs. Someone asks, “Anyone got any ideas?” And, eventually, there are enough ideas to fill a record.

“We’re not smart enough for a formula,” Tilson explains, when I ask if there’s a regular process to their writing. “It’s just random. Like, everyday you just breathe in and see what happens.”

That’s not to say they’re prolific. Mingle features reincarnations of all four tracks off the demo, the seven new ones do anything but disappoint. “45,” the demo single I first heard on John Richards’ Morning Show, hasn’t gotten any less infectious and joyful, and its newer version leading off Mingle has only gotten bigger and more dynamic with the extra studio tinkering (and the help of Nirvana producer Jack Endino behind the drum kit). Add to that the other guest appearances on the record (The Dap Kings on “Patches”, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden ripping a guitar solo on “I Go”, and Chris Ballew of The Presidents of the United States of America taking over the bass on “Count it Off”) and you’ve got yourselves one hell of a recipe.

Back to the interview: I went into specifics about the songwriting. One of the highlight tracks on the new record, a poppy-funk groove called “Patches,” features the Dap Kings, of Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones collaboratory fame. Was the song written, I asked, with that collaboration in mind? Or did the Dap Kings come aboard later?
“Truth be told, that was a song that me and Barfly were trying to take to Vegas,” Tilson shares. “We thought that was us turning into Barry Manilow. But yeah, you know, it just went a completely different direction.”