From Questlove’s memoir, “Mo’ Meta Blues“:
1. I was and am so devoted to the review process that I write the reviews for my own records. Almost no one knows this, but when I am making a Roots record, I write the review I think the album will receive and lay out the page just like it’s a Rolling Stone page from when I was ten or eleven. I draw the cover image in miniature and chicken-scratch in a fake byline. It’s the only way I really know how to imagine what I think the record is.
2. Imagine if there was a “Legend of Bagger Vance”-type figure who came to me when I was in London and told me that I wouldn’t see my first big check — I mean a real big check, a check that could make me feel secure and safe — until I was twenty years into the industry. I don’t know what I would have done.
3. Part of me would just like to relax and have one job that pays me the amount I need to survive. And another part of me wants the creativity that comes out of struggle and frustration and fear. It’s a never-ending cycle, which must be how I want it, on some level.