Spoken Nerd's Magical Powers
Part 1 of our Spoken Nerd interview
Nashville-based indie hip-hop artist Spoken Nerd has released more than ten albums over the course of his career. The most recent of these, Magical Powers, released in October 2023 and represents some of the rapper’s best work. We got to ask Spoken Nerd about his new album, the stories behind the songs, his creative journey, and more! Thank you to Spoken Nerd for taking the time to chat!
This article originally appeared in Midnight Donuts #2. Want to read the most recent edition of Midnight Donuts? You can do so here!
Midnight Donuts: Let’s just dive right into it. My first question: I saw a tweet where you called Magical Powers “an autobiographical quest for enlightenment.” What do you mean by that?
Spoken Nerd: When I started writing this album, the concept was youth. I really wanted to do sort of an autobiographical album. But when you go to record something or make an album, I think so often what we do, as rappers, is we just do an abstract retelling of life without a reflection. You know what I mean? I think at the end of the day what we really want is to find some clarity about the struggles that you’ve been through, or “what does all of this mean.” So that was kind of the “enlightenment” quote on there.
One thing that I was really happy about with this particular record was that I was able to cohesively tell a few stories on it. I find that it’s kind of hard, in rap, to make a song that actually tells a story while still not sounding totally corny and still, you know, keeping the song banging—something you can listen to in your car or while you’re at the gym without having to be like, “man what’s he talking about again?” So that was something that I was really stoked about with this one specifically.
Midnight Donuts: Speaking of specific stories, you said on your Bandcamp page for this album, “My mom tells this story about a time I stood up in the middle of my first-grade class and proclaimed that I possessed magical powers.” I think that’s a really cool story and such a cool album title backstory. Is there more background to that that you’d be willing to flesh out?
Spoken Nerd: Yeah sure! We were eating with my now-wife and my mom just embarrassingly tells this story: I was in first grade, and I really don’t remember this instance, but I remember doing things like this and I remember getting in a lot of trouble for it. Apparently I stood up in class and I proclaimed that I had magical powers and that I was Spider-Man and I started doing something with my hand.
I had this teacher who was really freaked out by that. I’ve had a couple instances sort of like that—I’ve always been a creative person—and when I was in school I was one of those kids who would draw during class. Even though I’m now in school again and I’m doing fairly well academically, when I was in high school I just couldn’t keep an interest. I would take books to school—like novels that I wanted to read—and I would read them during class. I was constantly getting in trouble for that, writing stories, writing songs. I was just one of these kids that wanted to be creative and didn’t necessarily want to take anything in that they had to offer.
I remember when I was in high school I had a creative writing class and they wanted us to make a fictional town and draw a picture of it and a map of where everything was. And, man, I think it was the town Freddy Krueger was from, Springwood, and then I had the Bates Motel over here, and all this crazy stuff. And my teacher sends me to the school psychologist. I get in there and he looks at the paper and he looks at the note and he starts laughing. He said, “I see what’s going on here. You’ve got this teacher, she’s probably coming in uptight half the time and you just think this is so funny, don’t you?” And I was like, “well, yeah.” [Laughs] He kind of read my mail. And so there it was once again.
And it’s something that’s kind of followed me throughout my life, you know, like when someone will ask you to speak what’s on your mind and you finally do and they’re like, “ooo...”
Midnight Donuts: I love that. I remember there’s a line on the album where you say you got diagnosed with an overactive imagination. So, I guess that’s kind of connected to the same thing.
Spoken Nerd: Yeah, that was a whole thing—I had an overactive imagination, whatever that really means.
Midnight Donuts: Tying it back to the album title, why did you choose to call this album Magical Powers?
Spoken Nerd: Honestly, I had just finished making the album I Need a Friend Like You and my mom tells that story and then my wife actually said, “you should call your next album Magical Powers.” … Hip-hop is about the way words sound together, and I feel like in marketing and any sort of situation where you’re calling an album something it’s not necessarily what it’s saying but it’s how it sounds—it’s both, but it has a lot to do with how it rolls off the tongue. And I felt like “magical powers” was just the perfect combination of words. And it felt like me, so I went for it.
Midnight Donuts: That ties perfectly into my next question! To me, Magical Powers feels like the most Spoken Nerd Spoken Nerd album. It really embodies your unique sense of humor that I associate with your work, as well as those more serious undertones that are also in keeping with your previous work. And it does so in a way that feels really integrated and natural. How do you view Magical Powers in light of the grand scheme of your overall catalog?
Spoken Nerd: I would say that what you’re saying is completely true. I think with the last several records I’ve done I’ve had kind of a foot in two different places in certain senses. And one of those places is experimentation. And I will always go back to experimentation. But with Magical Powers I think I really played to my strengths. … I usually don’t vet the songs. On this album I did that unintentionally—this was going to be a 15-track album, and when I went to get it mastered I realized that I was going to have to either do a double record or I was going to have to cut a couple songs. A couple of them didn’t quite sit right with the rest of the record, so I cut those. Bringing it down to 12 really made all of these songs fit a little more cohesively. It was a hard decision to make, because two of the songs specifically were some of my favorites that I had on there, but I felt taking those away kind of made it what it is and it made it cohesive. I like what you said, it made it feel like the most Spoken Nerd Spoken Nerd album.
Midnight Donuts: Well, that makes me curious if you’ll ever release a digital deluxe or something for those lost tracks?
Spoken Nerd: Yeah, I think you may see something with those coming soon. We’ll see.
Midnight Donuts: I hope so! So, this album is completely produced by Nathan Zensen. I’m not familiar with his work, but I really liked this stuff. How did you get connected with Nathan Zensen and who is Nathan Zensen?
Spoken Nerd: Nathan Zensen is a hip-hop producer here in Nashville and he primarily focuses on hip-hop—he can do anything. He’s kind of a master of mixing vocals. He is so talented with that. He works with several different rappers in town. One of the rappers he was working with was a fellow named kidDEAD, who was my old tourmate and a very good friend of mine who unfortunately passed away. But at the time when I started working on this record I was working with another producer—the same guy that I worked on I Need a Friend Like You with—and it was definitely, in some ways, a very different album. We had demos for “Supreme” and “Lunchtable Blues” and a couple other ones that are on there.
We had been working on it for months and we were coming to a place with the demos where we were going to bring in musicians—I think we did bring in my old guitar player—and this guy kind of disappeared. I just didn’t hear from him. Out of nowhere. It was like he was gone. We’ve since reconciled and talked and stuff, but when that happened I reached out to kidDEAD because I was like, “I have these songs, I’m thinking about mixing them myself. What do you think of my mixes?” And my mixes were terrible and I was hoping that kidDEAD was going to say, “hey man, I’m going to mix it,” but he said “I’m working with this dude, Nate Zensen—I want you to check out what I’m doing with him. You should just hire him to do your stuff.” I listened to what he had done for Ross [kidDEAD], I got a second opinion from my wife for what he had done for Ross, and we were both like, “this is the best music he’s ever made. This production is perfect.”
So, I met up with him. It was during COVID, during the phase when I was wearing like two masks and a face shield, and I rode my bike to a coffee shop on a very cold day—I remember there was frost on the ground—and I met up with him. We talked about doing the record and he was down, so we did a couple tracks that I was just so happy with the decisions he was making and how he mixed stuff. It had very much of the bump that I was missing. I was just so stoked to bring him into the mix, and I’m so stoked to be working on music with him.
Midnight Donuts: Which were the songs that you did first as that kind of trial run?
Spoken Nerd: He actually mixed some vocals for me on a song where there was a different beatmaker. The song was called “LOSE SIGHT.” It was one of my movie-inspired songs. That was the first song he did for me, but that doesn’t really showcase his beat-making capabilities. The very first one we cut together in the studio was actually “Trying Beer for the First Time.” At the time I was still very like, “it’s gotta be my band, it’s gotta have this and that,” and it was just my bass and I think he had some light synths on it at the time and his drum loop. I listened to the demo and was bumping it and it was like, yeah, this is about perfect.
So, he did that one, he remade the beat for “Supreme,” and then I think we went into “I Got This”—that was actually the first song I wrote for the record. Listening to what he did with those things—I can be kind of a control freak about how my beats sound sometimes—but he even made “Supreme” and “I Got This” without me even being there and it was just like, “man... this is fabulous.”
Midnight Donuts: I feel like I Need a Friend Like You overall has a different texture to it than Magical Powers. Magical Powers feels more electronic, maybe?
Spoken Nerd: That’s because it is—it’s more of a hip-hop record in its entirety. When I worked on I Need a Friend Like You we were literally in a studio on Music Row with huge mixing boards. ... Almost all of the drums were real drums: my friend Jane Boxell came down and played drums for that. We had a real horn section, which we used on this album as well, we used the BNA Horn guys on Magical Powers as well. All the bass was me on I Need a Friend Like You, playing an actual bass guitar. I think I had three different guitar players come down and play on it.
So it was very much a Music City, in-the-studio album, whereas Magical Powers is like what people who listen to hip-hop are used to hearing. It was very inspired by, actually, Grand Theft Auto 5. During the pandemic I got into video games. ... I got really into playing Grand Theft Auto 5, and the music on there just hit me in a certain way. And I was like, “I want to make some music like that.”
Midnight Donuts: My favorite song off of I Need a Friend Like You is “Good at Almost Winning.” That chorus is so catchy and it has so much guitar and stuff in it, almost like an indie rock hip-hop song.
Spoken Nerd: Yeah, that was a fun one to lay down. My friend Dale J. Gordon actually came up with most of the guitar parts. That song ended up being so crazy because I recorded a bassline to it and the bass was out of tune when we recorded the horns. The horn section’s not something you can redo: once they’re in there they’re in there. We caught it when we were mixing and realized this bass was actually a little out of tune, so that’s why there’s guitar in the second verse—that’s why that was so prominent. … We had to re-track the bass in order to put together the song.
So I’m glad that you appreciate that song so much, because that was one of those cuts that ended up really being a little more laborsome.
Midnight Donuts: You kind of already touched on this, but even though I said this feels like the most Spoken Nerd Spoken Nerd album, it doesn’t have as many melodic sung elements as some of your previous albums. But those elements are still prominent on songs like “Lunchtable Blues.” It seems like you’re leaning more fully into very hip-hop sounds: what led to that stylistic choice?
Spoken Nerd: A lot of it was just kind of the direction that the record ended up going. It’s kind of funny, because when I first started this record I actually did plan on it having a lot more of that style of vocals. Pretty much a couple things happened: one is, two of the songs that were cut from the record were very much vocally like the stuff in the past.
I think another thing was that the album was being written during the pandemic. I was just in a very different place, and I found myself loving hip-hop in a way that I had never loved it before. I made a conscious effort to start listening to more modern hip-hop and more things that were a little out of my wheelhouse. Because I’ve always kind of been a guy who—I like what I like and that’s what I’m going to listen to, and I’m not going to listen to this other junk. During the pandemic I wasn’t out playing shows, things were different. I was working, I didn’t miss a beat with my job (that was kind of what inspired the “OVERTIME” song, because I worked and still do work at a grocery store, so we were there constantly). In my time off I was playing Grand Theft Auto, I was riding a bicycle a ton, and I remember I would make these playlists—I would listen to The Needle Drop with Anthony Fantano, and whatever was coming out I would put it on a playlist and I would ride around on my bicycle—I would do like 30-mile rides—and I would just listen to this music. If I wasn’t feeling up to a bike ride I would just go down the street and play hacky sack in the school parking lot. So, I was just constantly listening to a little bit more trap music and things, and it inspired me in a way that I hadn’t been before.
And that’s kind of always how I try to stay as an artist: I try to look at each project like, “I’m going to do something I haven’t done, and I’m going to make this very new.” Which, you know, when you’ve released like a million albums (not that I’m the most prolific or anything, but I’ve put out over ten projects), if you’re just doing the same thing over and over again it gets stale. So, it was just a headspace that I kind of entered with it and I went with it.
The next record’s going to be pretty different, but I think that it's still going to hold some of those elements.
Midnight Donuts: I love that answer. Have you gotten to perform the album live much? And if so, what’s the most fun song to perform?
Spoken Nerd: I just did a short tour, so I’ve been doing “Million Dollar Pies,” I’ve been doing “WORK WORK WORK”—I’ve been doing those two for the last year. And then I just did a festival in Kansas—Manhattan, Kansas—and I played the “Bicycle Anthem” and I did “Trying Beer for the First Time,” so I added those two. I love playing those two songs. There’s something about them. I think “Million Dollar Pies” and “WORK” are great to play live as well, but there’s something about—my strengths before have always been that people love it when I play, you know, “Stripes on My Shirt,” they like it when I play “Spaghetti.” So to throw in new songs that have some of those elements of humor and storytelling… people were just stoked to hear those live and they went over really well.
Midnight Donuts: The song “Getting Kicked Out of Church” has some tough truths in it. If you could go back in time to when you were going through the story that you’re relating in that song, what would you tell yourself? And then if you could, what would you tell that church?
Spoken Nerd: I guess the biggest thing that … I wish I could’ve known back then is—I guess I used to see church as this institution where everyone was on the same page and everyone in that church thought the same and I was supposed to conform to what they were doing. But the thing that I didn’t realize is that these churches actually need people like me. They actually need my help: I can be a light in those places. So, that’s what I would tell myself.
And I don’t even know that I would’ve understood that at those times. I may not have been ready for that. I think when you’re younger—especially a teenager or just a little past that—you look at anybody that’s over 40 in a church—they’re kind of like the cops, you know? They’re kind of like this group that’s trying to make sure that you’re not acting up, and if you did something or you’re wearing something they don’t like they already know it. They can sense it. They know where it comes from and they’ve got a problem with it. You know, that’s not actually the way things really are. But there is some element of that.
That song … the whole hook is “I was asked to leave because my wardrobe wasn’t proper / I didn’t read the books that Anton LaVey authored.” (Anton LaVey was one of the guys of the satanic church.) So—I came to church wearing an Ozzy Osborne shirt, and it was the Ozzy Osborne Randy Rhoads tribute shirt. And they told me if I was going to wear that shirt there then I couldn’t go to church there. I think that was ludicrous. There was nothing on the shirt that was wrong. It was a tribute to Randy Rhoads, who had died. And I took it real personal—real serious, like “he can’t do a tribute to his friend?!”
Obviously there are reasons that churches were opposed to Ozzy Osborne or secular music or whatever. I guess the main thing I would like to express to churches in general—one of the cool things that churches are effective in is facilitating culture. And sometimes the culture that it facilitates may seem contradictory to what they teach or whatever, but it’s still good that that culture is there. Because they’re able to offer their space for people to be expressive, and I think that’s a really cool thing. And it’s something the Church should lean into more.
I mean, if you look at the hardcore music scene, so much of hardcore music culture is built upon the Church. And the reason for that is this music is very popular in rural areas. And your bar isn’t going to throw those shows. Your average club doesn’t want that stuff there. Because hardcore music—it is loud, it’s obnoxious. I mean, if I’m out having dinner, I don’t want to hear it. But it’s great if you’re into that kind of music, and it has its place. And that’s what the Church—they did a great job through the early aughts offering these venue spaces for music like that.
And for even my own music! No one wants to hear a rapper when they’re out for dinner, especially one that’s really loud and abrasive like myself. But to hear it in this other space collectively for arts—especially in communities where there is no space for arts—it’s cool that the Church does it. And I think they should lean into that a little bit more.
Midnight Donuts: I’m glad I asked, because that helps me understand the song a lot better. A couple of my favorite songs off of the album are “WORK WORK WORK”—which was the lead single—and then “Bicycle Anthem.” Any fun origin stories for those?
Spoken Nerd: I’ve always been really into cycling. I’ve always liked to do songs about things that I’m passionate about. So, I just really wanted to do a rap song that was just super bike-centric. Then someone that I was around said, “you go ride your bicycle, I’m going to drive my truck.” [Laughs] It was like the most redneck thing, right, and I thought, “man, that would be cool to have it sound like a sample of a country song.” That’s where I came up with that idea.
Midnight Donuts: Was it somebody that you knew, or a random person?
Spoken Nerd: Yeah it was somebody that I knew!
“WORK WORK WORK,” I was actually out in Asheville, North Carolina, and I came up with the idea of making a song where it was like, “I do something,” and then you say it a few times. I liked the idea of having that three-phrase end of a bar. “I’m doing work work work!” I came up with that hook, and as we drove through Asheville on vacation I was just sitting there with a notebook—I didn’t even have a beat, but I was writing these bars—and I just sort of came up with it that way. When I went to the studio I had an idea for what the beat should sound like, and [Nathan Zensen] blew away all my expectations with that one.
Tune in soon here on Substack for part 2 of this interview, where we’ll be talking with Spoken Nerd about how he first got into music and more!
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in Midnight Donuts #2. Want to read the most recent edition of Midnight Donuts? You can do so here!
