Eric Hilton: from Thievery Corporation to Corazón Kintsugi

LP: I've spent the last several days immersed in the new record, and it's really so beautiful. I won't blow too much smoke at you, but the album has this element that I appreciate, which it borrows from ambient music in that I can put it on and just let it enhance my environment and live around it. But it also has the ability where you can sit down and pay attention to it and let it unravel and really listen. That's a really beautiful quality to have both of those things. Congratulations. You made a beautiful record.

Eric Hilton: Thank you. I'm glad you made that observation because that is a goal of mine when I make records like this. Same with the Thievery Corporation in a lot of cases. And it's a nice challenge, so I'm glad you think it worked.

LP: It's interesting that you say that because people tend to think of what I'll call electronic music, or this type of music, as very binary, right? It's either meant to be in the fore, or it's meant to be put on in the background. And that's rarely the case. Even with the so-called ambient music, there's so much going on. It's usually so much richer and more engaging than it's often marketed as.

Eric Hilton: I agree. I think that a lot of very good ambient music requires you to listen a little harder. It's all there. The emotions and what music does to you are there in the ambient music as well when it's good.

LP: There's a lot as it relates to your musical journey. I'm hoping we can unpack a little later in the conversation, but I'd love to stay with the new record for a bit. But over the years, you've had a very symbiotic mentor-muse relationship with Natalia, going back to you producing her record a while ago now. How did you first become aware of her? How did she get on your musical radar?

Eric Hilton: I met Natalia through her then-boyfriend Federico Aubele, a very talented songwriter with whom we used to do a lot of work on Eighteenth Street Lounge Music. I produced his first record with Rob, my partner in Thievery Corporation. And then I produced two more records for him. He's just a friend, and he's very talented. Natalia was there in the background a little bit. I didn't think of her as somebody I would work with in the future because she was working with Federico. 

At a certain point, Federico actually encouraged her to do a solo record, and she asked me to produce it, and I had a little bit of time on my hands. I took that task. She gave me her capella tracks, and I just played with them on my laptop and put some ideas together. Then we hit the studio in D. C., which was the Thievery Corporation studio. We recorded over three weeks or so, and Nectar was the result. I was just very impressed with her songwriting, her singing, and her malleability in the studio. She could change on a dime to suit a certain mood, and that was a great quality of hers.

LP: If you can, articulate what it is about her that inspires you to keep returning to the collaboration.

Eric Hilton: She's one of the most talented singers that I know personally. So we tend to meet people, and they come into our lives. She's toured with Thievery Corporation for over a decade. And we've been friends for a long time, so it was just very natural for us to eventually work together. She has an incredible way of singing at a low or high level in terms of intensity. She can do either. And that's rare in a singer. If you think of Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star. She's a really appealing singer, but I've never heard her really belt. Right? I don't think she does that. And usually, it's one or the other. Natalia can do both.

LP: In reading about how this record came together, I'll paraphrase a quote from you, but essentially you had realized you had some music that would benefit from vocals. What specifically does that mean when you're putting a record together? Are vocals another instrument for you as a producer? Are they more weighted than that because of the human breath, the human element? How do you think about a vocal line beyond just a melodic delivery device?

Eric Hilton: Yeah, that's an interesting question.

I make mostly instrumental music because I really enjoy that. And the challenge for me is to create a piece of music that I can enjoy as an instrumental, which I find very challenging. Sometimes, you don't feel like you get there; you feel like you have this great foundation, but it needs a human voice. It needs a collaborator who's a vocalist to take it somewhere else. It's not like the next level, per se. It's more like a different, an off-ramp, and you want to go somewhere else with it. So, I keep two types of sketches that I'm doing. One that I think, "Okay, purely this is great as an instrumental." And another one where I'll save it for a vocalist. And that's just the way I work.

LP: Do you write the melody lines on those non-vocal versions? Are you playing a melody on another instrument, or do you hand it to Natalia, and she delivers the melody?

Eric Hilton: In Natalia's case, like on Corazón Kintsugi, I wrote the keyboard melodies, and I wrote almost all the keyboard melodies on her record, but I did not write the vocal melodies. She wrote the vocal melodies. On the instrumental stuff that I release, I generally write all the melodies on the instruments.

LP: I push it, not to try to get you to deconstruct how your creativity works. (laughter) But specifically with the title track, the two words being from different cultures, even just reading them and having the consonant sound in them, they're strong words, but they flow so beautifully melodically. The way she sang the chorus hook with those two songs was really beautiful and unexpected. Not to make too much of it, but it was really a striking way for the record to open. And after listening to it several times, I find that vocal melody to be quite an earworm. It's been with me for days, just looping in my brain.

Eric Hilton: It had to be the first track because, in a lot of ways, it's the most dramatic of all the songs. It just got the lead off the record. And then, of course, the record gets a little bit more lighthearted from there for the most part.

But yeah, it's a really powerful track. And also, lyrically, that song means a lot to Natalia personally. It may describe the last two years of her life if not other periods of her life. We also have experienced the highs and the lows of Thievery Corporation, and she's no longer on the road with Thievery Corporation. And it's now a very good thing for her, but it was a hard transition. Doing this record was part of making that transition. It was a friend-to-friend thing. Like, Hey, let's make some art.

LP: Was it a healing opportunity?

Eric Hilton: Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. For her. I know it was. Yeah.

LP: For listeners who aren't familiar with the concept of Kintsugi, it's Kintsugi. It's stunningly beautiful as even a concept, the idea that to be a little didactic for a moment for people who aren't familiar. It's the notion in Japanese pottery of looking at the broken or flawed piece of work and seeking to repair it actually with gold to highlight the flaw or to, I'm not articulating it well, I apologize, but it's in a sense, the flaw becomes the most beautiful part of the artwork you draw. You don't seek to hide it, right?

Eric Hilton: And you described it well. It's a really great metaphor for life in general. You learn as you go along, and those repair marks of gold are almost like the lessons we learn as we go along. We learn, and we get stronger, hopefully.

LP: Yeah, and to translate it to other forms or specifically to music, it reminds me very much of that, and again, to badly paraphrase, the notion that Miles Davis always talked about of there being no wrong notes or no bad notes, and it was really about what you played before it and what you played after it to give it that context and to make maybe the bad note be the right note.

Eric Hilton: It's very punk rock, actually. Yeah. Coming from Miles Davis, it's kind of cool.

LP: Yeah, he might have been one of the original punks. (laughter)

Eric Hilton: Yeah, I would say he's a punk rock jazz artist.

LP: He's kind of punk. The other thing about this record is that, and certainly even in just that, the title track and the, in that melody, the things we've talked about so far, it seems like a really interesting meta summation of a lot of your work in music in terms of being cross-cultural.

Some of the other things we talked about were the challenge of instrumental versus lyrical music or vocal music. As it relates to having a vocalist, what role does the lyrical theme play for you? For lack of a better way to say it, do you care? Does it influence you? Do you interact with it? Is that like somebody else's thing to care about?

Eric Hilton: Well, I do care. This one was so personal. I didn't co-write any of the songs lyrically with Natalia because she was more than capable of expressing what she wanted to express. So, in this case, I just trusted her 100%. And she somehow managed to express deep emotions but in a very melodic way, Which, of course, is the top-of-the-game kind of performance. And she just did a fantastic job. Now, as a secondary, I'm happy if it sounds good, as long as the lyrics are not silly. Everything has to sound good, right? That's the baseline requirement. If it sounds good, and there's some really good intensity in the vocals, and they really mean something, that's just a bonus.

LP: Something else that really struck me about her vocal work on this record is that I could imagine it in other languages. I could imagine an Asian voice or an Asian articulation, certainly in Spanish and Portuguese, but I actually couldn't really imagine it in English. It's interesting. I don't know why it struck me that way to hear it.

The melody of the actual language she's singing in, even to the extent where I could imagine if it were like, say, the Cocteau Twins or a made-up language. It was so melodically rich that I appreciated not being able to understand the lyrics, as bizarre as that is, given how important the lyrics are to her.

Eric Hilton: No, that's not very bizarre. I've heard people say before that if a song is in French or Spanish, they can almost listen to it in the background because the actual words aren't distracting them. There's definitely something to that, and I also think that a singer like Natalia, who speaks Spanish as her first language, sings so much better in Spanish. She is a great singer in English, but in Spanish, she's on another level. It was great to do the record in Spanish and Portuguese and not touch the English language.

LP: Yeah. I think that notion's been rattling around in my head a little bit because I had Nimol from Dengue Fever on recently, and on their new record, pretty much all of her lead vocals are in Khmer, and she stays away from English more on this record. Some of the background vocals are English and harmonies, but her vocal performance is in her native language. It's something that stands out about the record. You can hear the emotion. You can hear her comfort. What it comes down to is that her voice is not impeded by a certain level of having to translate. It's very powerful.

If you haven't heard the record, it's worth a listen. It's always wonderful to hear an artist so far into their career and still evolving. They're not making the same record over and over, and I love that.

Eric Hilton: That's cool. Yeah, they're very good. I have a few of their records. I really like them.

LP: There's a theme obviously that runs through so much of your career, and it's something I so admire about what you've built, which is This notion of independence, right? Like controlling the businesses and your life as a business person in multiple areas, especially in the era that you really emerged and grew in, the way the supply chains and the value of music and all those things have changed.

What's your self-conception of being an independent music artist, and what has it afforded you that You might not have otherwise had, or how has it contributed to here we are talking, pretty much 30 years into a career? How important has that been? This notion that you've both even with Thievery, that it's just been, it's been you guys, it's been you, it's been your wiliness and your independence.

Eric Hilton: It was vital to the longevity of Thievery Corporation. If we had taken some of the offers that we had early on, I don't think we would have lasted more than a few more years because we would have actually been working for someone else. That's what I've noticed with bands that signed to major labels, particularly back then. They were an employee of the machine of the major label. Not to criticize the major label so much, because I know that they're investing a lot of money, time, and effort into promoting those bands. Still, what I saw was that they were calling the shots. Rob and I grew up in the DC area, and we're obviously very inspired by Dischord records. And Ian MacKaye, who is a neighbor of mine, and I see him from time to time, and he's an idol, he always makes me a little nervous when I see him, and I tell him, "God, man, my idol. It's crazy."

But they were, obviously, very independent — a DIY punk label. To this day, they operate that way, and it was the only way for us. We had considered a couple of offers, one from Chris Blackwell, which was a very nice offer, and another one, but we couldn't do it. We had to take breaks when we wanted to take breaks and tour when we wanted to tour and record the records our way and be in total control. It just felt right to us.

LP: It's really interesting to look back on, especially that, that sort of, that turn of the century era when I think about things like Moby's play and when Trip Hop had its commercial moment. I can only imagine what it must have been like to say no, right? There had to be some moments where just the money itself seemed pretty real.

Eric Hilton: It seemed real, but it's interesting because we decided to actually be a record label and release our music, find a distributor, and do all those things. We actually saw what business was being done, so when somebody offered us an advance and a deal, it didn't look that great. It looked okay. It sounded good. But we realized that if we just held on to our masters and owned everything in the long run, we would do much better. They may have promoted us heavier, but we weren't really looking for that. 

Like I've always said, we wanted to grow like a bonsai tree: slowly and strong. And we have a very strong fan base even to this day as Thievery Corporation. I think it's because we just grew at a normal pace; it was organic, and it wasn't heavily advertised or anything. People were actually able to discover Thievery Corporation on their own, which is a cool thing. Yeah. So it was vital for us to go down the path that we went.

LP: I was going to make a comment that I'm not going to, I'm going to say it, but I'm going to loosely stand by it, which is, uh, because maybe it'll be fun to bat around a little. And that was, it seems, a little bit of the time in terms of emerging from And certainly observing what was happening in the sort of punk alternative DIY world coupled with the DJ-rave-dance-music scene, this ability to find your audience, let your audience find you, but also understand from the business side that what a major label might be able to do in terms of taking you to, let's say, millions and millions, you could actually have a sustainable career and lifestyle Maybe with the hundreds of thousands, the piece you keep and the part of yourself you don't sell. And not even to be metaphysical, but just in terms of, like you said, your ability to produce when you, when the muse strikes you, or if you want to put out ten records this year and no records next year, you have that. You have that right.

Eric Hilton: Yeah. That was pretty much it. That's what we did, and that's why we did it. To have that kind of control and not really answer to anyone other than Rob and me. That was a heck of a luxury.

LP: As your relationship with the live performance part of being a music artist has changed. How do you think about the live presentation of your most current work, this album in particular, and coming from a DJ perspective or world? Is that okay? Like letting somebody present your music as part of a set, I'm curious about that decision to opt-out increasingly from being the first-person presenter of your music live. And I'm curious about what that, how that fits in now as you continue to create.

Eric Hilton: You're talking more about Thievery Corporation then?

LP: Yeah, and will you perform this music live?

Eric Hilton: It's funny, Natalia would love to, and we've talked about doing a couple of shows just for fun, like in New York and maybe a couple of other cities. I am so focused on making music that any time that I have to take away from making music, it frustrates me. I'm just a serial creator of music. And I realized that about myself a while ago, but even more so, I'm aware of it now. And I'm just always on to the next, always on to the next. I mean, my next album is done. But it'll come out in February. It's all instrumental. And even the one after that is finished. I just enjoy making the music.

I always tell friends if you're a painter and you love to paint, then you have to go to the gallery shows, which are the live shows, right? And you have to recreate the painting in front of the audience. It feels like that to me. As much as I love connecting with the audience and I love the fact that there is an audience, it's a beautiful thing.

I just want to make that art. It's what I'm driven to do. And it's interesting because Rob and I are very different on that front, and he loves the live show. He just literally lives for it. So we're at polar opposites, which is funny. He wants to continue playing Thievery, I think, for quite a while. I have the luxury of going and participating when I want to, but it's just not my calling. I was always more of the studio guy.

LP: To go back to something we were talking about, those decisions years and years ago, in a way, have afforded that luxury, right? Like, you're not the type of artist who needs to go on the road to live. And I don't mean live to get your life calling; I mean to live and eat.

Eric Hilton: It's interesting. I guess now, if we were just starting, we would be. We were fortunate to be in the music business when it was better, And it was much better before downloads and streamings in terms of rewarding the artist for their work.

So we were very fortunate, but yeah, the records and the music are valuable. And over time, they retain a really high value. There are just two ways of looking at it. Whatever you're inclined to do and whatever your passion is what you should do. I just never felt like I was part of a band because I wasn't. We created a band of incredible musicians to perform Thievery Corporation with us, but I'm a producer, DJ, and artist. That's what I am.

LP: Not entirely unreminiscent from, like, mid-70s Steely Dan. (laughter)

Eric Hilton: Yeah. I really, it's funny. I'm not a Steely Dan fan behind each stretch, but what they went through, I can completely empathize.

LP: Yeah, I like to read about or hear them talk about the pressures of that era in particular because the model was so much make a record, go on the road, come back from being off the road, make a record, go on the road. And it's hard now for people to really appreciate the will it took. And they were lucky that they were making commercially successful records, so they had the clout to be able to stand hard against that. But that was not an easy choice at that particular time in the music business.

Eric Hilton: Yeah, it's true. I watched a documentary about them, and they were so obsessive about the quality of what they were doing in the studio. At least one of them was terrified of live performance just because of the lapses in quality that would naturally ensue from a live show. They couldn't handle it. They wanted their music to sound a certain way, and they couldn't do it live.

LP: Yeah. It's interesting. I think we're relatively in the same age range. Talk to people of our generation who went to shows 35- 40 years ago, and you often didn't know what you were going to get in terms of sound reproduction. And I can remember going to big concerts and leaving saying, man, that sounded awful. And now it's like you go to a show and pretty much anything from a club on up to out in a field or a stadium, that's not something you really reckon with anymore. It's incredible how the technology has allowed the presentation of a live show to actually, you know it's going to sound good.

Eric Hilton: It's true. Yeah. I have so much to stick out for me, but I did see New Order over in the early eighties, maybe 80, 81, or something like that. And they sounded awful. They were literally awful. And they're one of my favorite bands. And it's funny, though. Now, if you see them, they sound incredible.

LP: I've always been curious a bit about your musical journey because you draw from So much, right? Music from around the world and the way you've always emphasized bringing together the strands that serve the composition or that inspire the composition and not really worrying about genre per se. It's something I've always loved as a listener. It'd be the bottomless well that is music. One of the most fun things about being a music lover is that you can keep going forever. Sometimes, even within one genre, never mind across genres. The amount of reggae music that was produced in eight years on this one little island still blows my mind. It is incredible.

How did your mind get open? So you start with whatever it was you were into as a young kid, as a young adult. But what was the beginning of the journey to realize there were these other musics? Was there a mentor? Was there a zine? Can you identify moments where you were like, holy cow, what is this other thing?

Eric Hilton: Yeah, I can. I was lucky to grow up with a great local radio station, WHFS, which was very free-form. It was right outside of D. C. It served as a D. C. market, and they played a lot of eclectic. Music that was heading into the new wave era, which was my high school years. And there was a record store yesterday and today, which is where Dischord started. It's the whole punk label that was started out of that record store. So, I would spend all my money that I could muster up on records. At a certain point, I realized that I really liked the two-tone records, and I liked some neo-latin things, so I liked a lot of different things.

I liked electronic stuff, but I really liked things that were based on older musical forms, and I had never even heard of ska, like real ska, right? I just discovered The Specials and the two-tone stuff, and then that hipped me to the original stuff. And then I just started to go backward, and I got really into jazz and bossa nova cause I liked the first Everything But The Girl record. And I wanted to see where these influences came from. And sure enough, there was that deep well. 

Yeah, I'm still always just looking back because there is so much great music from the past. Sadly, I miss a lot of the current music, just cause I'm looking back all the time. Yeah, that's how I got into all the different types of music. And, of course, I love music from any culture, any place.

LP: What's the common theme for you? Are you a rhythm guy? Are you a melody guy? Or is that overly reductive?

Eric Hilton: Oh, I'm like an everything guy. My strong suits are bass lines and rhythms, but I love melody, too. It depends on the mood.

You mentioned Jamaican music like one of my favorite musical formats is old rocksteady. I love that era of early reggae, but it just depends on the mood. I'll work on all kinds of music, and in one day, I'll switch gears sometimes.

LP: It's one of the things that stands out for me about this new album, which is you mentioned Everything But The Girl. I had a moment when I was listening to it this morning when Air popped into my head. I heard a bass lick that, that sort of, I was like, oh, that almost sounded like an Air sample. And I'm always hesitant to tell an artist when I hear something in their music that's reminiscent because I understand as a listener that it's all one atmospheric river.

And the music, music gets plucked from it and gets added to it. And so I never view that as a deficiency or a whatever, like to me, that's a positive, like it's all a lineage of music that's being added to and drawn from. Something that struck me about this album was how it's so rooted in all these things you talk about: the music you love, the music you've played with over the years, but it's additive. It's additive. And that's something I really appreciate in what you do and what you've done with Thievery over the years as well. It's been an acknowledgment of lineage. 

And the musicians I talk to here a lot often do that. Sometimes, it's not reflected in their music, just in their attitudes or in the conversation. You realize they see themselves in these lineages. Other times, it's much more explicit, but that's also another very special element of what music artists get to do. Someone is rarely just on an island, and they have no connections to anything else. What's your take on that? What's your feeling about the importance of that? Are you in a musical community?

Eric Hilton: I'm actually not currently feeling like I'm in a musical community because I've decamped into my little world of trying to be completely self-sufficient. With Natalia, we made the record together, but a lot of times, I just make musical sketches that will hopefully become instrumental songs that I'll put out. Yeah, I don't know. I'm an introvert in that way. I'm an introverted extrovert, so I can go either way. But when it comes to art making, I like to be very introverted, I have friends in the music industry and we talk sometimes, but we don't like share secrets or plan things or anything like that. We're all just working independently.

LP: That's really incredible that after a career that I would say almost, not defined, but certainly marked by collaborations of all kinds. So many musicians have come in and out of this orbit that you and Rob created. There are so many people, so many players, and so many styles, and, in this moment, that's where you are. And I understand that it may not speak to a moment five years from now. It may not. It's just a moment, even if it feels like it's the new paradigm. What got you there? Is it just a, is it a need for control? Was it the pandemic and isolation? Was it something bigger? How do you arrive at this moment?

Eric Hilton: It's more of just challenging myself. I work with a partner, with Rob, and that's the best way for both him and I to work. We're bi-coastal, so we can't work remotely well. It just doesn't feel right. You have to be in the same room. You have to spend a lot of time together. We don't spend enough time together because of our very busy lives and things like that. I'll stay up late at night making music, steal time during the day, or just try to figure it out. And I just found that I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the challenge of having to do everything. The bass line, the keyboards, all the beats, the rhythms, the arrangement of the song — it's just been incredibly challenging. I'm getting much better at what I do, just working alone, because I have to figure things out. So that's what I've been experiencing lately. And, yeah, I like it. It doesn't mean I'll do it this way forever, but it just works right now.

LP: That might be a great way for us to say God of our time together. I think that's a great summation. Thank you again for making time and for the record. It's a privilege to be able to talk to artists like you, and it's my driving force for continuing to do this. It's a great way to hear such diverse and interesting music, and you've added another brick to that for me. So thank you.

Eric Hilton: Thank you. That was a great conversation. You have a great podcast, so it's my pleasure to be on it.