Thundercat’s Eclectic Journey: From Snoop Dogg to Star Wars
The genre-bending musician reflects on a career defined by unlikely collaborations and a new album exploring themes of grief and self-discovery.
- Thundercat, born Stephen Bruner, recounts an early attempt to introduce Snoop Dogg to the complex jazz-rock of Frank Zappa.
- His forthcoming album, Distracted, delves into personal struggles with loss and self-sabotage, building on themes explored in previous work.
- Bruner’s musical background is remarkably diverse, ranging from backing Snoop Dogg to playing with Suicidal Tendencies and appearing in “The Book of Boba Fett.”
- He attributes his open-minded approach to music to his parents, who discouraged rigid categorization.
On an overcast Thursday afternoon in London, Thundercat shared a story that perfectly encapsulates his uniquely winding career: the time he tried to play Snoop Dogg Frank Zappa’s “St. Alphonzo’s Pancake Breakfast.” Bruner, then known as Stephen Bruner, a bassist for hire, was backing the rapper with a band brimming with Los Angeles jazz talent—Kamasi Washington, Josef Leimberg, and Terrace Martin, all of whom would later contribute to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. But their improvisational skills weren’t always appreciated. “Ain’t nobody told you to play all that,” Snoop reportedly flatly stated during one of Bruner’s expansive bass solos.
Perhaps in a bid to broaden horizons, Bruner played Snoop the 1974 track, a dizzying piece of jazz-rock that shifts time signatures three times in under two minutes and features lyrics about stolen margarine and public urination. “Yeah, I hit him with the rollercoaster,” Bruner chuckled, recalling Snoop nearly dropping his blunt while asking, “What the hell is going on?” “I said: ‘My sentiments exactly.’ I think I did a cartwheel after that and left the band: I played Snoop Dogg St. Alphonzo’s Breakfast, my job is done here, I have no more work to do.” He paused, adding, “Or maybe I got fired: ‘Get out of here dude, you’re too weird.’ I forget. It was a great moment.”
This anecdote, it became clear during a recent conversation, is quintessential Thundercat. His career has been a series of improbable collaborations with an astonishingly diverse range of artists: Ariana Grande, Herbie Hancock, a brief stint in the early 2000s German boyband No Curfew, and nine years with the thrash metal institution Suicidal Tendencies. He admitted he wasn’t thrilled with his time in the boyband: “I’m a working-class musician, man, and that was what it meant for me at the age of 14.”
“Whatever brain disposition that lets you know you’re in a dangerous situation, I don’t think I have,” he shrugged when asked if he ever feels out of place. “I think constantly performing has allowed that to not be such a problematic thing to me. What’s that saying? ‘Luck is just preparation met with opportunity’?”
Bruner’s transition from a sought-after sideman to a solo artist in the early 2010s felt natural, he explained, because his music was already as eclectic as his resume. His albums blend funk, jazz-fusion, electronic pop, yacht rock, hip-hop, psychedelia, punk, and chiptune, all liberally adorned with the kind of extravagant bass solos that once irked Snoop Dogg.
What makes Thundercat’s music unique is his ability to seamlessly blend disparate genres into a cohesive and compelling sound. It shouldn’t work, but it does, perhaps because the stylistic combinations feel organic, a reflection of his remarkably broad tastes. He enthusiastically discussed Leon Ware’s 1976 album Musical Massage, explained the Lydian mode, demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of Chick Corea’s work, and even defended the “really innovative” output of Limp Bizkit.
He credits his parents, both musicians—his father drummed with The Temptations—with instilling in him a rejection of musical categorization. By his teenage years, he was equally captivated by Slipknot and Korn as he was by Billy Cobham and George Duke, artists his parents played or that he and Washington would sneak into Los Angeles clubs to see.
Thundercat is a pop star unlike any other. His style is immediately striking: voluminous corduroy trousers, a shirt featuring a 19th-century military brocade, trainers with metallic skeleton toes, and dip-dyed dreadlocks held back by enormous silver grips adorned with snarling tigers. He accessorized with a large metallic breastplate bearing the logo of the cartoon alien felines that inspired his stage name. He’s an avid fan of cartoons, comic books, and science fiction, peppering his conversation with references to obscure manga and video games.
He declared his “greatest moment ever” was a cameo as a man with a robotic hand in the Star Wars series The Book of Boba Fett. “I can use that in an argument every time somebody gets too high and mighty: ‘Hey, you can’t talk to me like that, I was in Star Wars!’” he said. “It wasn’t one of those never meet your heroes moments. You can’t ruin Star Wars for me. Certain characters and certain principles it was created off are timeless, they still stand. The struggle between dark and light, what is considered dark and what is considered light; the Force, which is like flatulence basically.”
But his trip to London wasn’t about Star Wars. Bruner’s new album, Distracted, continues his trend of stylistic experimentation: smooth piano ballads alongside house tracks, A$AP Rocky rapping over shoegaze-influenced beats, and collaborations with Lil Yachty and the Lemon Twigs.
The album’s eclecticism initially obscures the underlying themes of struggle and melancholy. 2011’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse mourned the death of his friend Austin Peralta; 2017’s Drunk explored his relationship with alcohol, while his previous album, It Is What It Is, grappled with the loss of rapper Mac Miller.
He said It Is What It Is was particularly difficult to create—”There was a lot of trauma linked to it, a lot of pain”—and its release during the height of lockdown only compounded the experience. “I’ve heard putting out an album being compared to postpartum depression – you have such an attachment to this thing because of how much you obsess about it, then you put it out and then there’s this kind of weird feeling of loneliness. And because of fucking Covid, It Is What It Is came out to complete silence, like: drop the album and go sit in darkness, see if you can amp the pain up some more.”
“There was a lot going on at the time that album came out, and just having to sit with it, I couldn’t … I would almost, like, vomit at the thought of it. But ultimately, when I look back, I’m very grateful for the chance to have sat down, because to have to go on stage and deal with it night after night, say goodbye to my friends over and over again, would have been another traumatising experience.”
Instead of touring, Bruner took stock, giving up drinking and dedicating himself to boxing training. “Even my trainers wonder what the hell I’m doing sometimes: ‘Hey, are you training for a fight or something?’” he chuckled. “I’m like, ‘You mean world war three, because that seems to be on?’”
He describes Distracted as “a bit of a diary, my thought processing,” relating to the introspection he underwent after releasing It Is What It Is. The songs explore themes of self-sabotage, failed relationships, and a suspicion that his erratic behavior might be linked to undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The album also features Mac Miller on “She Knows Too Much,” a track recorded in Malibu years before his death. Bruner said revisiting the recording wasn’t painful, contrasting with the overwhelming grief that consumed him while working on tracks addressing Miller’s death on It Is What It Is: “So hard to get over it, I tried to get under it, I’m stuck in between,” he sang on the title track.
“It was the funniest shit ever,” Bruner said of recording “She Knows Too Much.” “It was hilarious, I remember it viscerally. I like to describe Mac almost like he was a one-man Rat Pack. When I would see him, I would somehow feel like we were supposed to be wearing suits. Like weird, highbrow bullshit and shenanigans. And tomfoolery! That’s what we were up to. It’s just a clear picture of who we were.”
Bruner says Distracted is “the sound of me choosing happy.” Even if it occasionally sounds troubled, he acknowledges, “choosing happy is a hell of a process.”
He seemed optimistic, joking about needing a Brazilian Butt Lift to compete with Cardi B and looking forward to an upcoming trip to Paris Fashion Week.
Despite all the changes in his career, he said, it doesn’t feel drastically different from his early days playing weddings or with Suicidal Tendencies. “My main memory is thinking if I stood still for too long, I’d get hit with a beer can. I think the same principle applies. Actually, I think that principle applies to every stage of life: stand still too long, somebody’s going to hit you with something.”
