3 Questions with Les Claypool

What was it like collaborating with your son, Cage, on the song “Conspiranoia”? 

Well, you know, obviously, it’s always a wonderful thing to work with your child. It was very cool. It wasn’t meant to be a collaboration [laughs]. I had written these lyrics, and he was like, “Dad, you can’t say that, you can’t.” Because it was a little too in your face social-political commentary. So it made me hearken back to the days. Well, most of our material I have these characters and I would express these points through these characters. So, I developed these characters through a song, and that’s when he came back and said, “Oh yeah, that’s good, that’s better.” 

And he came up with the final line: “For an open mind too open, spills its contents on the ground.” 

What insights do you wish you had at the beginning of your musical journey? And, what advice do you have for someone starting in music? 

I accumulated some things pretty early on that definitely guided the way I do things. And one of them is to stay true to yourself and your vision and be honest with what you present to the world, because pretense is very easy to spot. 

But it also depends on what you want. I think more than anything, you have to define success. For some people, success is having a bunch of money and women and cars and adulation. Some people’s success is being able to run the fastest quarter mile. For some people’s success is having a well-rounded life and family and whatnot. And so you have to kind of define what you want early on before you set down that path because there’s different ways of achieving these goals.

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