The Umbrella: We're really excited that you're working with Helado Negro, we know you've worked with Roberto before on your last album, Mars. How is it going on tour together?

Ahmed Gallab: It's great, it's like a dream come true, you know? He's a huge inspiration for me. He's very, very good friends with the drummer of Sinkane, Jason Trammell, who introduced me to Roberto and his music back when I was in New York a few years ago. So it's really nice to have a family on the road. We all get along and the music is just so fabulous. I hope that we can do more of this kind of stuff, it's exciting.

TU: And Grapefruit is here also.

AG: Yeah, they asked me if I wanted to add them on here a few weeks ago, and I really liked them so I'm excited to see Grapefruit play. This is our first headlining tour, so this is all so new to us. It's our first headlining show in Portland ever. It's exciting to see how it's going to manifest and see how many people are going to come.

TU: That's so fun. You've worked with so many big names in this music scene (Of Montreal, Caribou, Yeasayer), does that affect the way you feel about your own project? Do those feed into each other at all?

AG: Sure, absolutely. They all were so supportive of me and my music, and they all took me in under their wing. I gained a lot of knowledge out of playing in those bands, the kind of knowledge that you don't really get to experience unless you're actually doing stuff. When I'm touring now with Sinkane, I use all of the things that I learned from all those experiences. The business end of music is a really difficult thing, and it's something you don't get to learn as easily as I did. I'm very happy that I got to do that. 

TU: Yeah it's cool that you've been able to streamline that into your experience with Sinkane. 

AG: Yeah it's exciting. The guys in Yeasayer and Of Montreal, and Caribou... I am indebted to them. They really allowed me to do some great stuff.

TU: Speaking of projects other than Sinkane -- do you ever have projects that you're super enthusiastic about working on, maybe something that seems like it's going to take off and then it just flops?

AG: Yeah, that happens a lot. I'm kind of one of those guys who is prone to those situations. I'm so inspired by so many different people and I'm always like -- let's do it! Let's do something! I keep all of the ideas but they're all on the back burner. Roberto [Lange] and I want to work on something together eventually, like do an album together. I want to do something with Jay Trammell, our drummer. Our guitar player Jonny Lam has a country-western band and he's doing a project where he gets a bunch of people to sing classic country records, and I'm going to sing a song with him on that. It gets so overwhelming to think about anything other than the main project.

TU: Yeah, well Mean Love is so great. I don't know if you have anything planned for Sinkane beyond this, or if you're just doing this tour for now and then taking a break.

AG: No way man! It's my main project. I want to do this for the rest of my life. I don't see myself going back to playing in anyone's band ever again hopefully. I really like doing that and I miss it to some extent, but I've always wanted to come back to this -- to me doing my own thing. We're pretty far along now and I'm eager to get to the same place I was at with those other bands, and we're working really hard to do that. 

TU: Do you foresee a time when you'll be able to incorporate all of the things you want on stage and on tour, like a live horn section and singers?

AG: Yeah I think so. There were times when I didn't think I would even have a band together, and we got the band together and did the whole touring things from Mars and after that was done, I was like, man, I really just want to make sure we can do this on our own but more comfortably. Now we did it, and we're a little bit more comfortable. I think by the end of next year we'll be in a better place to play with our other guys. 

TU: I was wondering how it's been for you translating Mean Love into the tour, and what it's like to bring that to stage. 

AG: It's really challenging, because ideally I'd like to have horn players and singers with me, but I can't. It's not a band that is similar to the other guys I've played with where I can run a backing track. It doesn't sound organic or authentic to me that way. We have to reappropriate a lot of those songs and sounds and make them work for people. When we play in New York we get the horn players and the singers and it's really fun. It's allowed me to really understand the songs more, to deconstruct and reconstruct them. I think ultimately they're going to end up better in the live setting, because I have three other guys who are amazing performing with me. I think it's the tip of the iceberg -- we're getting there.

TU: Yeah, well we're rooting for you! You focus on identity and transcending culture a lot as a theme. We were wondering if there was anyone that inspired you to do that, or maybe it was more of a natural progression for you in this project.

AG: I think for me it was my folks, my parents, my experience growing up. When I got to working on this album it was really important for me to sing. I wanted every song to have vocals, and to have some message. I realized I have all of these experiences that I've dealt with in my entire life, and I can no longer express them only by the music; I have to talk about them. That was the easiest and most available stuff that I could think about singing. In turn, I think that's going to inform every record I do from now on. The stuff that I want to sing about is going to be personal stuff, because I have a lot that I've dealt with in my life. It's very therapeutic and cathartic to air out your experiences.

TU: Well I'm totally impressed at how many genres you can fit into and reconcile in your album. Especially the country-western stuff, like on "Galley Boys." Was it challenging? Or maybe there was some crossover between genres? 

AG: The thing that I've found as I was working on these records, is that there's a common theme in reggae, country-western, soul, and African music. The people that created these musics all come from a very similar place. They have all dealt with oppression, longing, sadness, and happiness in a similar way. So it made a lot of sense to bring them together because they have the same energy. If you listen to a country-western song, it really does have the same energy as a classic roots reggae song. I felt the same feeling in all of those musics. It would be so interesting if you could get all of them together and just melt them together and see what would happen if you have this collective energy of these five different kinds of music. When I started working on Mars, I first started falling in love with the pedal steel guitar. I got this guitar pedal that I felt like I could maybe cheat and make my own sound of the pedal steel. As I started writing more I realized that I really needed that distinctive sound and needed to get someone who was really good at it. It made a lot of sense when I brought Jonny Lam to record on the new album. He just fit in perfectly with the track.

TU: Yeah, well it seems like people often talk now about how genre doesn't do justice to a lot of emerging music, at least I know that writing about music it can be hard to fit people into these genres. I think a lot of people feel like you're always getting these sub genres and sub genres and etc. -- I wonder what you think about whether that's going to change completely in the future, or how that conversation is going to evolve if at all.

AG: I don't think it'll change. I think that people need to have things easily defined so that they can understand them. I made a conscious effort on this record to speak about the things I wanted to speak about in a very clean and simple way, and to use a simple vocabulary and make music that was not as complicated as my old music, so that you could hear and understand what the message was in each song. I feel like people will push boundaries and inspire people to think outside of the box but I don't think that genres will disappear. I think genres are another form of simplicity and a way for a lot of people to absorb what's going on. It helps too much. That said, I think it's a little bit unfortunate, because you start getting into these specific kinds of genres that bastardize a lot of music. Like "world music" as a genre is really annoying because there are so many kinds of music from all over the world and they all get thrown into this one category. You don't get to appreciate the beauty of it and you're not allowed to respect truly what that music actually is. When you think of "world," you think of African-sounding jingle jangle music. You'll throw, like, K-Pop or J-Pop into world music too, or Russian music will get thrown in. You know there are so many different kinds of music and they're all so beautiful and should be respected for what they are. 

TU: Yeah that is certainly unfortunate. Now you've got us thinking about the whole Western tradition of music....

So I know you've spent a lot of time in DIY communities in Ohio, does that affect how you think about music?

AG: Absolutely, yeah it's how I learned how to work on anything. DIY scenes and the hardcore and punk scene that I was involved with more than anything was about community and maintaining a constant dialogue between everyone involved in the community for it to flourish and continue to exist. We had a group of us who would put together a flyer every month that would show all of the punk and hardcore shows at every singe house. Everyone communicated with each other and it turned into this insular vibe within the city. That was such a beautiful thing. You were helping each other do something. A lot of us didn't really fit in with what was going on in the city or the world. It was really nice to be able to go to a show and see people like you and enjoy their company, share ideas and support them. As I've grown up and started to do my own thing and left Ohio, the idea of community and the idea of support that I got from the DIY community has still stayed with me. I like to support all of the people who I work with, and I have a close relationship with my record label. I know how that stuff works because I learned it through the DIY scene. You find out, the more successful you get, that hardcore kids rule everything. I have friends at Nike from hardcore, you roll up to a venue and the promoter will come from hardcore and you have these awesome conversations and just sit back and you reminisce -- "Oh where did you come from? What did you do?" "Oh I used to have a tape label," or something.

TU: Yeah it's a great unifier. It's cool that it transcends geography too. You're based in Brooklyn now, do you feel like the location that you're in influences a lot of what you're writing?

AG: It influences my writing but more so my work ethic. Brooklyn is not an easy place to live. If you don't do anything you can easily get caught in your mind and start to go crazy. A lot of people there that I know work very, very hard, and they create amazing things and do good work. It's really nice because if you don't wake up in the morning and do something, someone else is gonna do it. If they do it, they're going to have a better opportunity to get to a better place. You can look at it in that regard, as friendly competition. My girlfriend is a very driven person too, and it's really nice to wake up in the morning and go do something and then come back and talk about it, and be inspired to do it again the next day. I feel like when I was living in Columbus it was a lot easier to not be that way because no one really had a fire up their ass. The ones that did left. In New York, everyone has a fire up their ass and having a good work ethic trains your mind to be creative all of the time. [Your mind is] always working, you're using it much more frequently.

TU: Do you have any advice for twenty-somethings (of which Portland has plenty) musicians that are just getting started out?

AG: It's just really important to have fun. You lose track of that very easily when you get thrown into the fire. Music is all about having fun. It should never be work -- it is work-- but it should never seriously feel like it. It should never be a crazy thing. When you're not enjoying yourself playing music then you're doing something wrong. I say that because I've had to do that -- just sit back and say, I'm not having fun here, what's going on? When it's not authentic people are going to be able to see that in your music, and that's when you get shitty music.