Grantland recently profiled Earl Sweatshirt in a coming-of-age piece titled “Here’s Earl.”
At age 16, Earl released his critically acclaimed self-titled debut mixtape, Earl. By 19, he delivered his debut studio album, Doris. Last month, a 21-year-old Earl dropped his latest offering, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt.
Within the Grantland profile piece, Earl mentions that he wrote many of the tracks on I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside at age 19 and 20, when he says he was in “such a different place.”
“I feel I Don’t Like Shit was really the pinnacle as far as the idea of Earl Sweatshirt, the teen, could go,” he says. “Just a lot of the sounds were the fully grown shit that I feel like we was on when we were teenagers. That O.F. sound. A lot of it is a new twist on some shit that’s super-nostalgic. So that shit is like the last of me, the final shedding of the teen shit.”
AD LOADING...
The Los Angeles native admits that his latest album contains “a lot of truth” but “there’s still the late teen element.”
Last week, Kendrick Lamar named Earl as his favorite artist during a Twitter Q&A.
Earl says, Kendrick’s album – To Pimp A Butterfly – allowed him to find himself and he’s appreciative.
“I don’t know if it was a gift or curse, but for me it’s that I had to fucking find myself,” Earl said. “That’s why I told the homies, whatever nuances I’m not feeling with a Kendrick [Lamar]–type album, I’m still so thankful for his position because he’s doing that work so that fools like me can still find myself. I just don’t do it in the same way as Kendrick. Kendrick is so explicit in the way that that nigga writes. Like, it’s so explicit. He’s the opposite of mystery; everything is fully spelled out. But it’s in [an] everyman’s language. You can really, really understand it. It’s sophisticated but it doesn’t take a lot to understand what he’s talking about. And everyone can read it, so it’s like … it gives me room to find myself.”
AD LOADING...
For more Earl Sweatshirt coverage, watch the following DX Daily:
