Key Change: James Acaster on OutKast

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

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This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that transformed their lives.

My guest today is James A.

Caster, a comedian, author, musician, and interviewer.

He's filmed comedy specials for HBO and Netflix, which are hilarious and high concept.

His musical project, Temps, has released an album and an EP.

He's written multiple books, including one about how the year 2016 was the greatest year for music.

James also co-hosts the food podcast, Off Menu, with comedian Ed Gamble.

And I've listened to more hours of Off Menu than any other podcast.

James and Ed don't know it, but they're my best friends, and I have lured James out of the parasocial relationship that we have in my head and into this conversation with me to talk about a song that had a profound effect on his life.

So James, thank you so much for being here.

I love that.

I love that there's a parasocial relationship and a real one at the same time.

The parasocial one goes very deep.

Yeah, that guy, I can't compete with him.

I accept that you're his best friend and that's cool, but like I'm happy to have our relationship as well.

Okay, great.

Well, what song are we going to talk about?

I mean, it's going to seem really obvious and basic, but we're going to talk about Hey Ya is what we're going to talk about.

I don't think that seems either obvious or basic, especially in the year 2025.

It's been 22 years since Outcast released it, so I'm excited to talk about it.

Yeah, I guess like I was 18, I think, when it came out, and it was everywhere, and you couldn't get away from Hey Yah.

Yeah.

I did a DJ set at Glastonbury Festival with a friend of mine who's also a comedian, Nish Kumar, and there was someone relentlessly requesting Hey Ya who was maybe 15 years old.

And I don't know what their relationship is like with the song because they haven't heard it absolutely in every single bar they walk in, every time they turn on the TV, every time I turn on the radio.

So I don't know what it's like for them.

And when did you hear the song for the first time?

The first time I heard it wasn't actually Audrey 3000 playing the song.

I was doing a music course in Northampton where I grew up.

And one of the bands on the course played an acoustic version of it to the class

and I knew it was a outcast cover but I was like this song is incredible I have to go and listen to this actual song right away but they had learned it like you know a day after it had come out and played it to everyone and I wasn't really listening to that sort of music at the time so it just passed me by and the day it had been out but instantly loved it.

Were you already an Outcast fan?

Not really.

From the ages of 13 to 17, I was just listening to punk and metal and that was it.

You know, finding my tribe in school and trying to be with those guys and just being completely shut off to anything else.

And then I'd left school, gone on this music course, which was not a proper qualification.

It wasn't really a proper course, but the whole point of it was that you form a band and everyone's in bands in the course and they're playing their songs to each other.

And while I was on that course, I was like, I'm going to listen to as much music as possible.

I'm not going to shut myself off anymore.

I'm going to be really open to loads of different genres.

So I've been listening to a lot of jazz.

I've been listening to electronic music, but I hadn't really gone all the way into hip-hop yet.

And I definitely hadn't got anywhere near pop music yet.

Yeah.

So this really poppy song

from a rapper was not something that was on my radar yet at the time.

I was open to it, but I hadn't yet discovered how incredible pop music is and also how mind-blowing rap music is.

When you were at that music course, were you playing drums in bands?

Yeah, so I decided when I was at school, I'm not going to go to university.

I'm not going to carry on being at this school.

I'm just going to focus on being in a band.

Didn't know where to find other musicians, saw that course.

The whole point of it is form the band.

I'm going to go there.

I'm going to do that.

But I was open-handed as a a drummer.

I played like left-handed, even though I was right-handed.

Yeah.

And a drummer that I really respected told me,

you need to switch over.

I've been playing drums for like 10 years at that point.

And they were like, you need to learn how to play right-handed.

Why?

Because they were saying, if you go to any gig, the drums are set up for a righty.

You want to be able to sit down and just play it.

It's just going to make your life easier.

I was ambidextrous when I was like a little, little kid.

Yeah.

And all of my teachers and my parents just encouraged me to be right-handed and were like it's an easier life just do it but i was just naturally i'll you know i picked up my knife and fork left-handed and drums left-handed just most things i would quite naturally do left-handed so i spent the summer before starting that course learning how to play drums right-handed which meant I went from thinking I was this really good drummer, I really had a high opinion of myself as a drummer, definitely inflated looking back, but I thought I was brilliant to absolutely being like, I can't play the drums.

I remember when the course started, I was pretty nervous and I was like, I'm not well, I want to be or well, I was.

But that was my main instrument.

And luckily, there wasn't too many other drummers on the course.

So I was able to get in a band fairly easily.

Do you think relearning how to play the drums and opening yourself up to new genres of music?

were related at all?

Like you're retraining your brain on the drums and maybe also retraining your brain on how to listen to music?

Definitely, I think leaving school, like deciding to leave school and not go to university, which is what I'm supposed to do, definitely did change my mind to be a bit more like, you can do anything.

I met someone on the college course called Graham, who I instantly bonded with, who was kind of at the same point.

He was older than me, but he'd quit his job as a plumber to decide to try and be a guitarist.

So we were both like, we just suddenly realized you can do anything in life.

We could go around, we were very obnoxious at that point.

I think he would admit that as well.

We would argue with people about stuff that we didn't even really particularly care about, but we just realized we could argue when we'd never argued before.

We'd always been like agreeable types.

But the positive side of it was we were like, we can play anything.

We can play any instrument.

Let's just go for it.

Let's just sit down, work it out.

No one can tell us what kind of music we can listen to.

We can get into whatever we want.

We can study it, understand it, not understand it, whatever we want to do and that was a really exciting part of that time was just yeah being like let's not limit ourselves anymore the James that I'm imagining before this program a drummer who thinks very highly of his playing and listens to punk and metal I mean I think I either was very close or possibly was that person at that age as well was it tough for you to make that switch from being like, this is exactly what I listened to, to, no, I'm going to let in other kinds of music.

I think, think, I don't know if I've been wanting to do it for a while, but it definitely stopped making sense to me to just continue listening to one style of stuff.

Although, in Ketron, the town that I grew up in, all the kids who were into alternative music really quite heavily at that point

got into old school alternative music.

So they all suddenly got into Sabbath and ACDC.

And it wasn't about what was current, which, you know, to be fair to them, their their taste of absolutely stood the test of time, whereas what I was listening to at that point were predominantly new metal bands and, you know, bands that are very cringe now.

But within that friendship group, within that whole music scene in Ketrin,

I still was sticking to my guns, even with them, and being like, no, no, I like this new taproot album.

And you guys don't know what you're talking about because you're listening to stuff where they just, that's how metal's always been.

But I'm listening to stuff where they're pushing it forward and it's exciting.

I'm listening to New Metal.

New is in the title.

Yeah, it's literally called New Metal, you Philistines.

Did you think it was exciting that they spelled New Metal N-U instead of N-E-W?

It's extremely exciting.

I wouldn't have been lured in by it if it was N-E-W.

Did one of my teachers invent it?

I'm not going to listen to that.

So I think that when I did start being like, I'm going to listen to anything, it was actually quite an easy jump because it was like, oh, I should have been doing this all along.

You know, running my mouth off about how great it is, people innovating in one genre of music within this very tight parameters.

But actually, there's all this stuff that I clearly love and enjoy.

And there were some like gateway bands and bridges and stuff.

But Haya was the proper like, oh, we've completely shifted into, I'm not being a snob anymore.

I mean, you couldn't really be a snob with that song.

It was so good.

You would have to be, you know, willfully a contrarian to not like it.

But it meant that it completely just got my head out of my ass and made me actually appreciate anything by its own worth.

Okay, before we go into Outcast's version of the song, will you tell me more about the cover that you heard?

Were you sitting in a classroom when this band was playing it?

Yeah, there were these really uninspiring, energy-draining cabins that we were all sat in, where it had like stark white walls and they were echoey and people would fall asleep in the lessons all the time.

And I remember it was a lesson was like, we're going to do an acoustic song each each of the bands and it had to be a cover i remember that the main guy in that band was called tim

he was a red-haired guy i think there's an acoustic bass involved and maybe one of those you know whatever that drum's called that you sit on that box oh uh cajon

yeah i think it was that and at the time graham and i were really into

learning new time signatures and not everything being in 4-4.

And the main place we'd found that was in post-hardcore music or jazz music.

Then they played Hey Yah and it's just got that one bar of two in the chorus.

And that was so hooky to me and worked so well.

And it was like an undeniable pop song that was also doing what I considered at the time to be like intelligent.

Now I know that there's all sorts of intelligence in music that isn't just, oh, that person can count in certain ways.

But at that point, I was like, whoa, that's like really good songwriting.

And I couldn't wait for that bit to come around again.

I literally can picture that Tim guy in my head sitting on a chair, playing the acoustic guitar, looking down as he was singing and doing that bit where it's a bar of two in the chorus.

And maybe like, I have to hear this song.

So when did you go and listen to the actual song and where were you for that?

I went and bought it.

I was still very entrenched in buying cds at that point yeah so i went to the kettle hmv in the weekend i bought the double album and i don't remember sitting down and listening to it for the first time but i remember constantly listening to it and was it clear to you how popular it was everywhere yeah and you know that age as well i was starting to like actually like go out with my friends and go to bars or clubs or whatever and i've got yeah distinct memories of like being in the soundhouse in Northampton may it rest in peace and then playing hay yar and just

everyone who was sitting down suddenly is on the dance floor and that pretty much being the case anywhere that you went around that point and it was gonna be on at some point in the night it would have been nuts if a DJ didn't drop it at some point because

it's just an open goal and surely you want an easy night to some degree and it still would be now that's the thing nish and i didn't play it at glastonbury because it made me laugh too much that someone had held their phone up that said, play haya.

And I laughed because it was such an obvious song to request.

I always think when you're requesting songs, you know, it probably should be something you don't think they're going to play.

To play something that is so well known made me laugh.

And then the guy tapped on his phone a bit more and then showed us the screen again and it just said, please, and made me laugh again.

To be fair to the guy who requested it, it would not have been out of place at all because we're doing one after the other.

We'd play a song

and the game became whatever the last person played you kind of played the opposite to that uh genre wise but we were still trying to play songs that everyone knew so we absolutely should have played hey ya especially because we both had it downloaded already as part of our day-to-day lives so we should have we should have played it yeah i hadn't listened to it in quite a long time And then because I was going to do this, I was like, I'm going to listen to that particular song again.

And it still makes me feel the same.

It really is still a really exciting, unique song that I don't think I found that energy anywhere else.

Well, I was wondering when you started hearing it everywhere, if that changed your feelings about it at all.

Definitely when I was into New Metal and suddenly Limp Biz Kit were number one, I felt a bit of that.

But with Hey Ya, At that point, I was playing music all the time with my friend, trying to make something that was innovative and accessible.

We were very obsessed with, we wanted to have a huge album.

And bearing in mind, we failed.

We wanted to have a huge album that was also incredibly innovative and original.

And

when I heard that album and that song, that's how I felt about it.

I thought this is really inventive.

And yet.

I think it was number one.

Everyone was listening to it.

It was huge.

So when I was like out for the night and they'd play Hey Ya, a song that I was like, these people don't even know that he drops a bar of two halfway through the chorus.

They haven't got a clue.

And they're all dancing to it.

And they don't get thrown off by it.

They're not dancing.

And then the bar of two comes on.

They're like, whoa, hey, what happened?

Like, they're all still dancing.

So to me, it was extremely inspiring because I was like, yeah, you can do smart music, make smart choices.

be a bit avant-garde within pop music and still everyone will love it.

And that was really I wanted at that point.

Music that I liked to be in the mainstream because I wanted to make music that would be in the mainstream.

I didn't want to be this weird little band.

And looking back at the kind of band that I was in, what were we thinking that that would ever have been in the mainstream?

We were lucky if we even got it into the alternative scenes.

But, like,

I definitely, that's what I wanted at the time.

My desire was to have really weird music in the mainstream.

So, this rapper who had been the weird half of this duo for a while had fully led into that, did an album on his own as part of this double album and released this song that I felt was sneaking weirdness under the radar for everyone and they weren't realizing how weird it was.

So I was delighted when everyone was dancing to that song.

My conversation with James A.

Caster continues after this.

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So around this time in your life, were you already thinking about becoming a comedian?

Not really, no, not at all.

Like around then, so when I was 21, I did my first comedy gig and that was just to see if I could do it.

Again, it was kind of partly tied into that era of my life where I was like, let's just do everything.

But also, I'd had this car accident that really freaked me out.

I could have easily died in it.

I emerged without a scratch on me, but I really got obsessed with, oh, I'm not going to be here forever.

So it was a bit of a bucket list kind of lifestyle of anything revealing itself, do that thing.

One of the things I wanted to do at the time was do more volunteer work.

I painted an old lady's kitchen through this Keprin volunteer service.

They asked me if they could do anything for me in return.

I said no, because I hadn't done a good job of painting the kitchen.

They were like, we need to write something on the form.

Can you just say something that you would like to do?

And I was like, I want to do stand-up comedy at some point.

I want to do a stand-up comedy gig.

And they were like, okay, well, we can't organize that, but we'll write it on the form.

And then coincidentally, a week later, a guy came in asking them if they could help him put on a stand-up comedy workshop for younger people.

And they signed me up to it without asking me and phoned me up and said, well, we've signed you up to this thing.

So I did that for nine weeks, did a gig on the 10th week.

And then even then, I was thinking, I'm not going to do this as a job.

I'm in a band.

That's who I'm going to be.

I'm a drummer.

So I would do a gig every four months, a stand-up comedy gig, just for the adrenaline of it.

And because it was just fun.

And it wasn't until the band stopped when I was 22.

So just a year later, a year and a half later, that I was like, I don't think I have the energy emotionally or mentally to start another band.

So I'm going to do stand-up comedy in the meantime, just for the adventure of it.

Do you think that the way that you play drums and the way that you perform comedy or construct your material do you think that they're similar i definitely notice and tour managers of mine and like venue techs people who see me every day have noticed that like there are some routines some delivery some lines that are always rhythmically the same

because i'll find That is the best way that that joke works.

That's the best way of making it land.

And I will remember that that's how you deliver that bit.

And I might mess around with it and try and deliver it differently one night and then go, oh, no, no, it was that other way is the best because that that pause at that exact moment makes that land better.

So sometimes I can feel a little bit like, oh, that kind of comes from drumming and that kind of comes from when to hit this, when to hit that, and the effect that it has and how that helps and how that affects the people who hear it.

So like, I definitely think there's something to that.

And I also feel sequencing shows and sequencing albums are very similar.

As soon as I started stand-up, sequencing the set and the order I was going to do the material in was a part that I really enjoyed and thinking how it would all flow.

Because when I was growing up as a teenager and I was in bands with my friends, I was walking around just thinking about the set lists because I was like, this is the order we should play them in tonight.

And if it didn't, well, I'd go away and rethink it.

No, we should do this because this is segue into this nicely.

Yeah.

And stand up, that's obviously part of it as well you cannot get to the end of a routine and then just like have a little bit of a break and then go into there's got to be momentum so i always felt that's really similar and a really satisfying part of it to me getting the sequencing right so the audience are taken on a journey that with music they don't necessarily even realize sometimes it doesn't have to be a story but there's this emotional journey that if you get the sequencing right it can take them on and i love that when a band has paid attention and thought about that when you were talking about what hey uh and what under 3000 and outcast accomplished with that song something that can on the surface be enjoyed by so many people because it has like such a mainstream kind of hooky quality to it but actually you know there's something secretly smart happening under the surface but it's able to mix both of those things is that something that you have found in comedy because i feel that way about your stuff.

Oh, thank you.

I think it can exist in comedy.

There are countless comedians that I've seen who I think pulled that off.

You know, the reason I wanted to start doing stand-up is because, you know, my friend bought Susie Izzard's VHS surrounding my house and was like, it's dressed to kill that show.

Yeah.

You've got to watch this.

And I knew this was one of the biggest comedians in the world.

And then watching it being like, this is so weird.

Like, this whole special is weird.

And this is one of the biggest comics in the world.

Yeah.

But there is a weird culture in comedy, especially in this country.

And I think American comics often get very frustrated with it when they come to the Edinburgh Festival because that's where you suddenly get reviewed.

And people get very annoyed with comedy critics in this country seeing a show that's funny wall to wall, but then giving it three stars and saying, yeah, but...

Is being funny enough, though, really?

It wasn't clever enough.

There wasn't this.

And then as a comedian, you'll go and see that show and you go, this is really clever.

There's so much cleverness in the show, but they're burying it.

They're not putting it in the shop window and saying, look how clever I am.

And I think the main kind of flaw in the way that comedy is reviewed, and maybe,

I mean, I'm going to sound very bitter here because I famously have failed to win a certain award many years in a row in this country, is that the comedian's show often has to tell the audience why it's clever.

There has to be a point where the comedian explicitly says, hey, here's what I'm doing in this show.

Whereas if the comedian trusts that the theme is there and the audience will see what the theme is, or they do the clever stuff, but they don't tell the audience, here's why that was clever.

They just do it and they naturally laugh.

They don't know, like, hey yeah, they don't know they just danced to someone doing

two bars of four, a bar of two, and then back into four, four again.

Right.

Aldre 2000 doesn't go like, you know, Jim in the chorus.

That was a bar of two, by the way, and then carries on.

Yeah, there's something so special about having a song that music heads can appreciate.

You know, there's this dropped bar of two, and yet still have aunties dancing to it at every wedding.

Yeah, I really do feel like that's the dream.

I think those are some of my favorite things just across the board, hugely accessible and innovative at the same time.

Is that something that you can design for, or is it just luck?

I personally couldn't envision sitting down and going, right, we're going to write something that is both, you know, accessible and innovative at the same time.

And that's what we're going to aim for.

But I think if you're always thinking about your audience and how they're going to feel when they experience the thing that you're making, then it becomes a bit more achievable.

If you're someone like Andre 2000 who,

and I'm being very presumptuous now,

but

he appears to be someone who won't let himself off the hook, who's like, yeah, this has to be good.

Yeah.

And this has to be true to me and what I want to do at the same time.

I have to be expressing myself.

But also, it can't just be just for me and nobody else.

Because even with that flute album, he is not doing it just for him.

He has been very, very deliberate about, no, this I want to share with people.

Yeah.

It might not be for everybody, but I am thinking about making a certain amount of people feel a certain way.

I think this can work and connect with them.

I think if those are your priorities, then yeah, you can kind of accidentally on purpose do that more often than not.

And I think Outcast definitely achieved that album after album because they had those values.

James, thank you so much.

This was so great.

Thank you so much.

I loved it.

You can learn more about all of James' various projects at jamesacaster.com.

His latest stand-up special is Heckler's Welcome.

It's out now on HBO, and you can also order it on vinyl.

Go to songexploder.net slash keychange for more episodes and for a playlist with all the songs that have been discussed on the series.

The playlist also includes music from James' musical project, Temps.

I'll be back with a new Song Exploder episode next week, and stay tuned for more Keychange episodes in the future.

This episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Bisco.

Special thanks to Kieran Banerjee for recording James A.

Caster in London.

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