Risen Magazine: Your first two albums earned rave reviews, but almost every one of them compares you to Prince, Curtis Mayfield or Sly Stone. Is that the risk of openly acknowledging your influences? Van Hunt: I don’t think people are wrong that there are elements in what I do that are similar to those artists. Particularly to me, with Prince and Sly—those albums were the soundtrack to my teenage years, my formative years. So they are big, heavy influences on everything that I do musically. That doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that I haven’t sold as many records! [Laughter] RM: At some point, though, I imagine you want to be recognized for who you are. VH: I believe less and less each day I’m on this planet that there really is a “who I am.” I feel like there’s music that comes from me that I’ve never heard, but I’m not convinced I can make music that’s never been done before. And I’m comfortable in that creative space. What I’ve liked about writing songs up to this point is being able to say something lyrically, musically, melodically, and put an arrangement underneath it. Nothing has satisfied me like that until recently when I
discovered writing short stories. When I started developing characters and using nuances—that gave me the same feeling. RM: What kinds of stories are you writing? VH: I had to start with something I knew, so I started writing about my life from like eight to 11. I make the correlation between my childhood and my adult life. RM: You grew up around your father’s rather bohemian lifestyle. [He worked as a pimp at one time.] How did those experiences affect you as an artist? VH: It doesn’t take more than one or two of those kinds of experiences to paint your whole childhood. My whole childhood wasn’t bad. I was raised by my mama who was definitely a disciplinarian. My father worked lots of jobs, just trying to hustle and pay the bills, and those experiences—although there were just a few of them—were the biggest ones. I just want to make that disclaimer. But I guess the one thing I took away from it is that everybody dumps on people and sometimes you get disappointed. I had to learn to pay attention and know when to confront people. JAN/FEB 2008 - Feature 41