Rapper Slug of hip-hop duo Atmosphere talks about his growth as a person ahead of Pittsburgh stop

It’s been more than 20 years since Atmosphere, the underground hip-hop duo out of Minneapolis, first toured with Sage Francis and Mr. Dibbs, and their new Imagine the Fun tour with all three acts is running better than expected.

“(It’s going) really well, surprisingly well and I don’t mean that to say I expected it to suck, but, you know, we’re not that good,” said rapper Slug, whose real name is Sean Daley. “So for it to be going this good, it’s amazing. We almost look like we’re good at this (expletive).”

The prolific duo, which formed in 1996, is comprised of Slug and DJ/producer Ant, aka Anthony Davis. Their tour, named in a nod to Atmosphere’s 2005 album, “You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having,” visits the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks on Feb. 2. And, strangely enough, touring now provides a different level of satisfaction than the early days for the now 52-year-old Slug.

“I guess when I was younger, like anybody I’m a pretty typical mid kind of person,” he said. “When I was younger, a lot of what I was doing was just escapism, running away from the parts of me that I rejected or the parts of me that were not OK, that were broken, or what have you, so touring kind of became an extension of other types of problematic coping mechanisms, drinking and partying and eating bad.

“It was a mess, and now I’m not perfect, but I’ve taken a lot of time to try to straighten out a lot of the broken parts. So now I get to actually enjoy myself and go record shopping and take long walks in the park and look at the sunset and (expletive). It’s a different beast.”

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Just don’t ask Slug if he’s matured.

“Oh, you said the ‘M’ word. I don’t know if it’s a maturity thing ‘cause I’m still an idiot. I think it’s more, as you age, you hope to repair also and heal from all the parts that you break without knowing that you’re breaking,” he said. “When you’re younger, you feel like you’re invincible, like you’re not even vulnerable to the world around you, and in order to be able to do that and to sustain that, you have to break a few things because we’re supposed to be vulnerable. We’re supposed to be dependent on community and our surroundings.

“When you’re young, you don’t want that, so you force a square peg into a round hole, and as you age, you just kind of figure out how to finesse it and actually allow yourself to repair, allow yourself to be wrong, allow yourself to be accountable for the things that you’re wrong for.”

In a recent call from Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Slug discussed tweaking old songs to fit his current state of mind, his collaboration song called “Pittsburgh” and more:

With this tour, are you playing most of the “You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having” album?

We are playing the whole album, from front to back. But to be clear, I would prefer to say we are celebrating the album because I do take the agency to change lyrics, to shorten songs in order to make the show good, but also in order to make sure that I am representing who I am right now. So there are lyrics on that album that I wouldn’t have written today, and I have to figure out how to reconcile that live in front of an audience. And there’s two ways to do that. One is to ignore it. The other is to just lean into it, and I’m leaning into it.

I’m having opportunities to create that conversation from stage like, hey, you’ll see me change some of these words because of who I am now. And it’s not that I’m ashamed of who I was by any means, but I don’t want to model an incorrect version of myself in front of people, because some of these people brought their kids to the show. And so now I want to make sure I’m modeling the version of who I am in front of them and their children at the same time, to help create conversation about what that might be because if the kid is forced to listen to this record in the car because their dad loves it, the kid is hearing things that are maybe more toxic than what I might say on record today, right?

And so if that’s what’s expected, and they’re not getting it, I want to make sure to address that to make sure that there’s a conversation there because I’m not here to point fingers or to blame anybody. Hell, I’m not fixed. I’m just on my journey, you feel me? So it’s like the best thing I can do is create conversation between two other people to carry it forward and figure out what the (expletive) they feel.

Has the audience been pretty receptive to that?

I mean, nobody’s throwing pennies at me yet, you know what I mean? So I hope. But also, the funny thing about art, nobody in the audience can correctly interpret what I’m trying to communicate, unless I take the time to make sure they get it. So in that motion, they can take away whatever they want. I have no control over what they interpret. And it goes both ways. I do not have the capability to correctly 100% interpret what that audience thinks, especially when you consider how many people might be in that audience at any given moment. So I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re taking away from it.

All I have is the conversations that I get to have, or their response in whether they’re making noise or throwing their hands in the air, like they just don’t care. Or what shows up in my DMs after the show. And so far, I haven’t got anybody in my DMs talking about (expletive) you, you suck, I wish you would drink bleach, you know what I mean? So I feel like it’s at least, whether or not what we’re doing is amazing, it’s on par with who we are. And that’s really the foundation of what my job here is as a ringleader or a carnival extraordinaire, I’m bringing my train of carneys into your town to sell you some snake oil, or really to present this entertainment in hopes that you’ll provide me with a bowl of soup or a place to lay my head. And thus far, we’ve been getting those bowls of soup. So therefore, I have to trust the process and trust that what I’m doing is the correct path.

You put out “The Detour” EP (with HEBL and ZooDeVille) that included a song called “Pittsburgh,” so I was wondering what you remembered about writing that song and making the video.

We shot the video at Mr. Smalls. So we had a day off, and we made the song on the day before the show. That was summer 2023 on a tour that was called The Detour. We were on tour with Slightly Stoopid, opening for them, but then on our off days, we would pick up our own headliner shows. So we had picked one up in Pittsburgh, and there was like seven or eight other places that we picked up these shows, and thought, hey, do you know what would be cool if on our days off instead of just allowing the three of us to sink into cheeseburgers and sleeping all day, what if we made songs in our hotel rooms on some really dingy equipment? We’re literally recording on a Shure 58 handheld (microphone) going directly into my GarageBand and then shoot videos too.

It was such a cool idea, so we thought we would try to live up to the challenge. So Pittsburgh, we’re in a hotel — I can’t remember which one, man — I’m gonna take a guess that it was the Comfort Inn. I can’t remember the neighborhood, kind of like a very woodsy big hill about 15 minutes out of downtown, and it wasn’t really near Mr. Smalls either. We booked cheap rooms. We keep a kind of budget-y, and I don’t even think budget-y is a word. So we recorded it in my room, and it was pretty fun.

It was a faster one, which HEBL wasn’t giving us a ton of fast ones ‘cause I think he was nervous whether or not we’d be able to handle rapping over something that was a little bit more four-on-the-floor or house-inspired, and we loved it. It was such a good one, and so we just went in and then the next day, we’re like we should shoot the video while we’re still in Pittsburgh. Usually we don’t get the chance to actually shoot the video in the same city that we wrote the song in. So we’d just kind of pick up the videos whenever we can, but in this instance, we actually had time to shoot it at Mr. Smalls, so it was pretty cool to find different spaces. That’s such an interesting building in the church. … It’s like five different locations. It’s like a house back there, and every room is this different thing, and they have this kind of dungeon basement thing going on down there too, so we had all these different spaces to shoot in and that was pretty cool.

Side note, I just remembered we also shot the end of the “Traveling Forever” video there at Mr. Smalls, where I come out of the, at the very end of that video, I come walking out of the backstage and walk right out onto the stage and just go right into our set, but we’ve shot me rapping my way out and the crowd’s waiting for us to come out, and they have no idea that I’m backstage rapping my way out onto the stage so we can get this clip for the video. So fun!

Here’s what I’m gonna say: Touring today is so much better than it used to be because, like I said, it was a mess, but not only was it a mess, but the mess is going to have collateral damage, meaning it’s gonna take things away from your day that you might be doing that were great. Now touring is just this non-stop creative process, even when we’re not on stage. To this day, we’re still making “Detour” songs. Every tour, we’re still doing this. We’ve only released those six songs, but we’ve accumulated enough music to release a couple more of those EPs and presumably we’ll start dropping those. It’s amazing now, man. I wish that I would have had the foresight or I wish that I would have done this back then.

With all the music that you’re creating, from a logistics standpoint, how do you keep track of all the writing, the lyrics and everything?

I’m a Virgo. So therefore I am like the ultimate when organizing things. So if you were to look at the desktop on my laptop, you would be like, oh, that’s how he does it. I have a problem, so my organizing is traumatic for people around me, like it drives my wife nuts. She thinks I’m a hoarder, and it’s like this isn’t hoarding. It’s organized. It’s not like I’m just throwing (expletive) in the garage and there’s stacks and boxes of (expletive). I buy a lot of records on tour but by the time I get them home, they’re already sorted and loaded into my Discogs account. They’re already in the database, and I just put them away where they go. And that’s how I keep track everything. Now let’s say the solar flare hits and it wipes out all of our hard drives and whatnot, well, then I’m (expletive) and everything’s gone, but it’s OK because we’re all gonna start from zero. It’s all right. I trust the process, brother. I’m just taking it day to day, and I love it.

Pittsburgh has produced two pretty famous rappers in Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa. Did you ever meet either of them, play with them or have any thoughts on where they stand in the rap world?

For 12 years, we threw a festival in Minneapolis called Soundset, and we’ve had both of them there. And so I’ve met both of them. Through that festival, I’ve kind of met everybody who made a name for themselves prior to covid. If you were a thing pre-covid, then we’ve crossed paths, we’ve met. I’ve shaken your hand and I’ve thanked you for coming to Soundset. I got to be there with Mac Miller and Sean Price. I kicked it and talked (expletive) and talked about making a song and whatnot. That was a moment and now, rest in peace, both of them are gone.

With Wiz, amazing human being, man. I could go on for days. I don’t really know him that well. I’ve only met him in passing via Soundset but just watching him and how he’s moved and how he treats people, super amazing guy. Mac was an amazing guy as well, by the way, I would put that out there.