Bass Creative

Based in Los Angeles, bass player, singer and songwriter Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat, is probably best known to Australian music lovers for his work with seminal crossover thrash merchants Suicidal Tendencies. But his CV cites names across as wide a cross-section of genres as you could want, from Erykah Badu and Stanley Clarke – with whom he toured through Japan when he was just 16 – to Snoop Dogg and Red Hot Chili Peppers. After meeting and touring with Steven Ellison, who calls himself Flying Lotus, the two collaborated on a track titled Zodiac Shift on the latter's 2010 album, Cosmogramma. The chemistry felt on that session led to Lotus co-producing Thundercat's 2011 solo debut The Golden Age Of Apocalypse, and the pair teamed up once more for his forthcoming second album, Apocalypse.

“Myself and Flying Lotus worked very hard on this album,” Bruner admits on the line from a restaurant in LA where, as it happened, he was chowing down with Ellison a couple of weeks out from coming to Australia to perform in his solo guise as Thundercat for the first time, joined by drummer Thomas Pridgen (who worked with The Mars Volta from 2007 to 2010) plus jazz pianist Dennis Hamm. “He's really close to me. Those are some fine-tuned ears, you know?

“I drew a lot from the creative process that I share with my friends. It's more so about the journey for me, I guess, creating, so it's like I didn't really have a specific place where I would reference things from – I'd just kind of create on the spot and try to be improvisationally inspired to do stuff, but it's definitely jazz-inspired music.”

Jazz-inspired it might be, but Apocalypse showcases a diverse fusion of symphonic pop, electronica, prog rock, funk and a hell of a lot of soul.

“On this album I'm singing a bit more and it was something that was talked about amongst me and Lotus to try to strive to do that. So I just kind of went with it, you know? A lot of the music was written before the lyrics, and the lyrics came a little bit after my friend [LA jazz pianist and composer] Austin Peralta died [A Message For Austin]. There were a couple of songs I had already written lyrics to, but more of that stuff was written after his passing.”

Bruner's father Ronald Sr is an internationally renowned jazz drummer who's also played with the Temptations, Diana Ross and Gladys Knight, while his drummer brother Ronald Jr plays in Suicidal Tendencies with him, so music is very much in the Thundercat genetic code.

“I think I was just anti everything, genuinely. Everybody wants to play drums? I'll play bass,” Bruner laughs. “Everybody wants to play music, I want to draw pictures. My dad used to have to try to keep me on track.”

That natural leaning towards the visual ended up leading Bruner back to music anyway, as he admits, his inspiration “didn't always come from other musicians – it came from video games, cartoons. A lot of the time I wasn't just focused on the cartoons 'cause they were cool cartoons. I was into the music; I was into the sound and the colours. A lot of it was completely saturated in jazz. I'm listening right now to the music of Carl Stalling, the guy that did a lot of the composing for Looney Toons. You listen to the music behind the cartoons and it's jumping between Dixieland jazz, straightahead and real orchestrated compositions – really nuts, you know?”