Evil Rising

There's perhaps more to 'Evil Eddie' Jacobson than one would expect. As leader and mouthpiece for Brisbane hip hop crew Butterfingers, Jacobson's long since been associated with filth and frivolity. For most of the last decade, his reputation and creative output was tied almost exclusively to a band defined through off-colour humour and a willfully brash mix of hip hop, rock and ska.

That party-friendly aesthetic obscures some rather impressive realities about the MC. Namely, he's a hell of a musician. Not so much in regards to technical ability (though he's obviously more than sound) as sheer artistry and ambition. The majority of Butterfingers' output can be laid at Jacobson's feet while, for his new solo album Welcome to Flavour Country, he actually attempted to write, play, record and mix the entire record solo.

“Well, I didn't get as close as I liked with that,” Jacobson laughs. “I can't play drums, and there's a lot of live drums on there, and I can't play horns, so I didn't play the horn parts – but, I mean, I wrote them all. I wanted to mix it all myself but I'm just learning to do that. I feel like I've got a grasp on it and I'm happy with what mixing I did but, to get it out on time, I had to get help on a couple of tracks – because, yeah, it's a learning curve for me.”

In actual fact, Jacobson's prodigious output is one of the reasons he's found himself releasing a solo album instead of a third Butterfingers record. Tiring of handling the majority of the band's songwriting, the MC tried to take the band in a more collaborative direction. When those sessions eventually didn't work out, he began work on developing a solo career.

“Oh, yeah, I mean... It's hard to put your finger on a single thing, really,” Jacobson counters. “You know, I was going through a real period of writer's block and was really struggling to come up with new material that I actually enjoyed... And I felt like the burden was on me to make it happen and make it good for the rest of the team, you know? I thought, 'If I'm doing all this and stressing about it, maybe I should just do it for myself?'

“So, as a band, we decided that the next release was going to be a collaborative effort. We went into practice rooms and started jamming together and working as a band and, really, that was the first time we'd ever done anything like that,” the MC continues. “You know, we've probably got enough music for an album-and-a-half but, I don't know, as we drifted apart, the songs just never got completed. Life gets in the way, really.”

In the years that followed, you could almost see Jacobson running away from that workaholic nature. He would release the occasional single or EP but he'd dart around genres, rarely play shows and generally fly under the radar. His decision to join local hardcore punk mob Spitfireliar as guitarist seems representative of a man grown a little tired of writing and performing music nonstop.

“There's no pressure on me in that band,” the MC smiles. “You know, not being the frontman, I feel like there's eighty per cent less pressure on me to perform. You don't have to be the focus of attention. I honestly feel like I'm more of an introvert than an extrovert. Being on stage as a frontman and being the centre of attention is actually really hard for me.

“But, obviously, I still love playing music, so Spitfireliar is great for me like that. That's a place where I can get out all my heavy riffs and keep things separated, so to speak. I mean, deep down inside there's a heavy metal kid dying to get out of me, and I've been friends with all of the guys in the band for years, so, yeah. It's a good thing to have around.”      

This could explain why it's taken Jacobson nearly three years to actually deliver the debut solo record. The multi-instrumentalist began work on the album almost immediately after Butterfingers' demise in 2009 (and will freely admit much of its material was originally intended for Butterfingers) and has been releasing singles for the record since 2010. Yet, it's only just been unleashed.

“Yeah, the first single was Queensland and that came out in 2010. The plan was always to roll it out as soon as possible after the first single but, yeah, I don't know,” Jacobson laughs. “I had that kind of writer's block thing going on at the end of Butterfingers and I suppose I was still dealing with that. It just took me this long to kind of get a process I could rely on and actually make it happen.

“I mean, I reckon for a good three or four years, I've had a solid process for my daily routine. You know, I'd write a sixteen bar verse every day, a beat every day. I was still doing that and I'm still doing that,” he clarifies. “But I was looking back on the work and just not liking it and not knowing why. It's hard to explain but I kind of had to develop a process to make sure the music I was making had everything it needed to make me happy.”

In any regard, Welcome to Flavour Country should go some way towards dismissing the myth that Jacobson is some kind of comedy prankster musician. Still colourful and entertaining, Evil Eddie's debut solo album is also very much a musically accomplished piece of work. Eddie's rhymes are tightly written, his productions eclectic and idiosyncratic and the songwriting genuinely stronger than ever.

“Yeah, I've kind of got a mental grasp on how to attack writing a song now, whereas before it was mostly just luck,” the MC laughs. “Most of the Butterfingers stuff was seriously just luck. I'd write something and it would be cool and we'd use it. When that doesn't just happen though, you have to know how to make it happen. That was really what the process of this record was about, I think.

“I don't know, though. I think a lot of people do just skim the surface of what I do and just see that kind of brash, funny side of things – but that doesn't actually bother me that much,” he reflects. “The people who I respect, generally speaking, can see the work that goes into my music. I feel I'm more misrepresented as a person, really. People who like my music meet me and think I'm going to be this loudmouth.

“And, really, I'm not like that at all. I'm actually a fairly mellow sort of guy.”