No. The thing is, my close friends like Pharoahe & Dice are but I am not. I see my friends with asthma smoke and smoke. But when I was talking about myself it was in relationship to the line before about blunts and liquor, which are things I do do.

Asthma is no laughing matter… (everyone laughs)

That was the beginning. I wrote my first rap at 9.

It was in the style of speed rhyme.

I was not in the studio with him. I was in the studio with his little terror squad and I’d just come from a long run in Europe. Pun and I had been communicating on the phone a lot. I was reading interviews where he was saying I was his favorite rapper. And it was a mutual appreciate. We’d spend a lot of time on the phone. I’d speak to his wife. We never worked together physically, but on this track we were trading verses.

That whole thing of changing the way words are

A lot of the performances we would do early on were freestyle. Even before we had a record deal, we’d tour with a lot of jazz musicians … any artists doing edgy collaborative stuff with hip hop. We would go touring just as the “guest rapper” and a lot of times you’re performing isn’t in a meter of 4-4, which is what most of us learned to rap and sing to. You have to ground yourself some way in what seems to be chaos. In a situation where your main concern is meter and fitting in the beat somewhere, you don’t want to overthink the words you want to rhyme. You might say something you didn’t meant o say. The vocalist’s instrument is his or her voice.