Balancing two musical projects at the one time reads out to be a daunting task, and on paper this could very well be the case for Brendan ‘Tuka’ Tuckerman, one-third of the Blue Mountains hip hop trio Thundamentals. However, Tuckerman has found a healthy balance between working hard on his own solo project and continuing to collaborate.

The forthcoming release of the MC’s new album, Life Death Time Eternal, not only proves his ability to multitask, but touches on some personal philosophies Tuckerman has picked up along the way. He’s taking fresh approaches to refining his work in hip hop, and learning some new life lessons as he goes.

The process for Life Death Time Eternal took Tuka far less time than usual. “I really only had a window of time to do this solo album while I was touring with Thundas,” he says. “It was a really intense, busy time and I didn’t see a lot of people. I was either in front of heaps of people performing or I was with myself or one other producer in a room going ham on beats whenever I had free time. It was a great experience. I came out of [Thundamentals’ album] So We Can Remember with so much energy coming through me; I didn’t stop writing. Two days after I finished, I started writing again. I felt like I shouldn’t stop, and I’m glad I didn’t, now this is done.”

The balance between Tuckerman’s two projects has shifted in light of this new release, he says. “In the past – because I’ve been going pretty much solo album, Thundas album, solo album, Thundas album for the last couple of years – usually, there is solid time off in between. But that last Thunda record really had a lot of activity happening, and to be honest, we want to pretty much put another record out as soon as possible anyway.”

However, working away from the Thundamentals group tends to result in some interesting developments for Tuckerman himself.

“The big reason I do the solo stuff is that I go away and test myself, so when we get back to Thundas I can bring more tools to the table,” he explains. “With this album – usually I produce a lot of it myself, but this time I didn’t have the time to produce the music, so I wrote it in my head and went to producers and started from scratch. Usually in hip hop you get a beat or a sample which starts it, and that’s the initial idea of the song, but I kind of didn’t have the time, and I wanted to approach it [from] a songwriting perspective. So I think of the song in my head first, find the initial idea off my own back, rather than starting with a sample or getting a beat off a producer.”

Thematically, Life Death Time Eternal represents something of an epiphany for Tuckerman. “I kind of loosely based the album around the idea of duality, kind of around a thought I had,” he says. “We could talk about duality all day, but essentially I didn’t want to put a yin and yang on the album cover and spoon-feed people, so I made it Life Death Time Eternal, so that people can read into it that it might be about that.

“Within every song there’s a positive and negative that I’m talking about. It’s quite ironic, that positive and negative, because the epiphany I had to start writing the album is from how that Thundamentals song ‘Smiles Don’t Lie’went. I was listening to it one day, and was thinking about how if I hadn’t had this heartbreaking relationship that had made me write that song – that’s one of Thundamentals’ most famous songs – I wouldn’t have been able to fulfil a lot of life goals in my career.”

He pauses. “From that failure I got a success. I was just thinking about the duality of that and how humans have really complex emotions, and there’s grey space between that success and failure, love and hate. I started researching duality and psychology within emotional standpoints and I found it fascinating, so when I approached the songs I took the thought that it’s not necessarily ironic that we have these opposing emotions – it’s just a complex system.”

No matter what happens down the track for Tuka as a soloist, he’ll always be looking forward to reuniting with his Thundamentals pals.

“The thing about Thundas is we’re all friends before we’re musos,” he says. “We sit in roles for some songs, but with other songs it’s not a big ego thing to switch it up enough and for another member to do a different role. Morgan [Jones, AKA DJ Morgs] has – when he is in the room – input on choruses vocally.

“For a band to really work, you have to drop the ego and people actually have to say what they want to hear. I’m not that worried about the songwriting process – in fact, I’m kind of looking forward to going back to worrying over beats again and not worrying over the music.”

Tuka photo by Cole Bennetts

Tuka’s release Life Death Time Eternal is out Friday July 10 through EMI/Universal.

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