Evidence has produced numerous dope beats including “I Can Handle It” for Tha Alkaholiks, “The Bionic” for Defari, “High Voltage” for Linkin Park, “Alive Remix” for the Beastie Boys, “Blunted” for Phil Da Agony, “Right Or Wrong” for Planet Asia, “Full Contact” for Swollen Members, and “Last Call” with Kanye West. But despite his impressive list of accomplishments, Evidence’s producing career hasn’t received the attention that it deserves…until now.

HHS: What is it about music that made you dedicate your life to it? How did you get started?

Evidence: Music is just something I’ve  been around my whole life…But what made me want to do hip hop and actually participate in it was my next door neighbor, QD3, Quincy Delight III, he didn’t take his father’s last name, he’s Quincy Jones son. And I would be piecing, my mother used to let us paint on the back wall of our house, so we’d be piecing in the alley, doing pieces on the wall, and how he got in and out of his house was his garage and it was right next to me and I’d see him pull out of the house and pull back in. And he used to have different people in his car that I’d recognize…And I was like shit, why are these people with homie? And he had long dreadlocks, and he looked like somebody I wanted to know too. So I just eventually introduced myself. I went over there and he told me he was a rap producer, and I didn’t even know what a producer was. So I would sit in there and draw in my graffiti book while all these people would come in and do rap vocals. So my whole introduction to seeing how hip-hop got made was through a producer’s eyes, not a rappers eyes. I would see the rappers come in and do their part and leave, but I would stay with the producer. I knew that I wanted to rap, I didn’t want to produce, but subconsciously he effected me right off the top. He’s one of my biggest influences because he organized my mind to think like a producer. Even though I just wanted to rap. From then on out, I was into it. And I’d be over at his house begging for beats and he’d spare me, and then I’d hear the other beats come out on other peoples albums and I’d realize that they weren’t for me. But he was just letting me rap on ‘em, I thought that they were for me, but he was just letting me rap on them, which was cool. And that’s how I got into this right here.

HHS: How did you cultivate yourself into a rapper and then into a producer?

Ev: Well, that was when I was 15 years old. That was a long time ago. I thought I was gonna be the first 15 year old rapper, you know, Kris Kross wasn’t out yet, (laughs) you know? But I thought that I was that good, because somebody told me that I was good or whatever. But as I got older I became humbler and humbler and I started realizing that it was mostly fantasies and I started listening back. ..And producing never even entered my mind, I was just trying to rap. The first demo that I did was with Will.I.am from Black Eyed Peas, we were kinda doing our thing for a couple demos or whatever, but we ended up going our separate ways and I ended up hooking up with Rakaa in ’92 and that’s kinda when Dilated Peoples, even though that wasn’t the name, that was when it kinda got formed. Previous to that, you know, I was really tight with one of my best friends at the time Alan, who became Alchemist later, and Joey Chavez. That was my peoples and they were really inspired by QD3 too. They’d wanna come over to my house just to go over to QD3′s house to see what he was doing. … And he’s really responsible for jump starting my whole click. Even Rakaa too, because he let me and Rakaa do demo’s over his tracks. So he’s definitely high in the food chain, as far as I’m concerned.

HHS: So then when did you get into producing your own beats?

Ev: Dilated Peoples had a record deal with Sony in ’95. And actually our intros to the game were through DJ Lethal from House of Pain, he put us under his production team, me and Rakaa. He basically shopped our project and got us a deal with Immortal Epic, and Epic was a branch of Sony. Still might be, I don’t know. But we put out our record, and we weren’t really ready, I didn’t produce any of it. Joey Chavez produced it, Redman produced a track, E-Swift produced a track. It was pretty cool but lyrically it wasn’t where I wanted it to be yet. Beats were pretty dope, concepts were good. We ended up, I don’t want to say we got dropped, because we didn’t, our label kind of got dropped, they lost their distribution and at that point we had a certain amount of days where if they didn’t get new distribution, we had an out in our contract. And we saw that loophole in our contract, and we jumped through it and we got out of our deal, but had to leave our masters behind. That’s why that never came out, which is a beautiful thing because I didn’t really feel that record anyways, it wasn’t meant to come out yet. So that’s when we started going solo, as far as our mentality, we were like we’re gonna handle this ourselves and we took on an independent mentality. And I saved up some money and bought an ASR-10 which Alchemist already had and Joey Chavez already had cuz I was just watching them. And the first day I had my keyboard I made a beat that night. I learned how to do it throughout the years of just watching my people. It wasn’t no mystery to me what to do, I just had to call up and figure out which button was which , ‘oh that’s what that does? Ok, cool.’…So I already had it in my head, I just didn’t have the means to do it. So that was a big eye opener for me, that was the point where I was like we can do this shit ourselves… That’s when we decided to be independent, and I started putting out beats, and ever since it’s just snowballed into a lot of things… It started leading to something that could lead to a definite future for me, as well as rapping, because I know I’m not going to be on stage forever.

HHS: Do you plan to focus on one element more then the other, or are you going to give equal attention to both?

Ev: Right now, it’s more gratifying for me to write a rap then it is to make a beat, but right now I want to do both for a while. Especially being the era of the producer… I kinda just dipped out for a little bit, didn’t take some jobs and I kinda just bounced on a couple things cuz I just felt like I didn’t have the ammunition being around my friends like Alchemist, and even Babu really stepping it up doing the Likwit Junkies and stuff like that. So when I come back out with my shit everyone’s gonna know it, so I kinda dipped for the last year…and for the two years before that, it’s been like a big work in progress in my head and I feel that now is the time that you’re gonna see the benefit, and I’m gonna see the benefit of what I’ve done. And it’s gonna effect people, hopefully the way that I intend it to.

HHS: Yea, I was at Fatbeats the other day talking about The Medicine, the album you’re producing for Planet Asia,  and they were like ‘Yea, Ev was in here yesterday and he was all excited…’

Ev: Yea, I’m really geeked right now. I don’t even know how to put. The only way I can put it is like when Raekwon was doing that interview on the first Wu Tang album, and he was like, ‘I know people are waiting on it, cuz I’m waiting on it.’ That’s how I feel. Sometimes I buckle up in my car and I look both ways because I don’t wanna go right now, cuz it’s not my time, because this album HAS to come out, you know what I’m saying? I’ve been eating less carbs (laughs) and I quit soda just so I can make sure that I see this record come out…I’m a make it.

HHS: Yea, you’ll make it…So a couple minutes ago you mentioned that you’ve been refining your style. How do you define your style?

Ev: I want to be like DJ Premier of the West Coast, that’s how I want to be labeled as right now. That’s pretty much my main influence. That’s the person I pretty much looked up to the most, as far as production. I’ve had the experience to work with him so…He doesn’t live out here (laughs), you know what I’m saying? I do, and I really believe that what he did from the Jeru album to the Group Home album to all the Gang Starr albums, he created a sound and a movement, and that’s what I want to do, create a sound and a movement. And what I also get off on lately is people hearing my stuff going ‘you did that?’ Cuz people know me as an underground cat, but I’ve been really stepping it up.

HHS: Do you prefer sampling or making a beat from scratch?

Ev: I’d rather sample, just honestly. I’d rather just chop some shit up or jack something and put my own twist on it. If I feel that I took enough of the other person’s composition, then I’ll clear it, I will. If I feel like hey man, I really bent some shit up and pitched it and did some shit, then hey, I’m a take my risks with it…But I love sampling. Plus for me, I can sit down at the piano and play some chords and some keys just from being a kid and having piano lessons. So I have the ability, if I am going to pitch something, I have the ability to put it into key when I pitch it or I have the ability to play along when I pitch it. So that’s really cool. What I really like doing is sampling and then playing along with it so much that I end up taking the sample away and then I have my own thing. So it’s like I play along with somebody’s groove and I have so many layers on top of their groove that I just take their groove away. I was inspired by a sample but it’s actually all real live instruments and interpolation which is something I’ve been doing lately that is pretty good stuff on the Planet Asia and Dilated Album.

HHS: What equipment do you use in the studio?

Ev: I use the ASR-10, that’s the first thing I learned on, the keyboard, sampler… And then I got the MPC, and the first beat that I made on the MPC was “Downtown” on the Platform Album, the Japanese release…And I fell in love with that machine…And I’ve been using Triton, people want to shit on that keyboard, but I use it a lot. I like it, so fuck off. (Laughs).

HHS: How’d you end up producing one of the tracks on Kanye West’s album, College Dropout?

Ev: ..My homeboy Porse had found that loop and I made the beat and was trying to get it to Jay-Z cuz he’s saying ‘Mr. Rockefeller’ in the loop, and I gave it to Kanye, cuz we were doing “This Way” at the time and I said  ‘Can you give this to Jay-Z for me?’ And he played it and he was like ‘I’m the new Mr. Rocafella now. I’m a kill it.’  And I was excited, I was like this is crazy. And months went by and I heard nothing. And then I got a call from my homeboy and he said ‘Yo he’s in the studio, go down there, he’s doing it.’ So I went there, and by the time I got there it was different, he had put his own drums…he did little tricks of the trade…But I was definitely a part of the creation of that.

HHS: Can you talk a little bit about  “Another Sound Mission.” How is it doing so far?

Ev: That’s Volume One, I got Volume Two almost finished right now. I just put that out just to get the streets wet. Just to keep everybody good, let everybody know that Evidence is out there. I kinda ran a little Alchemist concept, he put out the Cutting Room Floor and then Insomnia, and then he put out First Infantry, which was the real release. It just got the streets wet nice.

HHS: Talk a little about your new projects, like The Medicine and the new Dilated album.

Ev: Yea, those are the two projects I’m most excited about right now. Planet Asia, The Medicine, I’m producing the whole album, I don’t know how many tracks it’s gonna end up with , 14 or 16 cuts. It’s got Prodigy, it’s featuring Black Thought from the Roots, got Killa Ben, Turbin on there on a cut killin it..Yea, Fresno’s on the map…Phil Da Ag, Krondon, a lot of people coming through. My man Alchemist did the only outside production with me on a track, the Black Thought featured one, we did that one together. Oh, and my man Nucleus, we did a track on there together on the album, on a song called “Thick Ropes.” But for the most part, it is just me sitting in my room, or all of it is just me sittin in my room creating something that I feel is gonna be an underground masterpiece. … This is gonna be where people understand what I’m capable of because their gonna see the versatility that I put through in a LP from beginning to end…This is my vision, this is how I wanna see it with another rapper rapping on my tracks. Planet Asia, I don’t got to say it, if you don’t know about him, yea he’s ready. He just takes my beat to another level…He jumps on a track and his voice becomes the lead instrument. And the shit is how I want to hear it right now….and then the Dilated album, I’m even more excited about that because I’m doing that after the Asia shit.  I set the bar real high with the Asia record and I don’t want to let myself down lower then that. Plus I get to rap on it. So I’m definitely enjoying the new Dilated album so far, it’s just incredible, something I always wanted to do.

HHS: When are those due out?

Ev: Dilated is coming out in October. Asia’s coming out in September. Swollen members is coming out September. It’s gonna be good, I’m really excited.

HHS: That’s gonna be a good season for you.

And on top of that, Alchemist and myself are creating a project right now along the lines of a Jaylib thing where we do 50/50 on the beats and the lyrics. And just create an album like that. It’s gonna be real tight cuz we’re like friends before music, so we have a good time even when we’re not doing music, so when we are doing music we’re gonna have a real good time together. I wanna go tour Europe with that cat and get into some trouble. (laughs)

HHS: (laughs) Yea, war stories.

Ev: Yea, war stories. There you go.