JM: I’ll go until the doctor tells me bad news. I swear to you, until that day, I’ve got it figured out, and this is the most fun… Every morning I wake up, I go, “I get another one of these.” And most people figure that out much later on in life. Not drinking has a lot to do with plugging into that a little earlier than other people, but I go, like, “I still get to ride the ride.” And that’s why, when people we love pass away, we go, like, “Oh, you can’t stay on the ride?” When Mac Miller passed away, my first thought was, You don’t get to stay here. You don’t get to keep riding this ride, this beautiful ride that, if you’re lucky enough to have the talent, you get to just keep […]
Complex: You bring up Mac—you played on “Small Worlds,” and you said that you didn’t expect to be on his album.
JM: Well, I didn’t expect to play on his album. He said come over and listen to stuff. This is a true story: I started talking to my manager about splits—I gotta start making a living playing on people’s stuff. For years, it would be, like, a really fun side note. I got to Mac’s house and he played me this thing he had just worked on that morning, and I went, “Give me a guitar. I’m in.” I think it had something to do with him having worked on it that day—it was still wide open and fresh. There are a lot of songs people play for me and I go, “Man, I wish I was on this song, but it’s done.” I picked up a guitar and, I went [Pretends to play the guitar]. We had such a great time and laughed, and I said to him, “No cash. No credit. I’m just happy to do it, man.” He said, “Hey, can I…” I said, “I don’t want people talking about me. I want people talking about your record.” I just wish it wasn’t fatal. I just wish figuring out your life didn’t take your life away from you. I don’t have an answer for how to fix that, but once you get old enough to understand how valuable life is, you look at people and go, “I just wish you could work this out.”