On the Winter Olympics:

I’m out on the West Coast for a couple of weeks during the Olympics this year, a lot of friends are here and playing. It’s kind of confidential, but I am playing, and it’s gonna be a good vibe for sure.

On touring vs. recording:

This record was such an in-depth spiritual process. By the time I finished with my engineers — I mean you’re never really finished — you get very reflective. Touring is like some army shit, you’re out there with a bunch of guys, on your own in the world instead of being in the studio where you’ve created this illusion. Touring is the real deal: out in the world, meeting fans. I can’t really compare the two because they’re totally different processes. But if you make a record you’re proud of, touring is awesome because you’re playing what you’ve recorded, and sometimes people know the words and they call out a song from the audience. Those are all amazing things. You can start a song from your bedroom, then all of a sudden you’re in Portugal and people know what you’re doing.

On how songs evolve in live performances:

It happens on two fronts. I kick around this joke with my band, when we’re watching this other band that we’re friends with. When they play one particular song that’s well known, sometimes it’s just really fast and not like how it sounded originally. And sometimes the audience doesn’t realize because everyone thinks they know that song already. The band automatically plays it.

Other songs, maybe you don’t play them live as much, but one night on tour you find a piece of it and realize that maybe it doesn’t go over as well with the audience so you change it, just one or two lines. Things are constantly evolving and changing. It’s the difference between perfecting the sound with knobs in a studio and then going out in a room with 500 or 1,000 people. That’s the great thing about the band I’ve been playing with for a long time, we’re good about flipping things up. That’s when it really becomes fun, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kind of thing.

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By Jason Schneider

The premise of K-os’s latest video, for the song I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman, is simple. He and Canadian hip-hop stalwart Saukrates bomb around the countryside in a vintage muscle car like the Dukes of Hazzard. High art it isn’t, but like the sentiments of the song itself, it’s the kind of in-your-face pop culture deconstruction that’s come to be expected from the Toronto artist born Kevin Brereton.

From the moment he released his first album, 2002’s Exit, K-os added a new facet to Canadian music. He was a chameleon, as comfortable with a guitar as he was with a sampler, and as schooled in the blues and r&b as he was in reggae and hip-hop. Yet, despite his next two albums, Joyful Rebellion and Atlantis: Hymns For The Disco, earning platinum distinction in Canada, K-os’s often prickly attitude toward the industry kept him from becoming a household name. Conspiracy theorists may even speculate that was why he failed to score a single Juno Award out of five nominations in 2007.

Since then, however, K-os has made several major changes, including switching management and record company, and relocating to Vancouver. He channelled this fresh start into Yes!, his fourth album, which hit shelves in April 2009. He admitted upon its release that it’s a reflection of his renewed passion for his music, something that extended to his initial tour for the record, which allowed fans to pay whatever they felt K-os deserved after each performance.

“As cliche as it may sound, this record really does take the best elements of my past work,” he says. “I’m a historical opportunist who’s grown up on everything from Dylan to Marley to KRS-One. I’ve never seen myself as just a hip-hop artist.”

The single 4,3,2,1 preceded the album, a song that was a direct response to Feist’s international hit 1,2,3,4. Few others would have had the vision to do something that bold, but K-os admits he took up the challenge in the long-held r&b tradition of “reply songs.”

“I thought how interesting would it be to do a hip-hop version of this song? It’s about the battle of the sexes, where I’m rapping ‘what are we fighting for?’ Is this gender war going to happen forever? It’s me saying I hope not.”

Inviting Emily Haines of Metric and Murray Lightburn of The Dears to contribute lyrics also reconfirmed K-os’s ease at straddling the modern rock and hip-hop worlds. His critics have used this as fodder to attack him in the past, but at this point K-os no longer seems concerned that he’s alienating anyone.

Just before Christmas, his former label EMI issued the compilation The Trill: A Journey So Far, but K-os’s appearances in Waterloo are instead serving as a warm-up for the U.S. release of Yes! slated for the end of February. There’s a strong sense that the album will continue to build his reputation there, and with most of the pieces of his career now falling in place, K-os seems to have anticipated getting the last laugh on his haters with the track Burning Bridges.

“I honestly don’t mind burning bridges because I’ll find my own way in the forest,” he says. “You can’t be a genuine artist and be worrying about burning bridges, because then you’re just a product. Success shouldn’t make us all soft and coddled. There has to be somewhere to communicate subversive, candid feelings.”