He knows it’s a cliché, but Ryan Lewis just wanted to get away from it all.
He and the hip-hop artist Macklemore had wrapped up a two-year promotional campaign behind their slow-burning, self-released breakthrough album, 2012’s The Heist. They’d graduated from clubs to theaters to arenas to headlining slots at summer music festivals, just trying to keep up as “Thrift Shop,” “Can’t Hold Us” and “Same Love” conquered radio and YouTube, becoming mainstays of Internet comment fields and essay factories.
Now it was time for the next step: turning the beats Lewis had cobbled together on the tour bus into a follow-up album. And, from top to bottom, from “Light Tunnels” to “White Privilege II,” the pair’s new release, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, is about what happens when a couple of white kids from Seattle make a blockbuster album in a black genre, when they’re accused of cultural appropriation and “stealing” Grammys from black artists.
To escape the noise, they set up shop in a cabin in northern Idaho. It was the first part of 2015 in the dead of winter, and the cabin’s isolation was one of its selling points. Their crew included the engineer and cook they’d worked with on The Heist. While they may have topped the pop charts and performed alongside Madonna at the Grammys, they liked the people who helped them get there and decided to do it again.
“I think there’s a lot to process when you walk out of such a unique roller coaster like The Heist was,” Lewis says, calling from Zürich, where the duo was touring behind Unruly Mess. “To make sure that you’re grounded, to make sure that you’re looking for validation in the right places, to make sure that you’re relationally strong with the team that got you there to begin with and, I don’t know, trying to focus on all of that stuff and have a good time.”
The album is filled with the challenges Macklemore (born Ben Haggerty) encountered after he became the public face of some of the biggest hits in the country—most notably, his slip back into drug use. Lewis’ challenges were more behind the scenes, if somewhat predictable.
Lewis, 28, is the one who makes the beats. He’s the one who squawked out the sax line (on a sampler, he can’t play the saxophone) to “Thrift Shop” that made the Washington rap crew famous. And it was up to him to lay the foundation for what was to come next. The pressure, he admits, is another cliché. But it’s a cliché for a reason: It’s not just difficult to follow up the biggest songs in the world with brand new chart-toppers. Usually, it’s insurmountable.
“For a producer, it’s almost just like jogging or something,” he says. “You just kind of have to start anew, like, ‘Oh, I love making music. It’s dark and I have a pretty good sense of what sucks and what doesn’t. And we’re gonna make the music that rings true and honest to us right now.’”
To do that, they relied not just on friends and collaborators who helped them with The Heist, but on some of the people behind doors opened by the album’s success. That’s how Ed Sheeran appears on “Growing Up” and how they scored actor Idris Elba—who played “Stringer” Bell on The Wire, the Commandant in Beasts of No Nation, the lead in Luther—to narrate “Dance Off.”
“I guess that’s a difference between this album and the last: I don’t think you’d be able to get [Idris Elba] for The Heist,” he says. “But there is something superdope and special about the fact that I’m, like, ‘Idris Elba on this would be f**king amazing.’” And Elba did it.
Lewis knew the cabin well. His parents bought the place in Idaho years ago. Ryan’s mom, Julie, says her son was a busy, focused child. Whether it was building a fort or learning an instrument, if it was something he wanted to do, he dedicated himself to it.
“Ryan didn’t get into too much trouble because he was always superbusy with some project that he was interested in,” she says. “Not that he was perfect, because it was a challenge to get him to do other things that he wasn’t interested in. He easily got Bs, but he could have been a straight-A student. If he wasn’t interested in what they were talking about, then he could capture enough to get a good B.”
In third grade, he started playing guitar. Julie remembers him losing himself in the instrument for hours on end. In seventh grade, he decided to start a band, so he taught his best friend to play the bass and sold doughnuts to raise money for gear, like a new kick pedal for the bass drum. But it wasn’t just music that kept him occupied. He designed T-shirts, a website and promo flyers for the band, and in college, Julie helped him file taxes for his budding enterprise, which she says earned him just enough money to give him some financial breathing room in college.
Since then, Ryan has codirected videos for his hits with Macklemore, from “Thrift Shop” to “Can’t Hold Us,” which have done remarkably well in an era when catchy videos can be the difference between a song being skipped or spun. Having the skill to make both beats and videos also allowed him to articulate his artistic vision from beginning to end.
“There are particular songs that you make and are, like, ‘Aww, I can see this,’” he says. “‘Downtown’ and some of these other ones, I definitely saw a visual.” But before Lewis taught himself to play guitar, make beats or direct videos, he faced a more daunting challenge: His parents told him that his mother was HIV positive.
At 6, Lewis says he couldn’t appreciate what HIV was as a disease, but he understood that his mom was sick and that she may not have much time left.
“Reflecting on it,” he says, “I can definitely see now that my whole childhood for me and my sisters very much had this extra layer of trying to get family time, trying to take family trips, trying to go to the same cabin that Ben and I went to and spend as much time as we could together, not knowing what was going to happen.”
Julie had been diagnosed several years earlier and had been infected years before—during a blood transfusion while giving birth to her daughter in 1984. At the time of her diagnosis, her doctors gave her three to five years to live (fortunately, all of her children were born HIV-free).
Thirty years and several close friends with similar diagnoses later, Julie Lewis is still very much here. To celebrate the milestone, she wanted to build a medical facility in a corner of the globe where people with HIV/AIDS can’t get the life-saving care they need. Ryan liked the idea, but he wanted it to be bigger, to throw his band’s celebrity behind it. So Ryan and Julie Lewis launched The 30/30 Project in 2014 with the goal of funding 30 medical centers. They’re not in the business of throwing hammers: The organization raises the money and doles out the funds to groups that know their way around construction sites and hospitals, such as the Kirkland, Washington-based Construction for Change.
“If someone gets HIV/AIDS today, it can be a sustainable disease to live with, with modern medicine, with resources,” Ryan says. “The problem is completely, 100 percent access [to medical resources]. And for my mom and for our family and where we lived in the world, the resources that we had and have . . . we were extremely fortunate to have access to medication. The biggest thing that’s changed is that in 2016 the social stigma of HIV/AIDS is quite a bit different from the early ’90s, but the problem of access on a worldwide level, I think, remains the same.”
To date, Julie says The 30/30 Project has funded five facilities—from Malawi to rural India—and has funding secured for at least two more. Julie says that much of the money has been in the form of small donations—$10 at a time, say—from fans of her son’s band. The rest has been raised the old-fashioned, exhausting way. It’s been a success, Ryan says, but there is always greater need.
“For my mom, it’s been both a blessing and it’s been a lot of work,” he says. “It’s this bittersweet thing. The work is amazing, but there’s just so much to do.”
Today, you can be inspired by a song without taking any action, but Julie hopes that people who are inspired by the work of The 30/30 Project take it a step further. “I think our greatest obstacle is people telling us constantly: ‘Good job, you’re so inspirational,’” she says. “That means nothing to me unless it turns into money for a clinic.”