Mike D Made His First Solo Album With His Sons

The title track on Thank You came late, in the home studio Mike D shares with his sons Davis and Skyler. By then, the room had become more than a family setting. Mike D describes Davis as a gifted producer and arranger, while Skyler can make synthesizers and drum machines built decades apart work together. Mike D's own first recorder had been a four-track Tascam cassette machine.

The album exists on the far side of a much longer silence. After Adam Yauch died in 2012, Mike D repeatedly opened his computer to work and found himself pulled back into grief. He was mourning both a loved friend and the identity they had created together. Thank You, released on 28 August as his first solo album, is the first full-length new music from the Beastie Boys camp since Hot Sauce Committee Part Two in 2011.

That history makes the record easy to frame as a recovery story, but Mike D describes the working method more sharply: “We never end up making what I had in my head originally, but I'm actually happier with it.” He arrived with ideas and allowed collaboration to alter them. The point was not to recover the old procedure intact; it was to build a new one with people whose musical reflexes had been formed by different tools.

Thank You is not protected by the warmth of that story. The Associated Press heard stuttering drum'n'bass breaks and distressed vocals, praised the slower I Don't Care and its Mini Korg part, while calling other stretches misfires. The record can be meaningful to its maker and still uneven to a critic; one claim does not settle the other.

For his sons, the computer is where music has always lived. For Mike D, it came after tape. Those languages met in the same room, but the larger change was not technological. Music became possible again without demanding that the first idea survive. Grief remained nonlinear, as Mike D put it; the work could still move.