Pursuit of Happiness: Shad on Why Ball Is Literally Life

There are some bleak elements on his new album, Start Anew, but Shad has a gift for finding existential silverlinings. Phoning in from Canada on a humid September day, he discusses the hidden opportunities you can find in a catastrophe. 

“When I'm on stage and the sound isn't working it's a mini disaster,” he tells me. “But if I stay on my toes and if I stay awake and alert and positive, maybe that's when I can bust out a nine-minute acapella that I've never performed before,” he adds. “And that's what people remember.” 

That groundedness is the result of humility, self-reflection and simply getting older. It’s a level of introspection that’s helped make Shad one of the most respected MCs in the Canadian rap underground. Since the early aughts, the 43-year-old has served up bars that are as thoughtful as they are dexterous, unloading six albums and six EPs over the last 20 years. His latest effort, Start Anew, continues the tradition even as it focuses on the idea of ending old ones. 

“Making this album, I was thinking a lot about endings, and I was thinking a lot about specifically just the human challenge of facing endings [because] so much in life ends,” he says. “So much of life goes in a rhythm of cycles of ending and new beginnings. But facing that ending is really hard.” And yet, as his album title suggests, endings also mean a chance for new beginnings. If you’ve got the will to start anew. “I think this is a time that requires courage.”

Speaking to Okayplayer for the latest edition of Pursuit of Happiness, Shad gets deep on prayer, the pre-internet era, and why ball is literally life. 

Shad: I’m 43 and I'm from the IRL era, so I take the internet for what it is — which is not real life. It's an extension of real life at best and at worst, it's an illusion and a distraction. It’s toxic. Not to be alarmist, but I think it's really important for us to retain that memory of the IRL era, because it's in the best interest of these companies that we actually forget life without them; that we erase it from our memories. They want to create a situation where we can't imagine life without them, even though it wasn’t very long ago that we did live without them, and we did live without so much of an online presence and online concern. Because of my age, I have a natural defense against that. I have a lot of other things going on in my life, not just as an artist, but as a husband and as a father, that take up a lot of my time and energy.

Three things keep me away from that negativity: my relationships, my work, and community. I consider my primary responsibilities to be my relationships, my close relationships and my work. But if I have more bandwidth and the opportunities arise, there are always opportunities because people need help and situations need help, I try to devote my attention there. It all begins with a spiritual practice. Prayer is really grounding in my life. It’s a time where I take an accounting of how I feel and I take an accounting of what I've experienced. 

Prayer is also a time where I remind myself of these values that I just described: What relationships are important to me? What am I truly doing with my work? Who am I trying to serve and how am I trying to do that? And then I consider the other people in situations that I encounter that are in need of some help. And I pray for those things and I think about how I might be able to contribute to those things. All of that flows naturally into kind of a to-do list. Just, 'Okay, well, what needs to be done?' I got to set aside tonight to just hang out with my wife, and I got to do that. I got to text this person, check in on this friend. I gotta do X, Y, and Z in terms of my work. So it kind of flows from that spiritual practice into a very practical, tangible sort of list of things that I should do that day. 

I know there will be bad days. And it's okay. I also know I'm going to have good days. There's one Manu Ginobili postgame interview I remember. The Spurs had just won some big game. It was an overtime game. And the reporter was like, 'You guys came back, you won that game. How'd you do i?” And I remember he said something like, 'Well, they're a good team. So we knew they would go on a run, and they did. But we also knew we’re a good team. So we knew we'd go on a run. And we did, and we tied it up. Then in overtime, somebody wins and we won.' I was like, 'That is life.' I'm going to have a run, and in the end it's going to turn out how it turns out. 

Sometimes things happen, and they're just painful and they're just difficult. But sometimes, if something is difficult, that can be the absolute best thing. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. His mother was deaf, and that's why he was obsessed with sound. 

At this point, I have a level of self-awareness that I never had before. I have a self-awareness about the rhythms within my own body. The older I get, the more I realize being young is hard. It's really hard. You don't have a lot of experience to lean on. The future seems really big and as a result, every decision feels really consequential. And so I think in many ways this is the most stable I've ever felt.