The Questlove Show - Questlove Reaches Into The Mail Bag & Answers - January 16

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

In this special mini episode, Questlove answers questions pulled from the QLS DMs, Facebook inbox, and comments across YouTube and other DSPs. Along the way, he shares the origin story of The Questlove Show theme—touching on J Dilla, D’Angelo, James Poyser, and Questo. He also revisits The Roots’ Game Theory, offering lesser-known history behind the 2006 album. Questlove also responds to a Jazz collaboration suggestion that hits close to home, and more. Enjoy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media.

Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfills of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clivert Show on the I-Hard Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft. And we've got a special guest. The director of the NFL's East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco, joins the Sports Slice podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospects. From hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else.

If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice Podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slica Life 12 and TikTok podcast network on TikTok. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test ones.

It took an army of internet detectives to. to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police.

As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, They take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this.

He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The Questlove show is a production of IHeart Radio. What's up, good people? This is Questlove.

In addition to our website. weekly interviews of the Questlove show. I'm going to be doing some things periodically where I'll tell you a little bit more about a guest or what's going on in my life. I think they call this musings. You know, another thing we want to do is take your feedback, take your questions, and I will answer them to the best of my ability. So I'm giving you the listeners a chance to engage with me. You can DM me to either the QLS account. Matter of fact, only DM the QLS account.

Don't DM my account because I barely check my own account. Okay. Follow QLS on IG or go through questlove supreme.com. And, you know, we'll be recording these a few times a month where I'll basically, you know, answer letters. Okay, people, this is a first for me. I am going to go through, I guess this is like letters to the editor or letters to the podcaster. and we get a lot of email and the last configuration of the show. We have not answered fan mail or fan email,

but we're going to change that and do a little bit. You know, one rule in life I have is to never read the comments, and I know y'all are never going to let me live down the Open Mic Eagle episode. Yes, people, I know. You have to understand the tape. of that episode happened at a very, very kind of emotional time for me. So I kind of went rogue that episode, but I promise you that Open Mike Eagle is going to return to the Questlove show for a proper interview. And I have read the comments. I will, I promise to improve. This is a little

new for me, even though it's old, but it's still new for me. Anyway, probably the most Ask question is about the theme music. So as a Soul Quarian unit, people often ask, have the four of us ever worked together? I'm happy to say, well, I don't want to spoil or alert it, but when the Dilladot comes out, even I was shocked. Shout out to Wajid for just always having the camera on, especially when I didn't know there was a camera rolling. So, well, Haji did actually has proof that all four So Aquarians played together. We've done, I guess you can say, maybe three to four songs together, most notably time traveling or on commons, like Waterford Chocolate album.

But, I mean, that was the one time where the four of us are playing together at the same time. I mean, just to put it in perspective, the roots have an... played in a studio together as a band since Do You Want More? Actually, the newest Roots album, which is Do You Want More Live at Blue Note? Mostly just for engineering reasons, I record separately. Like, I'll do my drums first or whatever. So in the case of the theme song, people are like, yeah, it sounds like Jones in my bones. DeAngelo's playing what he calls the Flying J patch.

probably the most genius thing about DeAngelo is him being one of the very few people I know that doesn't adhere to the rule of using patches. So when I say patch, when you buy a keyboard and you want sounds like, hey, let me get some bells or a fender roads or I want a piano sound or some strings. You call those patches. So DeAngelo is the only person I know that have the ingenuity to not want to just use the factory settings. Actually, DeAngelo and Prince are the only people I know that will quote unquote hook up their patch settings. So in other words, most of us will just take the machine out the box, plug it in, and start working with what the manufacturer gives.

gives us, but there are options to change sound. So that particular Jones in My Bones patch is the DeAngelo, what he calls the Flying J. But it's essentially a filtered Calimba that also has phase on it. Phase is kind of the sound when you play two records at the same time and they sound like they're squeezing together in and out. It's called phasing. So D's playing Flying J on that. Dilla actually made that beat.

He's flipped Jones in My Bones a few times. If you listen to You for You on Fantastic Volume 2, that little noise is from Jones in My Bone. So what I do know is that the night that we made, tell me, for you, or Slum Village is fantastic with DeAngelo on it. The night that me, Dilla made that joint, we also just jammed for like two hours, and a lot of that was on tape. So Dilla actually took the DeAngelo Flying J patches

and hooked up a beat. Initially common was going to rhyme to that on like Waterford Chocolate, but it didn't happen. and so that was kept in my pocket. James Poyser added his keyboards probably last, and I wanted it to be a full sole querying affair. So anyway, that's the long, shorted history of the theme song I'm using. I wanted the soul querians to represent.

So that's what it is. All right, what else we got? We got James Bradley, a 10th grade student at Wild Lake High School in Maryland, Shout out to Wild Lake High School, Maryland. He asked me to sort of share my thoughts and wax poetic on the subject of drumming. You know, we know that two of the most universal forms of communication and language. Numbers are one thing. And music is the other.

The sound of the drum is sort of how Africans communicated. That was the original cell phone. That was the original social media. drums to me are really important there was a point in the early aughts where I was a little concerned because there was a period in hip-hop the

kind of a rival of snap music some of DJ premieres premier actually confessed to me that it was my very own platform of okay player that was ragging him about his

high hats and so thus Premier for the last 25 years decided no more high hats, which is kind of weird. I didn't know that OK player had that much power, but one of the things that I celebrated with the new premier Nause album

was premier bringing the high hats back for the first time in a long time. But yeah, you know, drumming is a communal kind of exercise and communication and rhythm and speaks to your chakra. It's a metronome. It's a traffic cop. I highly recommend it. Shout out to Wild Lake High School in Maryland. All right.

Scott Steinhardt wrote, I mentioned in past interviews on the podcast in other places. Another person from a younger generation is doing what you are doing, but different. And you mire their approach. And who is this person? And what are they doing differently? I would probably say,

minus the scarcity marketing, which kind of frustrates me a little bit. But, you know, what's good for the goose might be good for the gander. And that person, to me, I think Inflow, just what he's doing now with community. I mean, I love the idea of community. Of course, one of the first examples of community that I saw

was the juice crew in hip-hop. The juice crew consistent of Big Daddy Kane, Biz Marquis, MC Shan, Roxanne Chante, Kooli rap, collectives, you know, like the native tongues,

a tribe called Quest, De La Sol, Jungle Brothers, Salt, one of my favorite groups right now. I mean, this is their 10th year,

and they're using scarcity marketing to the hilt. All their album covers look the same. We barely know who's in the group. You know, imagine my shock.

I was at dinner one night. with a friend and I was trying to put her on to Salt and imagine my shock when she's like, Amir, that's my group. Shout out to Melissa, aka Kid Sister, who, you know, back then swore me to secrecy. But I think it's pretty much known that Salt is a collective featuring Inflo, Cleo, Soll, Kid Sister, Kronix, few other members that I don't know. you know again i think as a as an initial marketing plan it's genius based on no video no visuals whatsoever like cleo soul sold out radio city music hall like three nights in a row just on the

buzz alone so that shows me the power of music and that you don't need to subject yourself to silly marketing schemes or whatever like sometimes the music can speak for itself so it encourages me. But right now, you know, the world needs salt more than ever. So I wish that inflow had my mojo in terms of wanting to tour and get out there. Oftentimes, studio geniuses want to stay just in the studio and only in the studio. I mean, it was that way with Dilla, is that way with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. It was that way with Prince, like, you know, but sometimes you need to go out and preach the gospel. And I consider salt. really a gospel group.

And gospel doesn't mean religion, just more spiritual. And based on how healing the Cleo's show was, this is one of the cases in which I think more salt actually means healing for people. People need a soundtrack of healing right now. So there you go. Also, Scott says, P.S. Sorry, I rushed you at 30 Rock and ask you for a selfie 13 years ago. I don't remember, but okay, you're forgiven.

I meant everything I said about game theory fantastic record and simply underrated. Thank you Scott. I appreciate that. Game theory is kind of a sad period. Initially, I mean, I've told the story before.

We were just about to purchase two houses in New Orleans and we were going to relocate to Louisiana because like there was a vibe down there. Lennie Kravitz was living down there, tell me, like, yo, I need to come.

Salon's was down there. It was like, yo, you need to come. So a lot of my friends had, and I love New Orleans. Like, I think if I were to live down south, that would be the city. I mean, Austin is my favorite city of all, but I think New Orleans is in second place. And so we wanted to go to New Orleans, basically just to explore the music scene down there. They're big on jazz, but also bounce music. And also, like, you know, Zytoe and marching bands and line bands and whatnot.

There was a brass band that we saw down there called the To Be Continued Brass Band. And they reminded us of us when we were first busking. They were slightly different than your average line band. You know what I mean? And so we thought, okay, we're going to get this band on the next record. So we had it all planned out from 2005, January 2005. to August. We just toured. And then in August, we had our house, and we were going to fly to New Orleans and record this game theory record. It started to rain, and it didn't stop raining. And it

destroyed the two cribs that we were going to move to. And so we just decided to stay in Philly and record. And this is actually how Tuba got in the group, Tuba Gerting Jr. We had so much lined up for like a brass band to play that we didn't want to throw the idea out. So we went to our comrade, Sir Jeff Bradshaw, of Brass Heaven, of Philadelphia, and told him to put something together. And we toured with that unit, that brass unit. And liked it so much, we stole Tuba. We kept him in the group.

And he's been a spark of energy ever since having him in there. So, yeah, not to mention, like, game theory was also made at the time when Diller was really sick and dying. And his death kind of took me out the game. That's kind of when, besides, you know, I would do, like, maybe an occasional Al Green, an occasional Elvis Costello. Like, I would do, like, a legacy artist, just one. But this whole, like, me living in the studio and working and I don't know, I just lost my fire for it. So, you know, game theory is kind of a mournful record, but there's no record that the roots released that I don't put my heart into, even if it's a sad thing.

But I'm glad you like it, Scott. Thank you. Okay, so an anonymous commenter, listened to my appearance with Christian McBride or Nora Jones is playing a long podcast and said to me, said that me, Christian, and Kurt Rosenrinkel need a project together, any chance. I would love nothing better. There was actually a moment when Joey D. Francisco was a little. live in which the four of us, Joey D.

Francesco, master organist, Christian McBride, bass player, Kurt Rosenwinkel, guitarist, and myself on drums. We were going to do a gig at the Blue Note. Shout out to little John Roberts for filling in for me. However, I wasn't able to make that gig. I wish I would have made it because, of course, our dear friend Joey D. Francisco passed away shortly thereafter. I should have been there, but I was on the road.

I would love to do more jazz projects. I kind of shy away from those types of projects because I just have so much on my plate already, and I feel like any album that really has to show me in a sharpened musical skill set, I tend to overthink it, but overthinking is very 2025 to me, so now that we're in 2026,

I'm open to any idea. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clivert Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media.

Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to the Cliford Show on the I-Hard Radio

app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft. And we've got a special guest. The director of the NFL's East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco, joins the Sports Slice podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospects. From hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make to the players flying under the radar.

This is the insight you won't. hear anywhere else. If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slica Life 12 and TikTok

podcast network on TikTok. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Ellen's, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of

Internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian, Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.

Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific. artist. They take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.