Fred again.. Talks About Dealing With Criticism & the Unanswered Email He Once Sent to Four Tet

Fred again.. rarely does interviews, but he recently sat down for a long conversation as part of Instagram’s Ask It Anyway series.

Filmed during a break from the British producer’s current 10 weeks/10 songs/10 cities rollout tour for his USB002 project, the discussion functions as a mentoring session for the young creators in attendance, as Fred elaborated on his creative process and much more. Watch the complete interview below.

The conversation started with the artist discussing his current tour, of which he said, “I’m feeling a bit more stable that I’m getting to travel with my best mates and play shows, and I feel very blessed if I’m honest.”

In terms of finding a balance between writing music and playing it, Fred added that, “I think for me there was just a clear thing, with touring at least. If you think of writing and touring, if you stop one of them, the other one stops. Like, writing leads to touring. So I’m really clear in my mind what’s the most important thing, and it’s writing music. My happy place is being on my ones or being with my mates making tunes, that’s always square one for me. I’ve always made sure that even if we’ve done mad stuff, that there’s always time to come back and be in London and write tunes.”

The list of “mad stuff” he referred to was indeed long, with the last few years finding Fred and his team putting on pop-up shows around the world, including a 2024 show the Los Angeles Coliseum, touring the U.S. and beyond and joining the Coachella 2023 as a last minute headliner alongside Skrillex and Four Tet.

“For me, I’m trying to just protect my mental so that I can feel good to make music every day, so everything just kind of feeds into that,” Fred said of maintaining balance amid these big moments. “I definitely haven’t always been good at this, but as I get older I care more about getting good sleep or exercising, so when I wake up I can have the cleanest line between here and here.”

He continued that creating this “cleanest line” has lead to an increase in useable output over the last few years.

“I find moments sometimes where we’re lucky with me… and both my brothers who I work with, to find ways where maybe 1% of what we write starts feels like it can come out as opposed to 0.1%. Having the record like USB, where it’s just tunes that I’m making for my USB, it doesn’t need to be like, some deep album statement always,” he said. “Then I’ve always got albums, so there’s a few different avenues that I get to put tunes out in. Or like, make an ambient album with Brian [Eno] or something like that.”

The 32-year-old artist also noted that from the ages of 20 to 28, “I reckon probably 0.0001% of things I made came out, and now I reckon 1% comes out, so that’s great.”

He told the rapt audience that making music every day is key to his process. “I try and make a few ideas a day, and most of them are rubbish… The thing is for me, the joy and the journey of finding out what you like, just like closing your eyes and throwing paint and seeing what sticks,” he said. “I would definitely preach all day about, the more you can fall in love with the obsession of it and the craft and just chasing chasing, to me that’s the win. The best feeling to me is when you play back the thing you’ve made that day and you actually feel good about it. That’s the drug I’m chasing every day.”

And while modern day producers have an endless number of software and plugins with which to create, Fred’s advice was “to just commit to two synths and five plugins that you’re going to use the next four years and save yourself all of that headspace and all of that wasted time comparing whether this compressor sounds slightly better than this compressor. Like, fix the chorus. I really, really feel this.”

He also recommended having a close group of friends to run ideas by, revealing that he has “a WhatsApp group with four of us and I’ll send everything to that group. All of them aren’t musicians, and that’s almost why I value their thoughts… You can take the feedback that resonates. That’s the most important thing. Don’t listen to any criticism, listen to the criticism that resonates.”

He also schooled the audience on not getting worn down by rejection, revealing that before he went on to become a frequent collaborator with Four Tet, he once sent the fellow producer an email that Four Tet never responded to.

“Four Tet is a producer who I’ve worked with a lot, an artist, and he loves to show people the email I sent to him years before we actually met of me being like ‘Hey mate!” Fred recalled. “I managed to get his email, that was like a huge win, and then I sent him this email like ‘Please, can we do anything? Not even music, can we just have a cup or whatever?’ And then a few years after that we actually met, and he just loves getting that email out.”

In the end, he said, “It comes back to this trying to nurture your resilience so you can shoot a million shots and not take it personally. Because it’s not personal when they don’t land, it’s nothing to do with you.”

Watch the complete interview with Fred here.