#IMAGES OFMAC MILLER WEEKEND ALBUM ART MAC#
Photographers show up to Mac Miller’s scheduled appearances all the time, but hiding behind shrubbery outside his hotel feels cartoonishly weird. Paparazzi were waiting for him outside Colbert the night before, and this looked to be more of the same. He’d worked out that a gentleman peering at him from behind a bush was communicating with another in a vehicle across the street. Having a smoke on a bench on Bowery, Mac glanced up the street and then quickly popped back inside the hotel. That attention to detail isn’t limited to the studio. It’s not preciousness so much as a studio rat’s high bar for professionalism. Listening to the playback of “Ladders” on site in the mixing room at Colbert, Miller caught an almost imperceptible rhyming misquote in a backing vocal and asked staff to adjust the levels subtly so it blended in better. This is partly because Mac hears sounds even a keen ear might miss, and while this causes a potentially unhealthy level of self-reflection it also keeps him in a close orbit of jazz fusion guys like Thundercat, the funk apostle Dam Funk, and rap technicians Vince Staples and Kendrick Lamar. “I’ll wake up and just sit here and think about it for hours.” “I have a tendency to kinda brood about stuff and cook in it,” he says. Mac was still pondering the performance from the day before and wondering what he could have done better, even though the general consensus among the chorus of internet rap diehards who watched the video was that he did a great job. The storm complicated our plan to cruise the streetwear shops up Mercer but offered a scenic backdrop for indoor reflection. Out back, there’s a cozy patio with a vaulted glass ceiling made doubly breathtaking by the onset of a fast-moving afternoon thunderstorm, the worst in a two-week stretch of late summer rain. I met up with Mac Miller in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel the day after Colbert with a plan to wander around and talk shop in lower Manhattan. It becomes clear that Mac isn’t anxious about playing the room.
Colbert tickets sell out well ahead of the guest announcements it’s possible that no one in the audience knew they were seeing Mac, or the episode’s flamboyant first guest Nicki Minaj, until days before, if at all. Inside the room, a sea of shiny, bald heads suggests that the crowd is considerably older than the late-stage teens and 20-somethings that comprise Mac Miller’s fan base. After trying several crisp shirt and pant combos, Miller ends up onstage in his publicist’s sunset-hued Stussy sweatshirt, where he runs through an airtight performance of his new album Swimming’s funk-rap highlight “Ladders,” backed by the stellar house band, Jon Batiste and Stay Human. The Pittsburgh rapper - normally relaxed and easy-going - is growing wiry from anticipation. Wardrobe deliberations go on longer than you’d expect and the room is making everyone loopy. It’s a windowless white space with two extraneous doors that don’t appear to move or lead anywhere like a Scooby-Doo trap room. He’s pacing, running scales and planning outfits in the Late Night With Stephen Colbert green room during a Monday taping where he’s the musical guest. We are revisiting it in honor of the posthumous release of his album, Circles.
This profile was reported in mid-August of that year and was originally published the day before his death. Photo: Christaan Felber for Vulture Mac Miller died on Septem.