Title: Questlove Takes Kids' Calls! (Get Little)

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. Happy New Year to those who celebrate. On today's show, we'll hear from the authors of the new book We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During and After Roe. We'll also hear about the new season of Radiolab's podcast for kids Terrestrials. That's the plan, so let's get this started with Questlove.

[music]

Get Little is a kids' version of our monthly book club when we invite an author to come on the show and take calls and questions from kids listening at home. When school is off, Get Little is on. Today we're diving into the world of creativity with one of the world's most creative gems, Questlove. You know Questlove as a founder and drummer of The Roots, as well as the musical director for The Tonight Show. He's an Oscar winning filmmaker for the documentary Summer of Soul. Yes, we're about to get more films from him about Sly Stone, J. Dilla, and just announced Earth, Wind and Fire. The rumor is it's coming out on the 21st of September 2025.

Questlove: Wink wink.

Alison Stewart: Questlove is also an author many times over. He's written a new children's book called The Idea in You, full of creative inspiration and encouragement for kids. The book is illustrated by Shawn Qualls. It's out now. Questlove, it is really nice to meet you.

Questlove: I'm really freaking out right now because I'm such a fan of yours and I'm glad I finally got my Alison Stewart moment in my career. Thanks.

Alison Stewart: Aw. We love that. We love that.

Questlove: If your audience doesn't know, you have history.

Alison Stewart: Thanks, man.

Questlove: I've been following you for a long time, so honored to be here.

Alison Stewart: The book starts, "An idea can come from anywhere. Start here. Reach up into the sky and unhook a star." How did the metaphor come to you?

Questlove: Well, I think I have an obsession with how the constellation works. I'm always wanting to remind myself that we are smaller in the scheme of things, of how earth is compared to the rest of the planet, how the stratosphere compared to the rest of existence. Also, that line is meant for us to not dismiss our dreams. I think it's often too easy. Sometimes adults might unknowingly dismiss a kid's dream, and that might affect them in the long run. I've had people in my life equally support me. I grew up in the fall back on something to play it safe. Well, that's nice and all, but you should get into computers because that makes a lot of money. Survival is important, but not more important than your dreams.

Alison Stewart: We all know that creativity is important for kids. Why is it important to encourage kids, us as adults?

Questlove: I always ask my mother about my beginnings, and she tells me that my birth doctor, Gordon, I'm forgetting Gordon's last name right now, he would routinely call my mom long after I was born to see how things are going. I don't know how typical that is for a birth doctor to keep calling to make sure. He planted an amazing seed of an idea of her. He wanted to know because he knew that my father was creative. My father was a famous oldies doo-wop singer back in the '50s.

Alison Stewart: Lee Andrews?

Questlove: Yes, Lee Andrews and the Hearts. He was a fan of my father and wanted to know if the epigenetic effect, does the fruit fall far from the tree? He would always encourage my mom, no matter what he does, let him experiment. If you see him playing in his food or putting stuff in his hair or drawing on something, let him do it. Which in the early '70s was a no no in every household. Plastic cover everywhere. Do not destroy my furniture. That's the environment I grew up into. I asked my parents, "What were the results?" They said, "Well, you would abuse our furniture. Then we were like, okay, let's get you a drum set." By the time I was three, they saved their furniture, and they got me my first drum set.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, let's invite you into the conversation. If you're listening on your day off from school or parents listening and you have your kids nearby, we want to hear from you. How do you like to be creative? Is it when you're at school with your friends, or is it when you're at home? Give us a call. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. You can call us or text to us. What do you like to do that's creative? Maybe you like to draw or paint or act or play music. If so, what instrument? Call us and tell us. 212-433-9692. Now, while kids get priority today on the phone lines, we want to hear from parents too. How do you encourage creativity in your kids? What do you notice?

What helps them? How do you want to get your kids more creative or you're not sure how? Maybe Questlove can give you some advice. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. It was so sweet. When your dad passed away, you honored him by saying, "I love you for every backstage experience, for every drum lesson, for giving me your tireless work ethic. I understand why you were so hard on me, praying I didn't succumb to a fate not meant for a teenager in West Philly in the mid-'80s I didn't understand at the time, but I appreciate it now."

Questlove: Yeah.

Alison Stewart: How did your dad keep you from getting into it when you were a kid?

Questlove: Well, he had a hard job of encouraging my creativity, but also protecting me. To be young in the '80s, specifically the crack '80s, in which every day was a fight to the finish, sometimes literally a fight to the finish, my father really provided the tools that playfully distracted me from wanting to "go out there." The thing is that I was fortunate enough to grow up in a household with about 3,000 albums. I know, right?

Alison Stewart: I like that already.

Questlove: The ears perked up. I grew up in a household with three very distinctive record collectors. This also dispels another myth because I don't want to lead people into thinking I immediately came out the womb as this ready-made professor of music that knows everything. I will say that I grew up in a 3,000-album household, but I also grew up in a don't-touch-my-stereo household, which means the first six to seven years of my life was more I playfully say Stockholm syndrome in terms of I had to listen what they listened to.

If left to my own devices, I would have just listened to Sesame Street records and Marlo Thomas Free To Be You and Me. As a result of not having a say in the playlist, which I do now, I'm the king of playlists, I will say that growing up with a father that only liked soft rock or yacht rock as we know it, and a mom that listened to free jazz and funk music, and a sister who pretty much mirrored the pop music that her high school girlfriends were listening to, and they're bringing all three of those things distinctively into the household.

I gravitate towards it, not to mention being a child of the MTV generation. Back then, if you wanted to see a Michael Jackson video, you would just sit in front of your television for four to five hours straight, waiting for that 45-minute loop of Beat It or Thriller to come on. Then everything else that comes on, you absorb that, and then you suddenly know about groups like Yes and Van Halen and Quiet Riot and all those other groups.

Alison Stewart: I had so much fun listening to Shaft when I was little.

Questlove: Really?

Alison Stewart: That was my jam.

Questlove: [laughs] Talk about it. What would you do for creativity?

Alison Stewart: I used to love the record player in the front of my parents' house. It was in the living room where you don't really sit, you don't touch anything. [unintelligible 00:09:42]

Questlove: Don' touch my stereo household.

Alison Stewart: I could touch the record player, and I could put on Shaft.

Questlove: You were allowed to touch the record player?

Alison Stewart: I was. I was. [unintelligible 00:09:49]

Questlove: I was nine before I was allowed to press the power button.

Alison Stewart: Oh, it was a long living room, and I just had a dance that I would do to Shaft. That was what I did. I just loved the sound of it. I loved everything about it. I'm not sure I knew what it meant exactly, but I loved it.

Questlove: You absorbed music, and you danced to it.

Alison Stewart: That was me.

Questlove: I would play record store. I would grab maybe 75 records and set up a fake record store in the living room

Alison Stewart: Try it on. Let's talk to Patrick, who's age 10, calling in.

Questlove: Hello, Patrick. How you doing?

Alison Stewart: Hi, Patrick. You're on with Questlove.

Patrick: I'm doing good.

Questlove: How are you?

Patrick: I'm good. I'm brainstorming cartoons and making games from scratch.

Questlove: Really? You're brainstorming? What is your passion in life? What is it that you long to do in this life?

Patrick: Well, more than likely create cartoons for kids my age or create books.

Questlove: What kind of cartoons?

Patrick: Kids' cartoons, similar to Mickey Mouse.

Questlove: Okay, are you more into stories or more into actual art or drawing or sketching?

Patrick: Each and every one of those things you just said.

Alison Stewart: Well, all right, then.

Questlove: Do it every day. Yes, I encourage this. Take time out for yourself to just sit silent and doodle and make up stories. Always make up stories.

Alison Stewart: Patrick, did you have a question for Questlove?

Patrick: Yes. My question was, how did he get the inspiration and encouragement to become a drum player?

Questlove: Wow. Okay, to hear my parents tell me I had a knack for rhythm, their favorite game would be to clap a rhythm out to two-year-old me. They would do this [claps] and then they watch me, just see me [claps] and then I'll get happy. I will say that, for me, I naturally came with it. I will say that when I was four years old, there was a television show that used to come on every Saturday, and that show was called Soul Train. On the show, groups of the day will come and play music on it. One particular Saturday, there was a band from the UK, and they were called The Average White Band.

The novelty of it, of course, was back in '75, English white players playing soul music was a rarity. Now, it's nothing to see. Other cultures do music that they wouldn't normally be associated with. I watched that particular. They had a drummer named Steve Ferrone. Ironically, he was the one Black member of the group, but he had a sound that just hypnotized me. When I saw him drumming when I was four, I said, that's what I want to do when I grow up.

The full circle moment of that was I got to befriend Steve Ferrone some years later. When I started my new job at the Tonight Show, on my very first day, a box came to my office, and I opened that box, and he had gifted me the snare drum from that Soul Train episode back in 1975 that made me want to be a drummer. I use it to this day. That was a beautiful full circle. Sorry for that long story. I saw Steve Ferrone drumming and said, that's what I want to do, and I became it.

Alison Stewart: This is a text from Mira, "I'm a 9-year-old who loves NPR, and what I do to be creative is to use three random words and draw a picture that includes those three topics."

Questlove: I encourage that. Yes. I wrote a book. I wrote a few books, but my fourth book called Creative Quest, I talk about these exercises that people can do, like grab a dictionary or any book and figure out brain exercises to do. I encourage that. Like randomly point to a word and write a song about it, write a story about it or draw it. Yes, I encourage that.

Alison Stewart: We are talking to Questlove. His new picture book is called The Idea in You. It's part of our Get Little series of kids' book club live on the radio. Let's talk to Camilla from Long Island. Hi, Camilla. Thanks for calling in.

Camilla: Hello.

Questlove: Hi.

Camilla: I'm Camilla.

Questlove: Hi. Where are you?

Camilla: I'm good. I'm 10 years old.

Alison Stewart: Tell us what you like to do.

Camilla: I love to draw, and I like to use my imagination to make paper dragons. I like to doodle on my sketchbook a lot. It makes me feel like I'm in my own world where I can draw whatever I want. Maybe a person holding a star that they grabbed from the sky or somebody sitting on a cloud or a unicorn or whatever.

Alison Stewart: I love that. Thank you.

Questlove: You know what? It's what you said exactly. The one lesson that I learned in the pandemic, after 2020, is how important it is for us as adults to get back to that place. What she said exactly is what I tell everyone. That's why people now know me for something else. I've been throwing game nights. I'm very vigilant with my game nights. Everyone from Taylor Swift to Bun B from UGK come to these game nights.

The reason why I gather these creative minds, these singers, these actors, these writers, is oftentimes we get a passion and then we become professional and make a living, and then it becomes work, and then it's not fun anymore. Sometimes we just need to take time out for play. Play is the most important element in creativity. I figured if I invite 70 of my friends over set up about 15 tables, and we play games and everyone from Clue to Operation to Uno to Scrabble and Bananagrams, Spades, name it, I try to do this once a month or once every other month. We have to take time out to play. That's where creativity and ideas come into play.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Connor calling in from Fanwood, New Jersey. Hi, Connor.

Connor: Hello.

Questlove: Hello, Connor. How are you?

Connor: Good.

Questlove: How was your day today?

Connor: Oh, I'm good. I've been playing saxophone, piano. They're really fun.

Questlove: Oh, multi musician. How long have you been playing instruments?

Connor: I've been playing piano for around four years and saxophone for around two.

Questlove: I'm really impressed. Who's your favorite musician?

Connor: My favorite musician is the Beatles. I love the Beatles.

Questlove: Wow, man, I can tell you're going to go far. You have the right tools. Of all the instruments you play, which one is your most passionate?

Connor: Probably piano. I really like the piano. It's my most passionate instrument.

Alison Stewart: Connor, I hear you sing as well.

Connor: Yes, I do singing. It's really fun. I just started singing, though. Not that good at it, but I just started. It's fun.

Questlove: I encourage that.

Alison Stewart: Hey, thanks for calling, Connor. By the way, if you're a kid and you want to give us a call and talk to Questlove, our number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Tell us what you do to be creative. I'm really interested in this one picture in the book.

Questlove: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Because your little man standing there with, he's got a great fro-

Questlove: And the lotus position.

Alison Stewart: -and he's lotus position and he's meditating.

Questlove: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Is that important to you?

Questlove: I've morphed into the person I used to make fun of. [laughs] I'm going to keep it real. When you grow into hip hop culture, especially me growing into second, third generation hip hop culture, one of the things that you think that you have to lose, I don't want to say your humanity, we were told that you have to lose your emotions, because to express emotions is to express vulnerability. Somehow someone told us that vulnerability means weakness or whatever. A lot of times I feel as though my particular generation, Generation X, I was born in the early '70s, somehow lost touch with that.

It wasn't until the world completely stopped and I was quarantining on a farm, and I happened to be quarantining with someone that was big on yoga and getting up and breathing exercises. Really, meditating is sitting silent and it's the cousin of prayer. Prayer is where you talk to God. I believe that meditating is where you listen to God, and that's where ideas come from. I always make time in the morning. I tell everyone you need a morning routine the second you wake up.

If you just take 20 minutes out for yourself before you grab your phone, before you check your messages, before you start your day in which you're looking for the bad news, or how many emails I got to answer now, if you could just suspend 15 to 20 minutes just for yourself, sitting in silence and sitting in gratitude, saying thank you and being nice to yourself. That's my version of charging my iPhone. That's where I get my ideas. When I sit silent, I do it before I wake up in the morning, and I do it right before I go to bed. Some of my best song ideas, melodic ideas, movie concept ideas, all those things come to me when I just sit silently and breathe.

Alison Stewart: This is a really good text from a parent. It says, "Tips for ways to encourage the kids in the face of failure. My 13-year-old worked really hard and got callbacks to star in her middle school musical, and she got so close, and I want to keep motivating her so she can stay excited about it."

Questlove: Not internalizing failure. It took me a long, long time. I can't tell you the amount of times. People are often shocked to hear this part of my life where I'm very honest about a lot of insecurities I had or what I deemed those F words. I think around maybe 2018, I'd stopped looking at that F word, which to me is worse than what we normally call the F word, I'm talking about failure, I stopped looking at it as a negative. What failure really means is you learn out of every setback or perceived failure, that's a lesson to be taught, and that's the universe teaching you a lesson.

What normally happens is, I think if our ego gets in the way, we fight against that, and you do the equivalent of driving down a dead-end road. Hook a crook I'm going to force my will, make this happen, and it doesn't. That's basically life giving you a cheat hack to say that it's not this way. Figure out another way to get to that goal. I don't take that as a fail. I also believe in persistence. There is a web series that I host called Quest for Craft, and one of my subjects, it'll be out later this month, in October.

Lin Manuel, he and I talked about persistence and never giving up because Hamilton wasn't built in the day, and neither was it in the heights. Hamilton took him seven years to make getting somewhere and throwing the giraffe away, and that's not going to work. Let me try it this way. Let me try it that way. If you're in a routine, regular practice of whatever your passion is, then you won't see it as a failure. Just do not internalize that as a means to give up. Don't self-evidence why you don't deserve things. We as humans always live in that place where I don't deserve this, and why is this happening? No more imposter syndrome.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Megan from Stanford, Connecticut. Hi, Megan. Thanks so much. You're on the air with Questlove.

Megan: Hi, there. I am a physical artist. I do a lot of prop work for theaters, but my kids are very musically oriented, and I'm struggling with where to start them. They're young, they're two and four, but they've got all the love for it. I just don't know where to start them. Where it's not crazy expensive to start buying instruments and taking them to classes.

Questlove: Do you know which particular instruments that they're gravitating towards?

Megan: There's lots of singing. We have a little toy trumpet or toy drums. Everything's very beat oriented and chanting and singing.

Questlove: Well, you have something that I didn't have as a kid because there had to be a tangible instructional school or that sort of thing for me growing up. You have the aid of YouTube as a last resort. If there's a point where you can't find a particular musical teacher, I assure you with a good 15 to 20-minute vetting process that even me myself, as a person that's been professionally drumming for four decades plus, even I, there was one point when I was on stage and my band was like, where'd you learn to do that? The embarrassment I had. There's a 15-year-old on YouTube that has an instructional video on how to do this riff.

[laughter]

I was like, wow, am I really crediting someone younger than my first Grammy that's teaching me how to be a better musician? I will say that on YouTube, which seems to be the choice of any kid that I know born after 2000, there are a gazillion instructional videos to teach them how to pursue their passion.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Questlove. His new book is called The Idea in You. Let's talk to Eliza, who is calling us from Brooklyn. Eliza, you're 12, is that right?

Eliza: Yes.

Questlove: Hello, Eliza. How are you? Wait, why are these kids off of school? Oh, Elijah. Hello. How are you? How are you doing? How are you?

Eliza: I'm doing great.

Questlove: Awesome.

Eliza: The question was, what do I enjoy?

Alison Stewart: Sure. Tell us what you enjoy. What makes you creative?

Eliza: I enjoy acting. I really enjoy it. I would say at my middle school, I just tried out for this role from Into the Woods. Do you know Into the Woods?

Alison Stewart: Yes, sure.

Eliza: It's that basically, I tried out for this role of Jack, and I got the role.

Questlove: Congratulations.

Eliza: Thank you. I'm really excited to start rehearsing for it. I also would say that I also like singing too.

Questlove: Multi hyphen, okay.

Alison Stewart: Very excited for you. Congratulations. What's on your bucket list? Your creativity bucket list.

Questlove: Me?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Questlove: In terms of my creative process, what do I do?

Alison Stewart: Something you want to do. Something that you haven't gotten to do yet. You've done a lot already.

Questlove: You know what? It's weird. After I directed Summer of Soul and I got my Oscar, then the entire world just opened, and I was a kid in a candy store, which was, oh, I want to do this, that, this, that, and the other, this, that, and the other. I found myself back at square one, where what I was passionate about now has become a burden because I have 11 projects to do in 4 years. You know what I mean?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Questlove: If anything, I will say that I live in a space where the less I do and the more that I sit, which is hard for me to do, because, one of the things that for all the parents listening, and I know this is going to go against your instinct, we've been taught this narrative to work hard and be studious and to be experts. I now am in the place where I don't think I agree with that. Everything that's happening for me in life is in things that I'm not an expert at and things that I don't have this mental level of knowledge. I'm going into a lot of these projects feel like an imposter syndrome, but it's really just me showing up and taking one step at a time-

Alison Stewart: That's the way to do it.

Questlove: -and a child's mind approach to it, and I'm fine with that. Maybe two years ago I wasn't fine with that, and I felt like, oh, someone's going to find out about me one day and I'm going to get in trouble. Of course, we've been taught, at least in this country, to survive first, no matter what. I almost say that it's the opposite. It's not knowing and showing up and letting it in. That's where the passion is. The key word is fun. We shouldn't dismiss fun so much as we normally do. We think of fun as not serious. I don't think work should be serious. We should all be Will Ferrell in Elf. That's what we should all be.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Questlove. The name of the book is The Idea in You. Thank you for taking calls from our listeners.

Questlove: Wow. I enjoyed this so much and thank you very much for having me.