It’s rush hour in New York City. Ian Bavits is riding shotgun while en route to his Brooklyn apartment—his friend is driving. It’s late winter and the cold air is sharp, acidic. Bavits has a work-related appointment to keep, one which he’s cutting close, though not by choice. His friend is lollygagging, periodically stopping to run errands and shop for video games. But Bavits just wants to get home, tend to his professional obligations. That’s when his cell phone rings.    

“Hello?” His voice is soft but nasally. For a moment he listens, cell phone pressed to his ear then politely asks: “Can you call me back in like 10 minutes? I’m literally on my way home right now. Thanks.”

Bavits, for the better part of a decade now, has been working under the name Aesop Rock—his razor-tongued, hip-hop alter ego. And with road-hardened experience and a catalog of albums to his credit, Aesop is preparing for a U.S. tour in support of his latest release Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives—a seven song EP accompanied by an 88 page book documenting his prolific lyrical output. And while his passion for crafting beats and inking rhymes has never faltered, his affection for the promotional end of his career—namely interviews—is somewhat mixed. But nonetheless, press is a necessity for any artist, and the reason, today, for Aesop’s rush to get home.

“You can’t just make songs and let them go—you have to be able to describe, to a tee, why you did this record at this time in your life,” he explains. “You want to say: ‘Look, it’s just what came out of me.’ But that’s not a suitable answer, when in actuality it’s the real answer.”

And though Aesop’s words may smack of a “poor me” storyline, in fact, they are quite the opposite. While your average struggling emcee would barter his soul to walk in Aesop’s sneakers, the notoriety bred from his tongue-twisting, avant-garde rhymes portrays only one segment of a seemingly complex situation. His personal demeanor and extreme reluctance to fame, an experience documented on a hidden track on 2002’s Daylight EP, the follow up to his hugely successful and critically-acclaimed album Labor Days, tell of an artist who unexpectedly stumbled into a musical career that he wasn’t quite prepared for.

“It all changes the day you start taking money for it,” he says. “[The music business] is definitely way more than it appears to be. When you’re young and you’re rapping and you’re trying to get people to hear you—it’s so innocent and fun. Now, I’ve got five records out, I’m (chuckle) almost thirty. I don’t know, there’s a whole side to it that I guess I was just naïve [about].”

And while Aesop may have been naïve in understanding the machinery of the music industry, such monkey wrenches have not discouraged him from continuing to push its boundaries. On 2003’s Bazooka Tooth, his third full length album, Aesop unveiled his skills as a producer—opting to work solo from longtime friend and collaborator Blockhead, and creating a grimier, more electric funk-infused sound, a change in direction which received both praise and critique from the press.  

“People are scared of letting themselves evolve,” Aesop says. “If they have a successful record, they’ll go back and make the same record twice or three times, and it’s really pretty pathetic. My tastes have changed, the way I enjoy rapping has changed.”

On Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives, Aesop has evened the scales, sharing production duties with Blockhead, forging a more cohesive overall sound. “Holy Smokes,” the standout track on the record, is a dark, Blockhead-produced opus that finds Aesop telling tales of organized religion and the confusion it can generate in young minds.

However begrudgingly, Aesop has attained a certain level of fame. He has also, by default, become a mouthpiece for listeners who so strongly relate with his vivid storytelling.

“When I started hitting the road more and hearing what some of the fans had to say about my stuff and how much it was touching them or how much they identified with it, it was super-fucking weird to me,” he explains.“This is just the shit I did everyday for years with friends, and then when people are starting to somewhat put you on a pedestal… I was really just like: ‘No, don’t look up to me for this shit.’”