Questlove on ‘Sly Lives!,’ the Roots Picnic, his SNL music movie, and 30 years of ‘Do You Want More?!!!??!’
The Oscar-winning documentarian and 'Tonight Show' bandleader calls this year's Roots Picnic his "dream lineup."
Even by his superproductive standards, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is having an extraordinarily busy start to 2025.
The Roots drummer, DJ, documentary filmmaker, author, podcast host, and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon bandleader has two new music documentaries in Sly Lives! (a.k.a. The Burden of Black Genius), about psychedelic-era shooting star Sly Stone, and Ladies & Gentlemen ... 50 Years of SNL Music.
He also served as music director on this month’s SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, with the Roots backing everyone from Cher to Eddie Vedder to Ms. Lauryn Hill. (Afterward, Bonnie Raitt referred to the Philly band as “the always astonishing Roots.”)
West Philly native and son of doo-wop singer Lee Andrews, Questlove formed the Roots with Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter at the High School For Creative and Performing Arts in South Philly in the late 1980s.
In January, the band marked the 30th anniversary of its second album, Do You Want More?!!!??!. The band will celebrate that milestone, first with a six-show run at the Blue Note in Manhattan in March, and then in Philadelphia at the Roots Picnic, the Fairmount Park festival at the Mann Center, May 31-June 2. This year’s fest features D’Angelo with the Roots, Meek Mill, and Lenny Kravitz as top line headliners in what Questlove, in a wide-ranging interview, called “my dream lineup.”
He’s excited to be playing behind his friend D’Angelo, who’s a philosophical presence in Sly Lives!, and who may or may not have released his first new music in a decade, by the time the picnic rolls around. “I can neither confirm nor deny,” the drummer and producer said with a smile.
But Questlove — simply Ahmir, in conversation — is also stoked his band is playing the picnic on its own.
“I always wanted to be the opening act at the Roots Picnic,” he said. “The line to get in is usually like 90 minutes. So I wanted to have the band set up outside the gates and busk, like me and Tariq used to do at Fifth and South when we were at CAPA.”
Roots manager Shawn Gee put the kibosh on that, but the band will get to do an early set, “playing songs we have to learn because we haven’t done them in 30 years.”
But let’s get to the reason Questlove is sitting for a Zoom interview from Los Angeles: to talk up Sly Lives!, which, like his 2021 Oscar winning doc Summer of Soul, is streaming on Hulu. (Both the SNL music movie and reunion concert are available on Peacock.)
The crux of Sly Lives! is in its subtitle. It’s about the rise and fall of Stone — a polymath genius who led a glorious, racially mixed, and enormously influential band of women and men that celebrated late ‘60s utopianism with “Everyday People” before paranoia closed in on the equally brilliant ‘70s hits like “Family Affair” and “If You Want Me To Say.”
The documentary tests a Questlove theory about the weight Black artists who break through carry as an added burden. It’s a theory which he queries his peers on, including Chaka Khan, Vernon Reid of Living Colour, Q-Tip, and André 3000.
“When it’s Black success, it’s our success,” Questlove said. “It’s about we and us. You’re in Philadelphia: The one nonmusic figure I wanted to get in this documentary was Allen Iverson,” the Sixers star who kept it real by surrounding himself with a coterie of friends he grew up with in Virginia. (Iverson is not in the film.)
“It’s when your success is your cousin’s success and your parents’ and girlfriend’s and boyfriend’s and high school friend’s success. Vernon Reid says it in the movie: Now that you have the power, what are you going to do? Are you going to represent us? Are you going to embarrass us?”
Those questions animate Sly Lives! because they resonated powerfully with Questlove.
He does not consider himself a genius. But the responsibility that comes with the ultimate affirmation of your work on a level that you never imagined — like winning an Oscar for your first film — can lead to “paralyzing fear,” he said.
“You feel guilty that you’re the chosen one. You feel guilty that you’re the Golden Child. I can make a list of 500 people way more talented than me. The world knows I worship J Dilla [Detroit hip-hop producer born James Dewitt Yancey] as a musician, as a guru. I’m his disciple, and playing like him elevated me to this point. He’s the Charlie Parker of this movement, and he died at 32 without the world truly knowing who he is.”
Impostor syndrome is real, says the drummer who took his position behind the kit in his father’s band at 12.
“Oh yeah. It took me seven months to agree to do Summer of Soul. I was like, ‘Guys, I teach at NYU’” — he’s an adjunct professor at Tisch School of the Arts — “but I didn’t go to NYU film school. How am I going to learn?”
He learned fast, and won the best documentary Oscar in 2022. The audience was still in shock from the infamous Chris Rock and Will Smith spat immediately preceding his victory, while Questlove was in his own head.
“I started going down a list of people who might be happy for me, and not happy for me. They call your name, and it’s like ‘Oh God, this really is happening.’ Then you’re in a ‘Is this what I asked for?’ cycle of confusion. I was being thrust to an express floor on another level. Like, ‘Steven Spielberg is on Line 2.’ How’d he get my number?”
As a music business lifer — he turned 54 in January, celebrating by appearing on the YouTube spicy wings show Hot Ones — Questlove has been better equipped than most, with a gradual rise to pop culture ubiquity. Still, “it’s very very easy to self-sabotage,” he said. “Sly chose cocaine and angel dust. I chose overworking and food.”
For the food part, Questlove has his own line of plant-based cheesesteaks. And the overworking is apparent in his output — he’s written nine books, most recently a children’s picture book, The Idea in You, and has his own Auwa publishing imprint. But he says he has self-destructive behavior under control, thanks to being in therapy since the 1990s and getting “very serious about my mental health” during the pandemic.
And when Questlove overworks, music fans benefit, and sometimes the multihyphenate with encyclopedic musical knowledge does, too.
Maybe his most purely joyful filmmaking is the opening montage of 50 Years of SNL Music, which the pop culture junkie researched by watching all 900 episodes of the show.
The mind-blowing mashup, put together with editor John McDonald, uses split screen perspective to stitch together Run-DMC, Hall & Oates, and Cher, and Queen, Dave Matthews, and Vanilla Ice, to cite two examples with unexpected juxtaposition. “Which is how I DJ,” he said.
It also proved therapeutic.
“The Sly movie put me in a place where I wanted something more joyful to work on. When you immerse yourself in whatever subject you’re working on, it affects you, too. There were moments where we had to take a 15-minute break to go cry somewhere.”
From Friday to Sunday, he worked on SNL, Monday to Thursday with Sly, and then Friday to Sunday back on SNL.
“Because I just wanted something happy to do. Something happy to escape to. And it was just so much fun to do.”