COUP DE MAIN: In ‘All Hands On Deck’ you say: “I want your germs / Sick is a word / Death is a state of mind / Like time / But I’m not, I’m real.” Why did you decide on that for the opening statement of this mixtape?
DOMINIC FIKE: When I wrote it, it wasn’t the opening statement for the mixtape. My friend Sam [Homaee] and I were in his studio, and I was a bit antsy, so I wanted to leave pretty quickly. So I was like, ‘I’m not gonna write anything, I’m just gonna talk stream of consciousness.’ And I kept not writing, and then kept making random words rhyme, and then suddenly it had turned into that verse, and it was done in like all of five or ten minutes.

CDM: What do you mean by “but I’m not, I’m real”?
DOMINIC: “Sick is a word / Death is a state of mind / Like time…” I was reading all this Alan Watts stuff, and people talk about death being an energy change, or how we’re all just a part of one working organism. There’s the Vedanta, and that text and that approach to life, I had just been reading a lot of that sort of stuff. But then you can get into all this psychoanalytic bullshit, and you can also denounce God easily with all the psychoanalytic bullshit. For me, it was sort of like denouncing all the thought around existing, and I was just kind of like, ‘I don’t know what anything means, but it feels real – I feel like I’m real.’ Because people are like, ‘It’s all a dream, it’s a simulation,’ but I don’t think I’m a simulation.

CDM: What was running through your mind while writing: “I wanna help with your breathing / I wanna inhabit your safe zone”?
DOMINIC: I was just thinking of this girl I really love so much. And when you love someone, you want to be with them and want them to be okay – I want to be part of your three close people, I want to be your emergency contact, and help with anxiety, help with your breathing, stuff like that. I want to be that person for you, that’s what I was saying.

CDM: Why did you decide to name this mixtape after your son?
DOMINIC: It was more the other way around. I was talking to [my manager] Reed when I was in jail, and he was like, ‘What do you want to name this mixtape? Or the demos?’ We called them ‘Don’t Forget About Me, Demos’, but I initially told him I wanted to name them ‘Rocket’. And then [the album] ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong’, they asked me what I wanted to name it, and I said ‘Rocket’, but it never happened. Selena, the mother of my child, asked me what I wanted to name the kid one day, and I texted her ‘Rocket’, randomly. She was like, ‘Okay,’ and then when the mixtape was coming out, ‘Rocket’ just seemed right, you know? I didn’t want to make it about my son, I’ve always thought of it as a separate thing – it’s not a mixtape named after my son, even though it kind of is, but to me it wasn’t initially, so it still isn’t really. It may be to fans, but it’s never really been that way to me.

CDM: What is it about the name ‘Rocket’ that’s just really stuck with you all these years?
DOMINIC: I always thought of it as like those Evergreen shipping containers that are on the semi-trucks. I always liked them, and I always liked how they travelled everywhere, and I’ve always wanted to sneak onto one and travel a state in them. And then when I was in jail, I was like, ‘Damn, that would be a good way to escape jail, in one of those little shipping crates.’ I always pictured solid text on those shipping crates, and I would be in jail just thinking of shit, like images, and then ‘Rocket’ kept looking cool on an orange shipping crate, that I would always picture it on.