A decade after Endtroducing, DJ Shadow is back with an album that plays by its own rules. Do believe the hyphy, he tells Sinéad Gleeson

SPEAKING to a weary Josh Davis, it's easy to forget that the Californian turntablist and musician is only 33. It's even easier to bypass the fact that it's 10 years on from his groundbreaking debut, Endtroducing.

That record, which crept into the Guinness Book of World Records as the, "First Completely Sampled Album", is arguably responsible for clubloads of kids ditching guitars and buying 1210s. Shadow elevated the concept of the bedroom DJ and spawned thousands of DIY cut-and-scratch wannabes. Although the long-anticipated follow-up, The Private Press, didn't appear until four years later, Davis busied himself on collaborative projects with Q-bert, U.N.K.L.E, Cut Chemist and Dan the Automator, and released a collection of early singles, Preemptive Strike.

The "difficult" second album can be a musical albatross for many and it began to look as though pressure to produce another Endtroducing caught up with Davis.

"At the time, I don't think I felt I had to make Endtroducing Part 2," he says. "But in retrospect I probably did. I knew I'd achieved certain things with the album and with the UNKLE record, and was aware that of the gap between those and The Private Press because I wanted to feel I could top those records. I denied myself a lot of life's pleasures in making Private Press, but what I learned from making The Outsider is that I can still make good music and not be miserable."

Miserable is something Davis doesn't do these days. Recent years have seen some life-altering incidents. He was involved in a near-miss car crash in London and his wife's very problematic pregnancy could have ended in tragedy (she safely delivered twin girls). Call it an existential plateau or karma conversion, but The Outsider seems philosophically motivated, as if Davis has finally found the confidence to make the kind of record he always wanted.

"I hope that comes across on the record. When you have to confront things that are more important than chart position or 'are people gonna love me more this time?', it makes you a little bulletproof to the way the music business works. I felt like I was 23 for about eight years because I was straight out of college and already DJing a lot in Europe and Japan. I had this career where I was just putting one foot in front of the other, with no time to reflect on where I was going. I ended up having to confront a few situations that made all of that seem very insignificant.

"Thankfully, everything worked out and I felt I could do something on this record that was about having fun, and was for me."

The desire to have fun with this album stems from Davis's very different experience with The Private Press. He describes it as an inward-looking album, and The Outsider as very outward.

"Private Press was a very solitary record; I made it completely on my own. It was also very time-consuming and laborious to make, so it wasn't a joyful record, even though some of the music on it was some of the best stuff I've ever done. When it came out, I felt like I'd made a record that was heaps better than Endtroducing and was nothing like it but it seemed that no one was able to look at it on its own merit. Both albums were instrumental and people couldn't resist comparing the two. So with this new album, I wanted to make a record that was in no way comparable to Endtroducing.

"That's one reason it's called The Outsider. No artist is comfortable living in the box that other people construct for them."

Davis was keen to create the album he wanted without pandering to critics or fans, and The Outsider has already divided music bloggers and some reviewers with the inclusion of "hyphy" tracks, a hip-hop hybrid of crunk with its origins in Davis's home region of California.

Keak the Sneak, Turf Talk, and E-40 all contribute to the album, and some of criticism has centred on hyphy's "get wasted" philosophy, when Davis is as straight-edge as they come. Accusations of everything from bandwagon-jumping to selling out have been levelled for daring to pick such a populist style of hip-hop, even though Davis knows many of hyphy's heroes and the movement is centred around where he's from.

"The hyphy scene is like if U2 were to suddenly embrace a style of music that was contained within a five-square-mile radius and use it on their album, like I've done. Then you get someone in New Jersey telling them that they aren't doing that style of music correctly. It seems comical to me when people who have no idea of what the cultural impetus is, or who the people who are involved, criticise it.

"So many people claim to know what I'm really about and yet they're surprised that I don't want to keep making Endtroducing over and over again. A lot of people in hip-hop fear the future, and fear change. The way I see it is if they don't want to keep up or face the future, I'm not gonna wait for them."

Whether he's being defensive or defiant, Davis has taken a new approach on many fronts. Hip-hop is still his over-riding influence ("it taught me to love all types of music") but the album boasts the usual genre criss-crossing of Marvin Gaye-style funk (This Time), an indie ballad sung by Chris James, a broody folk number (What Have I Done?), and a bluesy ode to Hurricane Katrina (Broken Levee Blues), as well as numerous hyphy tracks.

As expected, there are plenty of MC contributions from Q-Tip, Quannum's Lateef and Phonte Coleman, but what stands out is the number of vocalists. Kasabian's Sergio Pizzorno and Christopher Karloff guest, as does Christina Carter of Texas folk trippers Charalambides. Given that working with so many singers was a relatively new experience for him, how did he approach it?

"The only song I had very specific requirements for was You Made It. The music was very personal and I helped write the lyrics because I wanted to make sure they were specific enough to me, but loose enough so that people could take their own meaning from it."

Fifteen years on from when he first dabbled in music, Josh Davis sounds as though he's finally where he wants to be and won't be selling up via Ebay any time soon. "I think of myself as a lifer and not someone who was signed to a major label and had to pump out an album every two years. Having that mindset from the start allowed me to pursue whatever I was interested in at the time.

"I make music with a lot of affection for the material, and because it can be a bit infectious, people really want to see where I'm headed."

DJ Shadow plays the Electric Picnic in Co Laois on September 2nd. The Outsider is released on September 15th