Busdriver doesn’t have a reputation for being the most affable interviewee, disdaining lyrical interpretation and refusing to elaborate on often succinct answers. His emails to arrange our interview had been curt to say the least and so, after waiting 40 minutes at the appointed location, I had already assumed he was a no-show only to look up and see him casually sipping a cup of coffee. His six-month old puppy had chewed up a plastic object and then vomited it up around his apartment, he explained, and he’d been delayed cleaning it up. The coffee shop had filled up while I’d been waiting and had become somewhat crowded. “I know a place near here,” Farquhar said and, although he seemed initially unsure of our destination, led me down Vermont Ave. to the back patio of the Starbucks adjacent to Macho’s Tacos.

The day after the presidential inauguration, Busdriver had released the track “Will He,” described as an ‘inaugural tribute,’ online for free download. From the song’s opening lines the stakes are high but the tone is unclear: "...the president's thought of as a thoughtful coon/ as Hannity peddles the fresh nonsense/ having his every press conference remixed and auto-tuned....” It seems hard to overstate how jarring it was amidst the relief and optimism of the inauguration to hear Obama referred to with a mothballed racial epithet; a sting that, for better or worse, has somewhat diminished now that debate and criticism of Obama’s policies have become part of the daily news cycle. The song, with references to Henry Paulson’s blunders and Rick Warren’s opening prayer, had a timeliness to it that made it sound as if it had been written and recorded the day of the inauguration and released more or less immediately. “I waited until the week before to record it so I could incorporate any breaking news,” Farquhar explained, “but I ended up using it pretty much as I’d already written it.”

The song seems to come across as more negative than Farquhar had intended. “I’m not happy with the unemployment and the peril a lot of the country is in,” he said, “but I’m glad Obama’s in there. It feels like a different era. Hopefully people will be a lot more engaged and a lot less complacent. It can be really stifling how Americans cast a blind eye to everything but in this election I felt like people were really thinking about policy and how it applies to their lives. I don’t care who’s in office as long as there’s dialogue and people are thinking. That’s what’s important to me.”

I asked about the track’s sardonic edge. “I have to be caustic because that’s just the way I write,” he said. “That’s the kind of writing I like and try to emulate.” and then pointed out, “It’s hopeful in the end,” and indeed I can think of few lyrics more optimistic than “pre-emptive thanks for my electric car.”