The Strength of an Ant: André 3000 on 7 piano sketches

André Benjamin, better known by his stage name André 3000, is one of pop culture’s true originals. As one half of the category-expanding hip-hop duo OutKast alongside fellow rapper Big Boi, André was a man apart from his 1990s contemporaries: a wildly off-kilter, dandyish rap-savant who seemed like an interstellar visitor among the crunk badboys of the Southern hip-hop scene. Any other artist as mind-unravelingly cerebral or unapologetically maverick would be consigned to the fringes, but not André. Thanks in part to his and Big Boi’s opposites-attract chemistry, and in part to his own weapons-grade charisma and lyrical virtuosity, OutKast became one of the most successful pop-music acts of all time. Speakerboxx / The Love Below, their 2003 double LP, remains the highest-selling rap album in history.

Few figures have scaled the heights of pop-culture success and then rejected their fame as resoundingly as André—and few with such dignity and grace. Having achieved legendary status as one of his art form’s inimitable geniuses, the Atlanta native left the limelight to pursue his own passions, becoming something of a spiritual northstar for the American left field in the process. His latest endeavor, 7 piano sketches, is a fifteen-minute EP of improvised piano music recorded on phones and laptops. It arrives after a 1930s-inspired clothing line, a New Age instrumental flute album titled New Blue Sun (2023), and a string of performances in acclaimed arthouse films directed by the likes of Kelly Reichardt, Noah Baumbach, and Claire Denis—only the latest reinvention, then, in a career full of them. The new EP is accompanied by a film, for which André has teamed up with indie director Graham Mason. In this delightfully buoyant short, André channels the limber expressiveness of a silent comic, skipping through a New York night limned with serene, cosmic wonder—and all with a grand piano strapped to his back.

Zooming in from Los Angeles wearing a tie-dyed shirt and his now-signature painter’s overalls, André spoke to me about ceramics, the creative challenges of aging, and his search for an elusive 21st-century style of acting.

MUBI: Let’s start with the music. Could you talk me through the recording of 7 piano sketches, and the origins of the project? 

ANDRÉ BENJAMIN: It’s been in the making for around fifteen years, maybe. It started with these iPhone recordings: I would sit and play the piano and record it on my phone. I played keys on some OutKast songs and some other stuff, but I’m not a piano player. I’ve always liked its sound, though, and the mechanics of how it’s played. 

When I was living in this empty house in Dallas, with my son, I rented a piano. He would go to school, and I would sit and mess around on it. I liked it so much that I ended up buying it and keeping it. That was when I started recording on my phone or my laptop, and texting the recordings to the mother of my child, my stepdad, and my musician friends, like Q-Tip. I thought they would get it or, you know, just enjoy it. The recordings were fun things. If they looked back at our text threads now, they would find a lot of these songs. 

After I released New Blue Sun, I was going through my laptop one day and I found a lot of these recordings—and I was like, Oh man, I forgot about these. It was refreshing to hear them again. So, thinking it would just be a cool share, I gathered enough of them to release. Originally, I wanted to release them for free. But because I’m signed to a label I had to do more of an official release. And that’s how 7 piano sketches came to be. 

We tried at first to figure out a way to text the whole album to people. I thought it would be cool, because text was the delivery system I originally used to share the music. Politicians are always sending me these texts on my phone that I don’t really want, so I thought, Why can’t I do that?

MUBI: There’s an appealingly rough and unfinished quality to the record; as the title has it, they’re sketches more than polished compositions. What’s attractive to you about this lack of polish?

BENJAMIN: I spent most of my music career producing very polished tracks. The music I was making with OutKast was very focused and direct. I think I’m at a stage in my life now where I’m more attracted to an unstructured approach; New Blue Sun was all improvised as well. There’s something about the freedom of improvising... Once you’ve done something for a long time, you’re looking for ways to unlearn things and get out of a pattern. There’s something raw and honest about that way of working. I’ve been doing music for so long, my brain has gotten used to certain rhythms, certain chord progressions, certain structures. It stopped being exciting to make music that way. Working in this more improvisatory way got me excited again. 

MUBI: On the EP’s cover, there’s a drawing of you with a grand piano strapped to your back. That image is the basis for the short film you’ve made with Graham Mason, and you recreated the look for the 2025 Met Gala. Where did that idea come from?

BENJAMIN: I’d been thinking about the idea for a long time: walking around New York with a huge piano strapped to my back. That was the idea that the film grew out of, and when the Met Gala came around and I had to dress up, I thought, Why not use the idea there too?

I like ants, and the idea partly came from thinking about ants and how they can carry a leaf that’s 50 to 70 times their body weight. I was thinking about what it would be like to have ant-like strength.

The piano was actually really heavy. I wanted to be able to move around freely and dance with it on my back, so I needed somehow to make it super light. We had a foam prototype made by a fabrication house in Amsterdam, which was great, but they had to back out before we filmed the short. I didn’t get to try on the replacement from the other fabricators until the day before we were supposed to start filming. I put it on, and it was like 40 pounds, 50 pounds. I said, “I can’t do this. Y’all have to build it again.” So they tried to gut as much as they could; they were removing wood pieces and everything. We got it down to 35 pounds—which is still really, really, really heavy. But I still wanted to move as if it wasn’t heavy at all… All the jumping around I do in the film actually messed my back up a little bit. 

MUBI: I’m glad you brought ants up, because I’ve noticed that ants crop up a lot in your recent work. There’s a giant ant named Mr Anthony in the short film. There are references to ants on 7 piano sketches and New Blue Sun, and you named your workwear clothing line “From Now On They Will Have No Choice But to Call Us Ants.” What do you find so inspiring about them?

BENJAMIN: How they communicate and relate to each other: their togetherness, the way they work toward a goal. It’s just intriguing to watch them. I’ll sit and watch hours of YouTube videos and nature documentaries about ants. There’s something so cool about the way they work; they're the biggest workers on the planet. I’ve always felt like humans could learn a lot from ants.

MUBI: You said that the core idea of the film was walking around New York with a piano strapped to your back. How important is it that the city was New York and not Los Angeles or Atlanta or anywhere else? 

BENJAMIN: Well, I lived in New York when I was thinking about the project, and I moved the piano I used for the EP from Dallas to New York. I was working with [elusive New York street artist] Jim Joe at the time, and we talked a lot about the city and how it related to the idea. There’s something about the New York cityscape, and the background it gives to normal life. And the crowds: It’d be different if I were just walking in the countryside with this piano on my back and there wasn’t anyone else around.

MUBI: That’s a very ant-like image: tiny pedestrians scurrying around beneath vast buildings, carrying things.

BENJAMIN: Exactly!

MUBI: Did you get any interesting reactions from passersby when you were walking around New York with this giant piano prop?

BENJAMIN: No, not really, because it was a night shoot. We started when the sun went down and finished when the sun came back up. Most people were asleep; the world was shut down. Even when we were on the bridge in New York there was nobody there. It was surprisingly easy to do.

MUBI: I thought New York was the city that never sleeps…

BENJAMIN: It sleeps a little bit.

MUBI: The EP is an exploratory work of improvisation; you’ve talked about how you just sat at the keys and let your fingers play what they wanted. Filmmaking is a different beast: There’s a lot of planning and execution required, and there are many moving parts to a film set. Is there a tension between the freedom of this kind of music and the execution of a project like this short film?

BENJAMIN: Originally, we wanted to release the album while I was on the red carpet at the Met Gala, then shoot the video immediately after, all in one night. So: Stay up after the Met, walk around New York and film this thing, rush-edit it, and then release the video the next day. It was supposed to be this really raw, quick thing. But that didn’t happen, it was too much. That’s where Graham’s filmmaking skills came in. My idea was this very raw and unfinished thing, and he came and structured it, organized it, turned it into a real story—and it turned out so awesome.

MUBI: As an actor, you’ve collaborated with some of the most renowned directors working today. Has working with these artists inspired your own creative process?

BENJAMIN: Just sitting around and watching them work and letting the atmosphere wash over me has been a huge inspiration. I know this sounds strange, but before I started working with them, I didn’t really know any of their work. I’m really not hip; this isn’t my scene. I’m in a lucky position where they would reach out with roles and I would meet them and realize how awesome they were. I’ve been so blessed to be around them and to watch them work. I’m 51 now, and when you get to this age you’re faced with big questions: How do I keep moving forward, creatively? How do I keep going? Being on those sets and looking around and seeing my contemporaries have such freedom and style was really inspiring. 

MUBI: Are you still looking for acting projects?

BENJAMIN: Yes, definitely. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out how I can find a way to do something different with it. There’s a famous actor—I won’t name him—and every time he sees me, he’s like, “You remember that conversation we had? Have you found that new style of acting yet? I’m still looking!” If you watch cinema, it moves through different styles of performance: In the ’40s and ’50s, they had this really serious kind of acting. Then in the ’60s and ’70s, it was very free. What is the style for now? I’m looking for that new style, but I don’t know if I’ll find it at my age. Maybe the youth will, because they’ve grown up with cameras in their faces and YouTube and everything. But I’m always looking for something new to challenge myself with; I’ve got some things to figure out.

MUBI: Hearing you talk about the creative process and how invested you are in that process of discovery makes me think of Showing Up [2022], the film you made with Kelly Reichardt. That film is very much about the act of creating, and the victory of even finding time or energy to create something, regardless of what it is. What was it like being on that set?

BENJAMIN: We shot it in an art school in Portland, so all the painting and weaving and sculpting and everything was actually happening on set. We were all creating around each other; I was playing a lot of flute. I’ve been drawing and making things all my life, so I understood the assignment and what Kelly was trying to do. I actually thought I would be a visual artist when I was younger, but then me and Big Boi met and we formed OutKast and I started making music. But the original plan was to go to art school. 

Working on Showing Up got me into ceramics. When I signed up for the film, Kelly hooked me up with a kiln master at Cal State University, Long Beach. I was playing a kiln master in the film, so she wanted me to spend some time with a real one. I was there for a few days, and I’m just following him around, watching him do his thing, and one day he turns to me and says, “Have you ever actually tried this?” And I was like, “Well, no.” So he gave me this big block of clay and told me to make some stuff. And I just immediately started making things. Because I draw, I quickly realized that, with clay, you can draw in 3D. So that film actually spurred me on to go down that path. Now I’m doing stone sculptures, I’m chiseling. 

MUBI: Do you think that creating visuals for a piece of music alters that music? How do you understand the relationship between images and music?

BENJAMIN: Attaching visuals to music definitely shapes how you’re listening to it, because you’re getting hit with two senses at once. 7 piano sketches has a different life now, because the music is tied to the images in the film. It gives the music another role to play. It’s kind of like silent film: You know how cinemas used to have a piano player in the corner playing along to silent films? That’s how I see it. I’m a fan of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin—all those silent actors who had to express themselves through movement without saying anything.

MUBI: Do all of these creative endeavors—acting, making music, drawing, sculpture—come from a similar place for you, or are they scratching different creative itches? 

BENJAMIN: They’re different, and they require different approaches, but sometimes you have these places where they meet and interact: like making a film from 7 piano sketches. I think I’m always looking for something that keeps me excited, something that keeps me really interested, because I can be like a kid who gets bored. After doing something for a while, I’ll start fidgeting and turning to the next thing.

MUBI: Do you still compose on the piano, or is it mainly on the flute at the moment?

BENJAMIN: Right now I don’t know what I’m doing to be honest. I’m in this super scary, super exciting limbo. I have no idea what I’m doing.

MUBI: Fidgeting?

BENJAMIN: Definitely fidgeting. Hopefully it’ll fall somewhere good. You know, a lot of people look at the art life and think: Oh man, those people have an easy life. But there’s a certainty to regular jobs: You have a contract, you wake up, go to work, get paid, have a vacation. As an artist, it can be hard to wake up and… there’s just nothing there. You don’t know what’s going to happen one day or the next. It’s stressful in a different kind of way. There’s less security. Every time you move onto something new, it’s scary because something may not happen—or it might happen and be horrible. I don’t know what I’m doing right now, which is scary, but exciting, because there’s potential. That’s the reward: potential.