After scoring a pair of No. 1 hits on the Hot 100, bringing their party rock on tour and appearing alongside Madonna at last year’s Super Bowl, LMFAO announced last September that they would be taking a hiatus and exploring solo ventures. One half of the group, Stefan Gordy (better known as Redfoo), has stayed busy prepping his first solo album, and tells Billboard that he has no idea when he and Sky Blu will reform LMFAO, if ever.
“I could easily say, ‘Okay, sure, in the future we’ll come back together.’ But really, the most accurate way I can say that is that time will tell,” says Redfoo. “It’s not about just the music. It’s easy to get in the studio and say ‘Hey, you put a verse over here and we can just put a label on it and call it LMFAO.’ That’s easy — that’s what we did the last album. You can hire producers and they tell you to insert a rap here and you put a sticker on it. That’s easy to do. There’s a dynamic between [Sky Blu and me] that has changed. There’s a personal dynamic, and energy dynamic. I can’t really speak for him, but I am very protective of that.”
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When LMFAO was formed in 2006 by Redfoo and his paternal nephew, Sky Blu (real name: Skyler Gordy), the relatives were electronica-minded solo artists that decided to combine their respective demos and release them as one entity. The pair stayed close as LMFAO began to garner mainstream notice, first with club singles like “I’m In Miami Bitch” and “Shots” and then with smash hits “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know It,” both from the duo’s second album, 2011’s “Sorry For Party Rocking.”
After selling 942,000 copies of the album according to Nielsen SoundScan and notching the third-biggest selling digital song of all time with “Party Rock Anthem” (7.5 million downloads), Redfoo and Sky Blu spent less time together and wanted to focus on their own projects, which led to the abrupt announcement of a prolonged split.
“We didn’t have to come together and do LMFAO, but we wanted to,” explains Redfoo. “It was like, ‘We hang out every day. We’re best friends every day. Instead of you trying to help me do my solo thing and I try to help you do your solo thing, why don’t we just both do a thing together.’ But now that isn’t the case. We’re not hanging out. So it doesn’t make sense — the dynamic has changed. Now we would have to fly to see each other; we used to live in the same house! The circumstances have changed. The popularity is different. The money situations are different.”
Last month, Redfoo released a solo single, “Bring Out The Bottles,” that operates in the same mode as LMFAO’s biggest hits, while Sky has released his own single, “Pop Bottles,” and has expressed interest in recording Latin music. Redfoo can’t speak for his nephew’s process, but says that working on his own full-length has been freeing, in a sense.
“It’s much easier if we’re solo,” he says. “The music will probably sound really similar to LMFAO on my side, because that’s exactly what I intended to make, and I loved it and I wanted everything with LMFAO. My image was exactly what I wanted it to be with the glasses, the animal print — every piece of clothing was made by me and my team. Every song I mixed and mastered was exactly the way I wanted it to sound.”
The 37-year-old is staying busy during LMFAO’s hiatus: he just returned from the Australian Open to support eventual champion Victoria Azarenka, and will kick off a DJ residency at XS nightclub in Las Vegas on Super Bowl Sunday. With total creative control over his next musical project, however, Redfoo says that he’s excited to finish recording and score some of his own hits — although he remains keenly aware of the public admiration for LMFAO’s radio-invading antics.
“If the dynamic can change, we can come back together,” he says of a potential reunion. “That’s why we call this thing a break, a hiatus — because we have the right to come back in the future. If it’s fun, I’ll do it.”