A few hours before he was due on stage at O’Brien’s Pub, Andy “Astronautalis” Bothwell stood in line at a nearby eatery, waiting to order a lamb shawarma. “How soon does your next tour start?” asked Adeem, one of the night’s openers.  Andy responded with an exact date more than two months out. On his forty-first—and final—stop of a forty-five day tour, Andy was already keyed in on his next chance to hit the road.

It’s not that he was overlooking his impending set. He skipped from Maine to New York on his tour this past spring, making this night his first show in Boston with his live band. Local Astronautalis fans, more than a year removed from their last chance to see him perform, proved their enthusiasm well ahead of time—for the first time in Andy’s career, the show sold out days in advance.

It wasn’t just fans that packed O’Brien’s to catch Astronautalis on stage. Photographers took up nearly half of the front row while a documentary crew roamed the room.  Adeem, an indie rap legend in his own right, stood on the unsteady chair behind the merch table to snap pictures with his phone. Even Brock “Harpoon Larry” Cummings—Andy’s longtime manager—joined the outskirts of the crowd.

“This shit’s going to be awesome,” nodded Andy as he stepped up to the mic. “If you know the words, sing the fuck along.” He kicked off his set with “The River, The Woods,” the first track of his recently released album, This Is Our Science.  He matched this album’s track list for the first five songs before digging into his back catalogue with fan favorites “Short Term Memory Loss” and “Trouble Hunters.” He returned briefly to TIOS with “Contrails” and then launched into a lengthy freestyle recounting the crimes of Thomas Edison.  To close out the show, and the tour, Andy mixed songs from Pomegranate with the remaining material from This Is Our Science.

Before taking the stage, Andy spoke about moving to Minneapolis, the success of This Is Our Science, and the status of The Four Fists, an upcoming collaboration with Doomtree’s P.O.S..

You’re on your last stop of the tour. Are you looking forward to going home, or do you wish you had another two months on the road?

Right now, I’m so excited about not having to sing tomorrow night; I’m pretty sure a week from now I’ll be ready for another two months. It’s been the best tour we’ve ever done. The band gets along really great. The shows have been really great. It will be really tough to see it end, but I’ll definitely be glad to not have to sing for a little bit.

When you’re on tour, how do you spend the time that you’re not on stage? What’s a day in the tour life of Astronautalis?

Pretty regularly, there are interviews to do either on the phone or before shows. There’s always more that can be done online: posts about shows, emails to answer. When I’m on tour, the only time I get to relax is when I get in the van. When you’re in the van, you hit a point where you can’t do any more because you don’t have cell service.  I read a lot, listen to podcasts, look out the window, and just enjoy letting my brain turn off for a while. I have a really hard time doing that at home. I get up, pound coffee and just work on my laptop all day. It’s hard for me to even leave the house because I just like working. When I’m on tour, it can be pretty relaxing but there’s always more to be done. Really, I’m running a small business.

This is your first time playing in Boston with a full band. How does playing with a band change your live show?

It’s definitely changed the dynamic of the show from a solo performance of theater to a more of a concert. Also, not having to carry the burden of the energy throughout the show has allowed me to step things down a bit so I can step things up even higher when I want to. The show ends up having much more energy than the laptop ones ever did. It’s a lot more like a punk show, which is what I was hoping for. Those are the most fun kind of concerts.

Allegedly, This Is Our Science is largely about touring—

That was the intention. It’s the story of the last seven years of my life. It’s not about presenting everything I went through. It’s about how it takes a lot of audacity to decide, “I’m going to be an indie artsy rap musician for a career. For the rest of my life.” To make that sort of insane statement is one thing and to really live it is a whole other thing. When all the curveballs—financial, social, artistic, emotional, mental—get thrown at you, there’s no manual that you can refer to.

You just talk to your friends and talk to yourself and try to make sure it works out in the end. The album is really about accepting the decisions that I made and accepting the ramifications that those decisions are going to have on my life forever and ever and ever, for better and for worse. I’m never going to get to have normal friendships or relationships with people, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have fulfilling and rewarding relationships. But I may never get to have a house or raise a family.

Things are going really good right now but that doesn’t mean that a year from now it will be good. The album is about how this awesome and about how this also sucks a lot of the time. The moral of the story is that this is the best thing I can be.  This is the thing I have to be. This is the most important thing I can be. I’m in the right place. 

I mean, the average American stays at a job for 4.1 years and you’ve passed that mark. 

Yeah. When we first started out doing this we looked at Atmosphere as a business model. We’re not nearly on the same page as them, but we used it to set benchmarks. Brock and I wanted to be making a living off music about five years into it, and that’s when we both stopped doing anything else. I think that I’m pretty close to being able to move out and live on my own and not have roommates…in like a studio apartment. We’re trying to just keep planning ahead. So far, it’s all on track.

This Is Our Science is your fourth album and there’s a lot out there about what goes into making a first album or a sophomore album or whatever. What do you think about making your fourth album?

It’s weird to me. I’m still kind of salty about the way my old record label handled Pomegranate. I’m really proud of that record and I felt like that record could have done a lot better, but eventually you just kind of get over that shit and make a new record.

To be honest, I’m super surprised about how this record has done. I had no expectations. When the record came out, I was leaving the next day to go for band practice. My plan was to do laundry, pack, grab dinner and drinks and hop on a plane in the morning. I got up and started laundry and then someone told me that I was on the iTunes hip-hop charts. That’s when all plans just went out the window. I just sat drinking coffee and watched it go up the charts.

All these things kept happening and it’s been that way this whole month. It’s been mindboggling. This record was about getting the affirmation I needed to press forward and keep doing this work. But I didn’t expect to get that kind of affirmation from this record. It’s surpassed all expectations.

Four records is a hard number for a lot of people because that’s significant amount of music. I just feel affirmed by this record; I don’t feel worn out. I’m ready to get started on the next record. I don’t intend on having another three-year gap between this record and the next, like I did after the last one.

How did you end up on your current label, Fake Four, Inc.?

A lot of people have a friend that started their own record label and we wary of that because there’s a lot of dead of phantom labels out there. The way that Fake Four pitched to us convinced us. Every other label had told us what we needed to do. We’ve given them our input and they’ve been like, “Nah.” We’ve tried to work with PR companies started by friends of ours that love our work, and other labels has been like, “No. You need to go with this PR company that’s not going to do a goddamn thing.”

Fake Four was the first group of people that was like, “You’ve been doing this and making this work on your own for seven years. How can we help you and make it better? What are your ideas?” That was the major selling point for us. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that that perfect storm of things has led to my most successful record to date.

This being your most successful record to date, you’ve gotten a lot of coverage from outlets that haven’t reviewed an Astronautalis album before and there seems to be no shortage of simple factual errors. What’s your reaction to a really positive review that just doesn’t have the facts right?

To be honest, most people, in most lines of work, don’t work hard. And that’s a problem. Reporters are no exception. When they’re forced to review twenty-five albums on a deadline, some people probably skim the bio, other people don’t. Even though it says quite clearly at the beginning of my bio that that I’m from Jacksonville and living in Minneapolis, I’m billed as being from all over the place. It just becomes kind of a wash. I used to get mad about that, but all I really care about is whether they reviewed the record. I’ve had some really flattering reviews where the reviewer didn’t really get the record, but they’re really complimentary about it. And I have some that are really well thought out and the writer took their time and got it. All the reviews have been good so far, though, which is pretty amazing. I’m really not going to complain.

How much got left on the cutting room floor for This Is Our Science?

There’s one complete song that got cut from the record. It should come out as a 12” soon. Every record I’ve made has had one complete song left over. There’s lots of ideas, fragments of songs, rough beats and other stuff that will just sit on the backburner until they’re appropriate and can be reinvented. There’s one story idea that I have that I don’t know how to navigate but it’s gotta happen.

What was the connection between the record and moving to Minneapolis? Were you already done with the record by the time you moved?

I had finished the record but I had already been going to Minneapolis non-stop between working on Four Fists stuff, touring, and just going and hanging out. I would go work on Four Fists for five days and stay for ten. All these people—not just Doomtree, but Gayngs and Bon Iver and the whole arts scene—are doing stuff that they love and making a career out of it. They’re all very creative, but they’re also all very ambitious. Seeing all that and talking to all of them made me realize that this network of support was the final wax seal on the album concept. This is what it’s about: being around people that get it, and working your ass of with them.  That’s why I moved to Minneapolis. Those people get what I’m doing and those people love me and I love those people. It was the scene I had been looking for all my life.

How do you like living in Minneapolis?

I love it.  Granted I haven’t lived through a winter yet, but I was really only concerned about a few things. Living in Seattle for the last three years, I’ve been surrounded by mountains and hills and fell in love with terrain. I have problems with Seattle as a city because our personalities aren’t a match but it is an incredible, beautiful city. So, I was worried about being without mountains.

I was also worried about not being in the South and not being near oceans. It’s been funny how romantic I’ve become about the Mississippi, seeing it at its beginnings and knowing what it means to the South.

I lived in Minneapolis all summer with nowhere to go. I’d work a lot on my laptop during the day and then at night I’d just ride around on my bike with headphones for hours to explore the city. On top of that, everyone is really enthusiastic about doing things. It’s a city that’s enthusiastic about itself and not in the way that East Coast cities are enthusiastic about hating other East Coast cities. I understand the romance of the East Coast, but doing what I’m doing, I can’t afford it. I can be broke for a lot less if I live somewhere else.

What’s next? 

The Four Fists album is really close to being done.  Now that P.O.S.’s record is almost done, it should be done soon. We basically just have to put it on the backburner when we’re working on our own shit. There should be a lull between my next tour and his first tour for his album when we’re buried under snow, so we should be able to finish it up. It’s about eighty percent done. There should be more stuff for This Is Our Science, like a remix record and more videos. There are a lot of pieces left over from this that I’d like to make into an EP next year. I want the EP to respond to the release of this record. I plan on making some more mixtapes because I really love making mixtapes. And then just touring my fucking dick off.