Artist of the Month: Black Pumas

Even without continuing to tour the world, Black Pumas have lost very little momentum since the arrival of breakout singles like “Black Moon Rising,” “Fire,” and “Colors.” The duo of Eric Burton and Adrian Quesada were shocked to land on the 2019 Grammy ballot as a contender for Best New Artist, and in 2020, they picked up nominations in three more categories: Best American Roots Performance and Record of the Year for the irresistible “Colors,” and overall Album of the Year for Black Pumas (Deluxe Edition). That expanded edition collects several new tracks, a few live versions of familiar favorites, and a must-hear cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” — a favorite song of Burton’s to sing while he was busking on the Santa Monica Pier, and later in Austin, Texas.

Drawing on folk songwriting as much as soul groove, both men agree that the term American Roots fits their sound well. The Americana Music Association seconds that notion, as Black Pumas picked up that organization’s Emerging Act of the Year in late 2020. And in January, the band performed a dazzling and powerful rendition of “Colors” on the soundstage of Austin City Limits in recognition of the historic win of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“The first thing people think of when they say ‘Americana’ is not always music that’s influenced by soul music, but it’s great to be recognized by people that are open-minded music fans,” Quesada tells BGS. “This is every bit as much American music as country music, you know?” Burton adds, “Soul music is just as a part of American music as folk music and country music. This country is a massive melting pot of the different cultures… so we’re honored to be a part of the conversation as we make music in America.”

The two musicians met through a mutual friend as Quesada sought an exceptional singer to add lyrics and a voice to the instrumental tracks he was creating. Little did he know that Burton was around the corner, literally, where Sixth Street meets Congress Avenue. In our two-part interview (Read part one here. Read part two here.), they shared their influences, their first impressions of each other’s talent, and their hopes for the year ahead as our Artist of the Month. Meanwhile, enjoy our BGS Essentials playlist below.


Photo credit: Jackie Lee Young

Guitarist Jackie Venson Charges Down a Path of Joy, Vulnerability, and Shredding

Jackie Venson, Austin, Texas’s resident singer, songwriter, guitar shredder, and joy dispenser, took a couple of months to restart the locomotive momentum of her career after it was halted by the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020. A summer of stepping up her touring and festival appearances trashed, she had to purposefully and intentionally consider a way forward. 

She chose the path less traveled, but she never trekked it alone. By the end of 2020, Venson’s totally independent team had landed her at number 10 on Pollstar’s Top 100 livestreamers chart for the entire year — higher than superstars Luke Combs, Brad Paisley, and even K-pop, heartthrob boy band BTS’s stream counts, with streams totaling more than 2.8 million viewers. 

“It felt like the train stopped and then I created work for myself,” Venson admits, describing an intentional pivot to virtual, streaming shows and alternative programming that never felt like she was giving up the most important parts of her art and expression. Just the opposite. Venson is a rare example of a musician who has utilized the pandemic to not only discover a new, novel way forward in an industry that promises burnout, extractive power dynamics, and the commodification of selfhood even in the best, most profitable cases. She also grew her fan base, her community, and found enough time to release five projects in the last calendar year, as well. 

Jackie Venson’s Shout & Shine livestream (viewable in the player above or here) — which highlights many of the entrancing, charming, entertaining aspects of Venson’s music, creativity, and most of all her stunning improvisation — will debut on BGS on Wednesday, February 3, at 4pm PST / 7pm EST. We began our interview talking about joy, which is not only present in every note of Venson’s playing, but is the first song of her Shout & Shine concert and the title track of her 2019 album. 

I wanted to start by asking you about joy. It feels so obvious and palpable in your music, especially in your playing style. Not just in how you’re so engaging and charismatic, and not just because it’s the title of your 2019 album, Joy. On “Surrender,” for instance, you sing, “Feet are so tired, but I keep running/ Heart is so heavy, but I keep singing.” That sounds like the radical act of choosing joy, to me.

JV: Well, it’s literally what I’m feeling while I’m actually playing the music. It’s just really cool to be able to play the guitar. I worked really hard to be able to play the guitar and when I look in the mirror I see the same face who started guitar, I guess ten years ago now, except this person can play the guitar! This person can play the guitar, and everybody likes listening to this person who can play the guitar. Not only is this person having a really good time doing something she set out to do ten years ago, but everybody else is enjoying it and having a good time on a base level — and by base level I mean, often they’ve just walked in the room. [Laughs] They weren’t there ten years ago! They’re enjoying it, objectively, and I’m sitting here looking at the depths of [the music] and then I’m watching other people, who don’t even know the story, just having a good time. That is pretty awesome and actually, I’m pretty sure that’s why most people set out to play instruments. They see somebody having fun doing it and they want to have fun, too. 

It sounds like gratitude is equally important to you. You’re clearly expressing so much gratitude for being able to do this thing that creates so much joy in your own life and in others’.

Well, absolutely. Gratitude is the foundation of joy. You can’t really have joy if you don’t have gratitude. 

One thing that jumped out at me from your livestreams and performances is the way you sing along with your guitar lines, the way you’re constantly in dialogue with yourself and your own voice. It made me think of the age old tradition of fiddling and singing along with yourself — and of course, it makes me think of jazz and bebop solos as well — but I wondered where singing along with the line in your head came from for you? 

My dad told me the best way to learn how to improv solos. I had been working on trying to improv from even the time I played piano from when I was like fifteen. I remember getting another piano teacher who knew jazz so that they could teach me how to improvise. Obviously, [Laughs] that’s the wrong angle. I was four years into playing guitar before I learned that I was approaching improvisation the wrong way. The funny thing is that my dad told me, when I was fifteen, he was like, “All you need to know about improvising is that you just think of a melody and you play it, and after you play the melody you thought of a few times, you start messing with it.” So you play it, and add a note here or subtract a note there, and he’s like, “That’s all you’ve got to do and then it’s a great solo!” Because a melody isn’t just playing notes randomly, it has purpose. You want your solos to have purpose. My dad told me that fifteen years ago and I just didn’t hear him. I wasn’t ready to hear him. It took the guitar and years and years of singing, as well, to put it all together and arrive at the destination my dad tried to usher me to. 

I’m a picker and a teacher as well, and I’m sure you’ve had this happen, you’ll get students who are so intimidated by the idea of improvising, I’ve had students just cry when you say, “Can you try improvising something?” 

It’s a touchy subject! It’s like singing, how people are way more sensitive about their singing. They’ll show you their drum licks all day, but you ask them to sing and they’re like, “Noooo!!” 

It’s the vulnerability! 

It’s a new level of vulnerability. But here’s the thing, it’s not very hard, all you have to do is just listen to a crapload of music, stuff a bunch of melodies into your brain, and then, just think about all of the melodies you know and think about them a lot. Always listen to music. Keep listening to the music you already have listened to and listen to new music. If you’re constantly listening then you’re going to be sitting on stage and everyone’s going to point to you to solo — say Cm going to F — BOOM! All of a sudden you’re playing, [Sings] “They smile in your face/ All the time they wanna take your place” on the guitar. You’re playing “Back Stabbers,” because suddenly  you’re going from Cm to F7 and you know it will sound good. You know? [Laughs] Because you’ve heard that melody and it’s not very hard! A beginner could play it. [Hums line] But you’re crushing it with some tone and everybody in the audience is thinking you’re a master. When really, what you’re playing is not that hard. It’s just musical. 

My jaw literally dropped when I was doing my research for this interview — you released five projects in 2020. Two double, live albums, the two volumes of Jackie the Robot, and also Vintage Machine. You also landed in the top ten of Pollstar’s livestream chart for the entire year. I hear you say “the train ground to a halt,” and I see a new train that didn’t just start up, but is roaring. I’m sure you see that, too. What does that pivot feel like now that you’ve got some retrospect. 

In that moment, it felt really busy, but it also felt kind of maddening. I was busy, but I was never leaving my house. Then it felt crazy. And in the next moment after that, the numbers started to juice. For a couple of months it was full stop, for a couple of months it was maddening like, “Wow, these numbers are really rad, maybe this is the way.” A couple of months after that I knew this was definitely the way. I stumbled upon the way. I was walking along on a path and then that path had like, a giant tree fall over it and I couldn’t go down it anymore. I saw this side path — you know when you’re in the woods and you see a path but you’re not sure it’s a path or if your eyes are just tricking you? 

“Is that a deer trail or is that actually a trail?”

Right. Is that really a trail? It’s like, “I don’t know… but there’s also a giant tree over the path I was on. Can’t go that way. I guess I’m going to go down this path, I hope there’s not too much poison ivy…” [Laughs]

That was the livestream path. There was maybe one creature that walked down this path, one way, one time. It appears there’s a path, but it clearly hasn’t been followed very often. That’s what it felt like, to be on this uncertain path, which then ends up opening up and it turns out I was right the whole time. The way I feel now is not the way I felt when it was all happening. The way I feel now is all because of having retrospect on my side. And the development — the direction things are going in. It’s a lot more clear than it was six months ago. 

 

I have found myself repeating throughout the pandemic that we should be building the world we want to exist after the pandemic while we’re in it. To me that’s what it sounds like you’re describing, finding this other path. Looking to the future, what will you be bringing with you from this time, into whatever a post-COVID reality looks like? 

The thing I’m taking with me is the fact that there’s never any need to be desperate, there’s never any reason to act out of desperation. There’s no person or contract to be signed that holds the “keys to the kingdom.” There is no kingdom. We are IN the kingdom. We just exist within different perspectives of it. Maybe your perspective in the kingdom right now is that you’re a baby band, you’ve just established yourself. You’re in the same kingdom as Beyoncé! You’re just standing in a different spot than her. There are thousands of spots you can stand in this kingdom. Beyoncé’s spot isn’t the only one that’s good. There are lots of places to stand! Millions of artists, that you don’t know about, are standing in pretty sweet spots in this kingdom that we all exist within, together. 

There’s no person that’s going to give you her spot. She got to her spot by her own weird, twisty trail to get there. Maybe a deer walked down it once! She took her own path. You’re not going to be able to recreate that, but she just took a path to get to a spot, not the kingdom itself. You consider that spot the kingdom, but we’re all in the kingdom already. The way we used to live had this weird illusion that we all had to climb these ladders, but really you just need to get where you want to be. You don’t need to climb that same ladder just because someone else climbed it, and they’re famous, and you’ve got to do what they did. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s completely futile, and you’re going to just be spinning in your hamster wheel, stuck in the same vantage point. There’s not one guy or gatekeeper who can unlock everything for you. There are people who will say they can, but what happens? You end up stuck at one spot, one vantage point. There’s no one person, one artist who has it all.


All photos: Ismael Quintanilla III

BGS 5+5: Hardened and Tempered

Artist: Hardened and Tempered
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Latest album: Hold the Line
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Less of a nickname than a consequence of a band name for a duo that uses the conjunction “and” is that we are often asked, “which one are you?”

Answers provided by Kristin Davidson

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

I was 12 when I discovered a mixtape of the Indigo Girls in my older sister’s room. Their songs captured my ears, mind, and heart, and remained constant company for me growing up. I think it was the first time I felt transformed and transported by music. But the pantheon of my musical influences is full of powerful writers, and I can pair just about every childhood memory with songs by Indigo Girls, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nanci Griffith, Tracy Chapman, Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Patti Smith, and Ani DiFranco.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

I love street photography and am drawn to the captured moments that expose the illusion of anonymity — that split second of absurdity or loneliness on a crowded street. I enjoy the process of finding words and sounds for the images that evoke emotion.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

We love to laugh and try to bring a joyful lightness to the stage. We are big fans of Maria Bamford. In the second season of her show, Lady Dynamite, Ana Gasteyer’s character keeps shouting a particular line as a rallying cry that we think is hilarious. We usually say that line to each other, giggle, and then walk onto the stage.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Hard enough to hold an edge; soft enough not to break. The band name, Hardened and Tempered, sums up the dynamic and delicate balance we try to keep in our lives and our music. Both Carolyn and I have intense personalities, we are drawn to big adventures and hard challenges, and we work with a lot of suffering. Slowly but surely, we are learning the artful balance of easing up a little and looking for light in dark places.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

I have dreamed about finding refuge from a cold, big city night in a basement bar room, only to discover Nina Simone playing an impromptu set on an intimate stage. I order my favorite bourbon, but don’t drink it. How could I?!


Photo credit: Norah Levine Photography

Harmonics with Beth Behrs: Episode 8, Gina Chavez

This week on Harmonics, Beth Behrs talks with Austin native Gina Chavez, a Latin Grammy nominee, queer Catholic, and an internationally acclaimed Latinx pop artist who is redefining Latin music in Texas and beyond.


LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • STITCHERAMAZON • POCKET CASTS • MP3

A 12-time Austin Music Award winner, including 2015 Musician of the Year and 2019 Best Female Vocals, Chavez is an Austin icon. She has more than one-million views on her NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and she has done a 12-country tour through Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia as a cultural ambassador with the U.S. State Department. With host Beth Behrs, Chavez touches on the universality of music, growing up Catholic and coming out as lesbian in college, the ancient Latin American traditions that inform her music, and so much more.

Listen and subscribe to Harmonics through your favorite podcast platforms and follow BGS and Beth Behrs on Instagram for series updates!


 

BGS 5+5: The Band of Heathens

Artist: Ed Jurdi of The Band of Heathens
Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina; band’s hometown is Austin, Texas
Latest album: Stranger
Band Nicknames: The Hand of Beathens

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

At the Americana Awards a few years back. I remember being on stage at the Ryman Auditorium and looking around and realizing that I was performing with a bunch of my heroes. Delbert McClinton, Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt and Sam Bush, to name just a few. It truly was a full circle moment for sure.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

In short they all do. I have always been in awe of painters who can really create a world with their colors and imagery. I find myself being really inspired by the impressionistic painters and the way they use light to offer a unique and different perspective on things that can be somewhat mundane.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

I don’t have any real set rituals, but I generally like to hang around the gig and sing some songs either by myself, or with whoever else is hanging out. It’s a good way to warm up and it’s a fun way to get the group vibes in a positive space.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Follow the muse. Lead with your art and expression and figure out how to make the business part of the career work in service of the creativity. I can happily say that has always been the case.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

I live in Asheville, North Carolina, so I spend the most time in the mountains and the forests that surround us. I love being able to hike way out into the woods and find a vista where I can see both the great scope of things, but also hear the rustling of the leaves and the wind blowing through the tops of the trees. In those moments of solitude I find my mind is incredibly clear and clean, which is almost always when ideas begin to present themselves almost out of nowhere.


Photo credit: Jason Quigley

WATCH: Bonnie Whitmore, “Time to Shoot”

Artist: Bonnie Whitmore
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Time to Shoot”
Album: Last Will and Testament
Release Date: October 2, 2020

In Their Words: “When I wrote ‘Time to Shoot,’ it was after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. It was the largest death count of any mass shooting and was in the summer of 2016. Remember 2016? That year of a thousand losses that started with David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen on Election Day, and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) right at the end? I was reflecting back on the earliest mass shootings that I could recall and I remembered it was Columbine in 1999. It struck me that it has been 20 years, and nothing has changed. Twenty years of making mass shootings normalized. The potential of becoming someone’s target practice is no longer how, but which large gathering.

“I was in high school when Columbine happened and I remember the immediate fear and repression that came afterwards, and for more than half of my life I’ve watched systemic violence being tolerated by my country and its people. I can see a pattern of unaddressed mental health issues and the ease of accessibility to these military-style weapons, and also the toxic masculinity and fear and shame that’s at its core, but each time it happens nothing changes. Nothing but more fear and ‘thoughts and prayers.’ I cannot accept that this is the only way. I know this is not an easy topic to discuss, but it is worth discussing over and over because we have to find a solution. It’s time we collectively shed some light in those dark places and do the work to get through this, because if the desire is to build towards a better future, then there is a lot that’s got to change for the better.” — Bonnie Whitmore


Photo credit: Eryn Brooke; Video: Ryan Doty

LISTEN: Selena Rosanbalm, “Can You Really Be Gone”

Artist: Selena Rosanbalm
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Can You Really Be Gone”
Album: Selena Rosanbalm
Release Date: October 9, 2020
Label: The Balm Records

In Their Words: “My ex-boyfriend took his own life four and a half years ago, but I still see him all over the place. I thought I saw him driving a van the other day, thought I saw him in a coffee shop. But I was especially struck when I saw a photograph of his niece some months ago; I could see his face so clearly in hers. ‘Can You Really Be Gone’ is about the suspension of reality people often experience after losing a loved one, when the logical mind knows the person is gone, but the emotional mind doesn’t want to give in to that fact.” — Selena Rosanbalm


Photo credit: Daniel Cavazos

BGS 5+5: Ferris & Sylvester

Artist: Ferris & Sylvester
Hometowns: Somerset, England & Warwickshire, England
Latest Album: I Should Be on a Train
Personal nicknames: Ducky and Didi. Proudly named by Archie’s nephew, Buzz.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

We’ve toured a lot over the past two years and have been lucky enough to see a lot of the world, from rooftops in Austin, Texas, to a hidden cove in The Faroe Islands. We’ve played to crowds of 12,000 and crowds of 12 and everything in-between. Probably one of our favourite moments on stage was playing Glastonbury last year. We played five sets across the weekend, one of which was in a weird, wonderful tent quite called The Rabbit Hole late on the Friday night. Naturally when you’re playing a big show, we had loads of technical problems and Archie’s kick drum pedal broke… Issy did a sing-along with the crowd whilst Archie got out a screwdriver to fix it. Archie then jumped off the stage, broke down the fence and went into the audience for his guitar solo. Meanwhile a man dressed as the mad hatter jumped up onto the stage and scared the hell out of Issy by pretending to chop her head off with an inflatable axe. THIS IS A TRUE STORY. Best show ever.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

We’ve really loved spending more time in our studio this year. Our studio is a small room, full of wonder with wallpaper covering the walls — no day in it is the same. One day, we’ll have the drums set up to record, the next day they’ll be replaced by a 1963 Hammond organ or a comfy red futon giving us space to write. Every corner is filled with something obscure. We love it in there. It’s where we’ve spent all of our days in the recent months and where our songs find their feet. Rituals include endless cups of tea, writing with pencils on yellow paper and recording dozens of voice notes on our phones. If we think a song is good, we’ll then spend hours crafting it and going over structure, melody and meaning. We’ll develop it in its simplest form, usually one guitar and our vocals. We’ll then work up the demo, experimenting with different instruments and sounds. This can take days. We sometimes get through five or six demos before record it properly. Other times, we stick with the first demo, knowing we captured something special and irreplaceable. It’s a lengthy process and we put everything into it.

We always warm up before a show, singing in harmony and getting in tune with each other. Lemon and ginger tea is a must. We then do a huddle with our band and sing “Cold Beer Conversation” by George Strait really out of tune. We don’t know why.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

Ooh. Our two favourite things. For Archie (Sylvester), the dream pairing would be Django Reinhardt with Steak Frites sitting by the river in Samois-Sur-Seine (where Django used to live)… For Issy (Ferris), a plate of fried chicken and Little Feat. In Dixie Land.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

We try to be as honest as we can in our writing. We don’t so much “hide” behind characters, though we sometimes work from a place of reality and then play with it and make it something different, until only shadows of ourselves are recognisable in it. For instance, our song “I Should Be on a Train” isn’t really about us, but we definitely put our own frustrations as a couple into it. Getting caught up in the same toxic cycles with each other over and over again, mainly caused by stress or pressure that we put on one another. The song takes you through an imaginary scenario of a relationship ending, but concludes that it is just a thought and not a reality. We’ve never done a proper storm out on each other, never boarded a train… maybe a few slamming doors. But we worked with what we had, and took it somewhere else. We also play around with perspectives a lot. We can shift from “I” and “we” to “her,” “him” or “they” in a song, giving it layers and opinions. Again, we wouldn’t say we’re hiding, merely playing around within the story. It can be hard to expose your inner self in your songwriting, sometimes it can feel too revealing. But we always try and opt for truth.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Every writing experience is different and each song faces its own challenges. Probably the song which has existed in the most forms and been rewritten time and time again is “Sickness,” a song we released last year. It’s our favourite ever recording and we consider it to be one of our strongest songs. But it took over a year to get right. It first existed as a poem, then we recorded a very early demo which didn’t sit right. It didn’t have a structure and sounded so far away from the rest of our stuff at the time. We parked it and returned to it months later. We got a lot closer with next few demos, but it took a lot of time to develop it. When we took it into the studio, we were confident we’d got it right. But we had a change of heart in the session and decided it needed an extra verse and a new middle 8. We hid in Manze’s Eel and Pie House over the road from The Pool Studios in Bermondsey and wrote new lyrics, filling in the gaps. Ironically after such a lengthy writing process, we recorded it quickly on the last day of the session. Everything came together. Archie’s slide solo was recorded in one take, the vocals were recorded late into the night and were done in a few takes. It felt effortless, after all that struggle. We’re very proud of it.


Photo credit: Felix Bartlett

BGS 5+5: Blitzen Trapper

Artist: Blitzen Trapper
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Latest album: Holy Smokes Future Jokes
Release Date: September 25, 2020

Answers provided by Eric Earley

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Michael Stipe was my favorite songwriter as a kid, his lyrics were so strange and uncanny. I’m thinking of Reckoning and Murmur, some of the most anachronistic lyrical content ever. There were no lyric sheets or online lookups back then so I was always trying to figure out what he was saying. His songs always had the feeling of a riddle or a magical text, the imagery was dreamlike and over the years I’ve tried to emulate that in certain ways. Tom Waits was a large influence later in my twenties, his bizarre comical lyrical storytelling and character voices were inspiring, I’m thinking of Rain Dogs in particular.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

There isn’t any favorite, lots of weird amazing ones for sure, playing “Heard It Thru the Grapevine” with Stephen Malkmus trading weird, collapsing solos with Stephen as he made up the words because we were too lazy to learn the lyrics. I think we were in Cleveland, but I could be wrong. Playing Big Star’s “Feel” with Jody Stephens on drums and Mike Mills on backing vocals in Austin, Texas, that was surreal.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

Most of my favorite songs have literary origins, whether it’s a particular Cormac McCarthy novel like Blood Meridian (“Black River Killer”) or a general religious text like the Bardo Thodol (the new record is based largely on this book). Biblical imagery has made its way into countless songs I’ve written as a result of childhood influences and pervasive cultural resonances. I’ve also started writing a lot of songs from reading specific poets, using their wordplay to inspire different turns of phrase. Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, to name a couple, I’ve also used Finnegan’s Wake and Gravity’s Rainbow to generate wordplay and imagery.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I’ve been playing music since I was a child, so being a musician was never really a choice. I didn’t think of it as a career for a long time. I went to college for physics and math, studied painting, learned classical fingerstyle, became a sous chef. Finally in my late twenties I decided to drop everything and play music, mostly because all the songs I was writing were keeping me up at night, but I didn’t have any vision for the business part of it. Spent seven years playing unattended shows in Portland. Got a record deal off a random song on Myspace and suddenly was touring and making money.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Experimentation is the only way to realize the vision of reality you want to hear, so never grow static in style or voice, always move forward, never sit still sonically. Don’t write angry, only from a place of emptiness without sentimentality, nostalgia without regret. Don’t try to please anyone, only follow your instincts.


Photo credit: Jason Quigley

LISTEN: Delta Spirit, “What Is There”

Artist: Delta Spirit
Hometown: NYC, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Austin, Montreal
Song: “What Is There”
Album: What Is There
Release Date: September 11, 2020
Label: New West Records

In Their Words: “’What is There’ is an acrostic poem that I wrote for the guys in the band, with each verse directed at a specific person. I wrote the song in the winter of 2018 while living in Oslo. We had just decided to give the band another go and I was feeling sentimental about the journey we had been on since 2005. We were all just kids trying to break into this business. Each of us had been burned by the major label system with other projects. Starting Delta Spirit with my best friends, traveling the world, and playing music that meant the world to us was such an improbable miracle, but then it felt inevitable. There were moments when we lost our way as brothers and as creative collaborators, but since the break, we have found new and better ways to communicate. And that feeling of inevitability is back.” — Matthew Logan Vasquez, Delta Spirit


Photo credit: Alex Kweskin