Foto-© Elizabeth De La Piedra

Die Welt kann ein furchteinflößender Ort sein. Bartees Strange hat selber erlebt, wie schmerzhaft dieser Terror für einen jungen, queeren, schwarzen Menschen im ländlichen Amerika sein kann. Am 14. Februar erscheint sein Album Horror via 4AD, auf dem er sich mit genau diesen Ängsten auseinandersetzt. Auf den zwölf Songs legt Strange eine schwierige Wahrheit nach der anderen ab.

Wir konnten im November mit Strange über die Hintergründe und den schwierigen Entstehungsprozess von Horror sprechen. Wir erfahren, warum des vor allem um den Horror von innen geht, was Angst bewirken kann und warum die Arbeit an den Songs für ihn so schwierig war, dass er sie erst einmal liegenlassen musste. Er erzählt, welche Musik ihn berührt, warum das Politische eigentlich nebenan zu finden ist und warum Geschichten und Verbindungen manchmal genauso wichtig sind wie die Musik, die daraus entsteht.

Let’s talk about your new record Horror. Looking at the news, looking out of the window, I can feel the word. What is your sentiment behind it?
I grew up in a place called Oklahoma in the south of the USA, in a very rural town. I grew up afraid of everything. I was one of the only black people around, and I was queer, and I was learning how to navigate the world. Somehow, I fell in love with horror movies and started watching them all the time – almost as a training for the world. I wanted to get used to being afraid so I could be better at it. I was very shy, nervous, and anxious. As I got older, I started to realize the horrors of my life – figuring out where to live, intimacy, friendships, relationships, health care – these are tropes of getting older, but they also become the backdrops where it’s shaky ground. It can be really scary to navigate these things when you have always been afraid of how you were going to grow through this world. This record is me looking at all these buckets of things that have always been scary to me and calling it horror because they don’t sound like the scariest things in the world, but they kind of are the scariest things in the world.

Horror is often associated with external horrors. What you are describing are horrors within yourself and your basic human self: Who to love, where to live, how to be, what to look like… What was it like to take those inner horrors and put them out there, in the biggest possible spotlight? Was that a process you felt comfortable with?
I wasn’t comfortable with it the first time. I started writing it at the same time I was writing my last record. I didn’t really know at the time that I was writing two different records. I was just writing songs. But then I realized that some of the songs were scarier and harder to touch. I didn’t really want to do that. I wanted to write these nice, pretty songs. That’s why I wrote Farm to Table first. When I came back to horror, I felt it was time to really look at some stuff. It was a lot harder to write.

Was it harder to share? You weren’t working alone, and I imagine it’s hard to let someone in to work on your core fears.
With this record, I did the most on it by myself of any of my records. It’s funny, Jack Antonoff worked on it, and even Lawrence Rothman worked on it, but 80% of it is just me in a room, staring at it, tweaking it, being very nervous to share it, and creating multiple versions of every song – not knowing if it’s any good and eventually bringing someone in. Which is different for me because I’m usually super collaborative, almost too collaborative. I love to share and I always feel like my music benefits from the minds of my friends who also know me. But this one, I was like, “I want it. I want to put what’s in my brain into this song and I’m going to do it.” I’m going to keep doing it until it sounds like what I’m hearing. And so that was what I did.

Right now, the record is not out. It’s November, the release is in February. Do you feel like you’re going to be more protective of it compared to your other work?
My feeling is that I don’t really care what people think about it. Because I said what I wanted to say. Which is different from my last couple of records. I was like, “Please, please like me.” But after the last record I was like, “I don’t even like you.” I just want to make what I want to make. And I hope that the people who connect with it come to me. I don’t owe anyone to like me. And that’s what the big part of this record is, it’s not only dealing with these horrors within yourself, it’s also looking at yourself in the mirror and being real with who you are. I’m not all the people that I might be compared to. This is just what I do. If you like it, you’re welcome. If you don’t like it, you’re still welcome. But you don’t have to come. That’s okay.

That sounds like an amazing freedom to have in your mind. I read a quote that said you were trying to shrink the world with Horror. At first I read it as a form of connection, bringing people together who feel the same way. But you can also read it the other way, to shrink the world by not wanting to have the things you don’t care about.
That’s kind of how I’ve been living these last few years. I’ve been in my own world. I haven’t really been engaged in a lot of the things that I would normally be engaged in. For example, I used to work in politics. I used to be very, very engaged in politics. And I still believe in all the things that I believed in civically, of course, but I’m more interested in what’s happening in my neighborhood, what’s happening around the corner. What’s happening with my parents? What’s happening with my brother and sister? What’s happening with me? My relationships? That’s all consuming me. It’s hard for me to get beyond that. And I really feel like if more people cared about these things, we could fix a lot of bigger things. Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to help their neighbor. Everybody has something to say about everything these days. But do you know what’s happening down the street? That’s real!

Yes, it’s a change of perspective, but it’s still political. You talked about how creating things is inherently a political act. Do you still consider yourself a political artist?
Yeah, I think I always will be. Frankly, just because of who I am and what I do and the context in which my music is consumed. I’m not usually consumed in the context of other black artists. I’m put in a world of mostly white artists, and when my music is put there, it does different things than it would if I was grouped with people that looked like me.

Let’s go back to the writing. You wrote the songs in parallel, left them and came back to them. How did you come up with the 12 songs you ended up with? Was there a lot to choose from?
There was a lot. And then I shrank it and then I shrank it again. I’m hurt! There are songs where I was like, “Oh, this should be on the record!” But I wanted something really punchy, really catchy, really fast, and I wanted it to end. I wanted people to get to the end because the last three songs are really good. I didn’t want to do 16 or 18 songs, I wanted to do 11 or 12, 42 minutes. I tried to get to 38 minutes, but I just couldn’t. But I felt like what I landed on was a great arc. It felt like it moved quickly. So I had to stop there. But I want to put out all the other songs. I just don’t know how to do it yet.

So, we just we get an extended version one day.
Then I might have written more songs.

You’re in this never ending spiral of never being able to put out as much as you want.
I really want to do mixtapes, where I can just be like, “Okay, here’s 15 things I made. I don’t know what they are. Just take them.”

What was your initial vision in terms of sound and how would you describe the outcome?
One of my favorite time periods in music is the late ’60s, early ’70s. My dad is a huge music fan. I grew up listening to Parliament, Funkadelic, Fleetwood Mac, all that rock psych folk stuff from America. But what interests him, and what interests me, are these little connections. Did you know that Neil Young and Rick James were best friends and they played in a band together, and then Rick James went to jail and told people in jail, „Neil Young, that’s one of my best friends. I played bass for him.“ And everybody was like, “Bullshit, that never happened.” And then he gets out of jail and he becomes Rick James. Or how Parliament, Funkadelic and Fleetwood Mac were making music at the same time. They were listening to each other’s records and making records. I love that because I feel like I’m a product of that. I love hip hop, I love jazz, I love folk, I love indie music, rock music. From 2004 to 2012, that was high school and college to me, The National and TV on the Radio, Radiohead, Big Thief, Freddie Gibbs, Madlib and MF Doom and all of it – that’s my shit. I want to make these things that are hip hop drums, folk guitars, high five vocal. But the band is live in a room blending these feelings and textures that are really nostalgic in a way that’s just new and very human, and it feels played and not sterile. And using sterility as a balm to level out highly produced and saturated things. That’s why you go from Too Much and Hit It Quit It into Sober and Baltimore. That was the whole sonic mélange of the record, which was really fun to piece together.

Does the order of the songs influence their sound? How did you piece them together?
I don’t know. On this one, I knew the first three or four tracks. I knew I wanted Too Much, I knew I wanted Hit It Quit It, I knew I wanted Sober. It was those three I wanted at the beginning. And then I knew that Back Seat was a great song to end a record with, just because of the upward trajectory of the end. Then everything else I didn’t know how to do, and I trusted that it would just work out. And it did.

Did your experiences from playing live find their way into the record as well?
There’s a lot of live playing on the record. 17 I did live, Baltimore I did full band live. The bridge on Wants Needs is live. I really tried to blend reality and non-reality. Do you know the artist Dijon [Duenas]? What I love about his music is that it’s so real. Everybody says they want to make a Lo-Fi record, but everybody’s afraid to put a microphone in a room and just sing their heart out. And there’s something, it’s beyond the song, the sonic texture is what makes you feel so nostalgic and like you understand. I tried to take from that, but also from a person like Jack Antonoff, who makes things that are so shiny and so pretty that you wish the world was like that. Combining that to create this ugly, human, but surreal sound was the challenge and the fun of making it.

Do you listen to it now that it’s done?
No. I just listened to it too much. I don’t even know what’s good anymore. I’m sure once it comes out and I see people find things they like about it, I’ll be like, “Yeah, that’s cool.” But it’s just in my head now, it’s been in my head for three and a half years. I love all the songs. I’m really excited about them. I’m thinking about what I want to do next, I’m in a whole other world.

When you play your older songs and you look back on your older work, do you see yourself as a younger person? Do you try to reconnect to where you were at that time? I imagine it’s so weird to have something like a photo album, but it’s songs of your younger self.
It’s like tattoos. I have tattoos that I got when I was 20 that suck, but I love them. I could look at them and be like, “I cannot believe I got a dreamcatcher on my arm when I was 20.” But I’ll never get rid of it because I see it and I remember it. This was a really hopeful, bright, kind, and very curious person. In my earlier music, before Bartees Strange, I played in all kinds of bands, and I’ll see a song now and then and I’ll listen to it. And some are good, some are bad. Nothing is what I would do these days. But when I hear it, it reminds me of who I was. And that’s always good. Remembering who you were and seeing the trajectory and the journey and being grateful for the journey. That’s what the old music does. It makes me grateful for the journey.

When going to a show, people usually want connection or they want to be entertained. What is it for you as an artist? Except for not losing money on tour, I guess.
I mean, breaking even would be really nice. I’m an entertainer, my parents are entertainers. I believe in these weird cosmic connections. I love what music can do to people and I love knowing that I can control it. It’s like being a magician or a puppet master. I know a little bit more about connecting people than the average person. I get a lot of enjoyment out of bringing people together and wielding that little bit of power for just a moment. I’ve been like that since I was a kid. I’ve always loved making people laugh. I’ve always loved making people cry. I love how it makes me feel that something I did can bring people together and make me feel close to them. Maybe that’s a little narcissistic when you say it. But I really believe in the power of art and what it can do when people are in a room together – make people feel like they’re not so different from each other. For a person like me who grew up always feeling different from other people, it’s powerful and humbling to be in a position where I can use my experience to make people feel more connected to the person next to them. It’s magical and cosmic and spiritual and beautiful.

It’s the opposite of horror.
It is. But horror is an emotion like all the others. Without it, you don’t have any of the others. I think of fear and horror and they’re just another thing that people need to feel and you can use to do other things.

Are you able to switch positions when you are in the audience? Are you able to let go being an artist and give another person that power?
They gotta be real good. No, honestly, it’s cool. I love going to shows and there are types of music that I can fully give myself to. It’s kind of hard for me to go see Ethel Cain or Lucy Dacus or Mk.gee, because I’m like, „Wow, that stage setup is really, really sick. I wonder how much it costs.“ But I love classical music. I love opera. I live next to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the [Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony] Hall, and I will go and listen and be completely shattered by the talent and the skill and the work. Because I know how much work and time it takes to become that. Or great jazz, great rappers, great beat makers, things that I don’t do every day that can get me. The thing that inspires me the most is probably movies. I love film.

Thank you for the interview!