Bartees Strange

Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

Pushkin Industries

Music, Society & Culture

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bartees Strange is an amalgamation of musical styles. Listen to any given song on his newest release, Farm To Table, and you can hear hints of early aughts emo, auto-tuned hip-hop vocals, and country blues—all housed in an indie rock veneer. Bartees wide-reaching sound makes perfect sense given his Midwest upbringing and early influences. He was raised in Mustang, Oklahoma as one of the few Black kids in an area rife with racial violence. As a teenager he discovered Christian hardcore punk and for the first time he felt at home in a scene that embraced outsiders of all kinds.

After graduating college and a stint working in D.C., Bartees moved to Brooklyn where he found a bunch of musical collaborators. In 2020 he released his debut album, Live Forever, and this year he dropped his follow-up album, Farm To Table, to critical acclaim.

On today’s episode Justin Richmond talks to Bartees Strange about his ascent into the upper echelon of indie rock, now that he considers artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus friends. Bartees also performs an acoustic version of his song “Heavy Heart," and he plays stems from two songs off his new album, revealing how he is able to expertly build what he calls, “sections on sections.”

You can listen to a playlist of some of our favorite Bartees Strange songs HERE.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin
0:11.3	Barty's Strange is an amalgamation of musical styles.
0:15.3	Listen to any given song on his newest release from to table, and you can hear hints of early
0:19.7	Aatsimo, auto-tuned hip-hop vocals, and country blues, all housed in an indie rock veneer.
0:27.2	Barty's wide-reaching sound makes perfect sense given his Midwest upbringing and early influences.
0:33.2	He was raised in Mustang, Oklahoma as one of the few black kids in an area still rife with
0:37.9	the threat of racial violence.
0:40.1	As a young teenager, Barty's discovered Christian hardcore music, and for the first time he
0:44.7	felt at home in a scene that embraced outsiders of all kinds.
0:49.5	After graduating college, Barty moved to D.C., where he joined the labor movement and
0:53.7	worked with President Obama as a press secretary at the FCC.
0:58.1	Overcome with the urge to play music, Barty's moved to Brooklyn when he was 25 and found
1:02.6	a bunch of musical collaborators.
1:05.1	In 2020, he released his genre-bending debut album, Live Forever.
1:10.1	This year, Barty's dropped his follow-up album, Farm to Table, to critical acclaim.
1:14.6	On today's episode, I talked to Barty's Strange about his ascent into the upper echelon
1:19.2	of Indy Rock.
1:20.2	Now that he considers artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Justin Vernon, and Lucy Dacus, friends.
1:25.8	Barty also performs an acoustic version of a song Heavy Heart for us.
1:29.7	Indy plays stems from two of my favorite songs from his new album, and reveals how he's
1:34.1	able to expertly blend what he calls sections on sections.
1:41.1	This is Broken Record, liner notes for the digital age.
	...

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