When Black Pumas made their self-titled debut in 2019, the Austin-bred duo set off a reaction almost as combustible and rapturous as their music itself. Along with earning a career total of seven Grammy Award nominations (including Album Of The Year) and winning praise from leading outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada achieved massive success as a live act, touring large theaters all over Europe and North and South America and delivering a transcendent show Burton aptly refers to as "electric church." As they set to work on their highly awaited sophomore album, the band broadened their palette to include a dazzling expanse of musical forms: heavenly hybrids of soul and symphonic pop, mind-bending excursions into jazz-funk and psychedelia, starry-eyed love songs that feel dropped down from the cosmos. Wilder and weirder and more extravagantly composed than its predecessor, Chronicles of a Diamond arrives as the fullest expression yet of Black Pumas' frenetic creativity and limitless vision.
In creating the follow-up to one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years, Black Pumas made a point of tuning out any sense of anticipation from the outside world. "I knew the first record was good when we finished it, but I had no idea people would respond like they did," says Quesada. "This time around there was a lot of pressure and expectation that we hadn't felt before, which was overwhelming at times, but we did our best to tune that out and focus on trusting ourselves like we always have." As a result, Chronicles of a Diamond wholly echoes an essential intention behind its creation. "More than anything I wanted to make something we'd be thrilled to play live 200 days a year," says Burton. "I wanted to be able to laugh, cry, bob my head, do the thing: it was all very much a selfish endeavor."
Like Black Pumas, Chronicles of a Diamond once again harnesses the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Burton (a self-taught musician who got his start busking on beaches and subway platforms in his native Los Angeles) and Quesada (a Grammy Award winner whose background includes playing in Latin-funk orchestra Grupo Fantasma and accompanying legendary artists like Prince). Produced by Quesada and primarily mixed by six-time Grammy Award winner Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, The War on Drugs), the ten-song LP finds Burton taking the role of co-producer and infusing his free-spirited musicality into every track. Although Black Pumas made much of the album at Quesada's own Electric Deluxe Recorders in Austin, Chronicles of a Diamond also came to life in such far-flung cities as Amsterdam and Mexico City and San Francisco, with their longtime band joining in to shape the album's explosive yet artfully crafted sound. "On the first record my goal was to make something that felt modern but without using any loops or programming or editing of any kind--everything was completely live," says Quesada. "With this record, we threw out all those rules and created something that's very much a studio album but also captures that crazy energy that happens in the live show."
The first piece recorded for Chronicles of a Diamond, opening track "More Than a Love Song" instantly reveals the heightened creative freedom Black Pumas brought to the album-making process. After building a potent momentum with its brisk beats, effervescent strings, and brightly buzzing guitar riffs, the long-beloved live staple shapeshifts into a moment of pure unbridled exultation powered by radiant gospel harmonies and a spellbinding bit of spoken word from Burton. "My entire approach to singing was definitely informed by our live show," Burton points out. "Whenever we take the stage it's the classic us-against-the-world kind of thing, and in reaching for my greatest strengths I ended up discovering new ones. With this album I felt very free in my vocal performance, which has a lot to do with Adrian hearing something in my voice and helping me to explore that."
Next, on "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)," Black Pumas present a fuzzed-out and falsetto-laced love song Burton wrote years ago, then further developed with bassist/keyboardist Josh Blue during an impromptu session at two in the morning. "When left alone I tend to work in an unorthodox way, where the colors don't go together quite like you'd expect them to," says Burton, whose lyrics playfully interpolate a classic jump-rope rhyme. "With that song the big distorted guitar doesn't seem like it should work with how I'm singing, but it sounded so soulful in a way that felt just right to me." Completed by Quesada at his studio, "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)" ultimately induces a trance-like euphoria thanks to its hypnotic rhythms and swirling guitar lines. "A lot of Eric's ideas lately have had a meditative quality, where all these repetitive motifs are happening in the background while the song changes around them," says Quesada. "As soon as I heard 'Ice Cream' I loved it, because it was so radically different from anything we'd done before, or anything I would've come up with on my own."
On songs like "Mrs. Postman," Black Pumas reaffirm their status as a vital force in moving the genre of soul music forward. A piano-driven serenade spotlighting the phenomenal versatility of keyboardist JaRon Marshall, the timeless yet exquisitely left-of-center track took shape from an off-the-cuff collaboration between Marshall and Quesada. "JaRon and I used to get together on afternoons and make hip-hop beats for fun, and 'Mrs. Postman' ended up coming out of one of those sessions," says Quesada, noting that the song marks the first time Black Pumas have co-written with another musician. In adding his contribution to "Mrs. Postman," Burton imbued his lyrics with equal parts idiosyncratic poetry and humanistic sensitivity. "I was partly thinking about how much joy the postmen can bring to people's lives, but I also wanted to encourage the people in my family and anyone else working a blue-collar job," he says. "I know from firsthand experience how arduous it can be, and I wanted to send a message saying, 'I still see all the beauty and light in you.'"
As Chronicles of a Diamond unfolds, Black Pumas endlessly follow their outsize imagination into unexpected directions. To that end, the album's sprawling title track emerged after Quesada unearthed a full-band recording they'd cut live at a San Francisco studio years earlier, then sampled and looped the most dynamic elements of that performance. Meanwhile, Burton dreamed up the lyrics to "Chronicles of a Diamond" by tapping into his deep affinity for Curtis Mayfield and penning a song from the perspective of a diamond in the back of a Cadillac. On "Angel," the band shares a mesmerizing slow-burner graced with majestic guitar work, moody mellotron melodies, and soul-baring lyrics Burton composed in a laundromat over a decade ago. "I remember feeling overwhelmed by everything going on with my family and the neighborhood I was living in, and hoping to find sanctuary in the actual voice of an angel," he says. "There was a laundromat nearby that served as a quiet place for me, and that song started to come to me as I stared into a still-life painting of flowers." And on "Hello," Chronicles of a Diamond takes on an otherworldly quality, casting a powerful spell with the track's sublime synth tones and celestial harmonies (courtesy of Black Pumas background vocalists Lauren Cervantes and Angela Miller). "Eric brought in that odd synth loop, and I loved the idea of building a song around something so out of the ordinary for us," says Quesada. "It was probably the most challenging song for me to finish, but mostly because I was completely obsessed with it and needed to get it right."
On "Rock and Roll," Chronicles of a Diamond closes out with a gloriously strange epic that Black Pumas first began developing during sound checks and mainly recorded at a spur-of-the-moment session at an Amsterdam studio. "We were on tour and I was feeling excited about life and wanted to capture that, and somehow convinced everyone that going into the studio was the most fun thing we could do with our time in Amsterdam," says Burton. One of several tracks featuring additional production from John Congleton (a Grammy Award winner known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen), "Rock and Roll" fully channels the raw urgency of that session while encompassing so many eccentric details, including a deluge of delightfully warped vocal effects. "Eric was in my studio and we started running his vocals through my Space Echo--a tape-delay unit from the '70s--then manipulated that into what you hear at the end of the song," says Quesada. "At one point the track was almost ten-minutes-long; we were just having so much fun playing around and recording the craziest sounds we could come up with."
For Quesada, one of the most memorable experiences in the making of Chronicles of a Diamond took place on a solo trip to Mexico City in the final stages of the album's production. "I was finishing up a lot of the sonic manipulation of the tracks and needed to be completely immersed, which ended up feeling like a very full-circle moment," he recalls. "That same summer when I first started working with Eric, it was in Mexico City that I got inspired by the whole jungle-cats motif--which is how we came up with the name Black Pumas." First introduced by a mutual friend back in 2017, after Quesada began seeking a potential collaborator who "liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke," the two musicians quickly felt a near-telepathic musical connection. "We never had to discuss much or plot out what we wanted to do with the project--it all came together so easily and naturally," says Quesada. "The way Eric creates is so in-the-moment and fits perfectly with how my brain works, and it makes everything immediately come to life in a way that's so exciting and inspiring."
When it came time to create Chronicles of a Diamond, Black Pumas leaned into that intuitive understanding while pushing their artistry to an entirely new level. "Making this album was much different from playing acoustic guitar by myself and writing from a place of self-reflection like I have in the past," says Burton. "It felt like a metamorphosis in a way that was both beautiful and difficult, but in the end feels more true to who we are as collaborators." In sharing the album with the world, the band hopes to impart a similarly transformative sense of joy and discovery. "I hope when people hear the record they feel the same excitement that we felt while we were making it," says Burton. "And I hope they understand that being excited about life isn't synonymous with having everything you've always wanted--it's something we can all choose today, and every single day moving forward."
~~~~~~~~~
Sometimes, a mystical, life-changing connection can be closer than you think. In 2017, Grammy Award-winning guitarist / producer Adrian Quesada had recorded some instrumentals in his Austin studio, and he started looking around for a vocalist -- he knew a lot of singers, but he wanted something different. He reached out to friends in Los Angeles, in London, but nothing seemed right.
Meantime, Eric Burton had recently made his way to Texas. Born in the San Fernando Valley, he grew up in church and then got heavily involved in musical theater. He started busking at the Santa Monica pier, where he brought in a few hundred dollars a day and developed his performance skills. Burton traveled through the Western states before deciding to settle down in Austin -- setting up his busking spot on a downtown street corner, at 6th Street and Congress, for maximum exposure.
A mutual friend mentioned Burton to Quesada, saying that he was the best singer he had ever heard. The two musicians connected, but Burton took a while to respond ("My friends were like 'Dude, you're a mad man, you need to hit that guy back!'") Finally, he called Quesada, and started singing to one of the tracks over the phone. "I loved his energy, his vibe, and I knew it would be incredible on record," he says. "From the moment I heard him on the phone, I was all about it."
The results of that inauspicious beginning can now be heard on the self-titled debut album from Black Pumas, the group that Quesada and Burton assembled, which has become one of the year's most anticipated projects. Described as "Wu-Tang Clan meets James Brown" by KCRW, Black Pumas were the winner of Best New Band at the 2019 Austin Music Awards.
Quesada has a storied reputation from playing in bands like Grupo Fantasma and Brownout, accompanying artists from Prince to Daniel Johnston, and producing such acclaimed projects as 2018's Look at My Soul: The Latin Shade Of Texas Soul. For the tracks that kicked off this project, though, he had a different direction in mind. "I was looking for somebody with their own identity," says Quesada, "who liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke."
Burton's taste, range, and experience proved to be exactly what Quesada was seeking. "We just take to the same kind of music," he says. "I listen to East Coast hip-hop, old soul music, folk music. When Adrian sent me the songs, it was like I had already heard them before. We were on the same wavelength from the get-go."
The first day they got together in the studio, they recorded the dusty funk that would become the Black Pumas' first two singles, "Black Moon Rising" and "Fire." Quesada had written the music for "Black Moon Rising" on the day of the 2017 solar eclipse, and Burton took that concept and ran with it. "Right away, the hair stood up on the back of my neck," says Quesada. "I knew, 'This is it -- this is the guy.'"
Burton sensed the potential, as well. "When I saw that Adrian played with Prince and had a Grammy," he says, "that he was a serious, respected artist, I knew that I would do my best not to squander that. If you can do it on the street, for a long time, without making yourself crazy, you can do it with a guy who's won a Grammy."
The duo also knew that they didn't want their sound to be too retro or imitative. "We didn't want to just do throwback soul and pretend that hip-hop never happened," says Quesada, noting that it was listening to Ghostface Killah that initially triggered him to start writing this material. "It had to feel sincere coming from us. I have a certain aesthetic in the studio, Eric has a voice that evokes a certain era, but I don't think we reference that too directly."
"Adrian has had the time and the interest to really dive into a specific sound, to recreate something he heard on a Motown record," adds Burton. "And because of that specific knowledge, he provides an interesting sandbox for me, whose background is in theater, to do something super-unorthodox -- to be an art student and play with all the colors I have, but to put it on something that's more familiar to listeners' ears."
With Black Pumas having evolved from an idea to a session to an album, they decided to put a band together and see how this music sounded live. They booked a residency at C Boys (a sister venue to Austin's famed Continental Club), initially playing every Thursday for a month. "We only rehearsed twice, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," says Quesada. "But with the first show, we knew it was unique, special -- the chemistry and fire were there immediately. And what Eric could do as a frontman was like nothing I'd ever seen."
As word got out, the C Boys shows turned into a local phenomenon ("the hottest party in town," according to the Austin American-Statesman), with lines around the block despite the fact that the band had only released one song. The reaction to the group's recent South by Southwest appearance helps explain the mania -- the Chicago Tribune called Burton's performance "a whirlwind of movement and gesture," while Rolling Stone, in naming Black Pumas "One Of The 30 Best Bands We Saw In Austin," wrote that "the hometown six-piece's grooves were funky in a thick, viscous way, oozing out in ambitious jams that wandered into heady territory without meandering" and praising Burton's "tireless, charismatic energy."
The other, unexpected result of the C Boys residency was that Burton presented more of his own songs to help fill out the set, which led Black Pumas into new territory. "Eric had all these other songs based on other styles, going back into what he was doing when he was busking," says Quesada. "It was a real spark that we could huddle around him and his songs, too, and get a real sense of what our sound was."
In fact, the final song recorded for Black Pumas was "October 33," a tense, pleading ballad by Burton. "I didn't feel like we had the right last song," says Quesada, "we needed something with more of Eric on guitar. I said 'I want to put down one more, do you have anything?' and he texted me back exactly what I was imagining -- it was almost unspoken."
Quesada and Burton both return, over and over, to this almost mystical connection they felt from the beginning. It's this sense of common purpose, of shared vision, that gives Black Pumas its focus and power -- and that points to great things ahead.
"It's so seamless, it's like we're musical brothers to some degree," says Burton. "It feels so easy to meld together that what's most important for us now is to continue to look for new sounds -- to make sure we're feeding ourselves the knowledge to continue to evolve. Every time we get together, it's better than the last time."
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In creating the follow-up to one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years, Black Pumas made a point of tuning out any sense of anticipation from the outside world. "I knew the first record was good when we finished it, but I had no idea people would respond like they did," says Quesada. "This time around there was a lot of pressure and expectation that we hadn't felt before, which was overwhelming at times, but we did our best to tune that out and focus on trusting ourselves like we always have." As a result, Chronicles of a Diamond wholly echoes an essential intention behind its creation. "More than anything I wanted to make something we'd be thrilled to play live 200 days a year," says Burton. "I wanted to be able to laugh, cry, bob my head, do the thing: it was all very much a selfish endeavor."
Like Black Pumas, Chronicles of a Diamond once again harnesses the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Burton (a self-taught musician who got his start busking on beaches and subway platforms in his native Los Angeles) and Quesada (a Grammy Award winner whose background includes playing in Latin-funk orchestra Grupo Fantasma and accompanying legendary artists like Prince). Produced by Quesada and primarily mixed by six-time Grammy Award winner Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, The War on Drugs), the ten-song LP finds Burton taking the role of co-producer and infusing his free-spirited musicality into every track. Although Black Pumas made much of the album at Quesada's own Electric Deluxe Recorders in Austin, Chronicles of a Diamond also came to life in such far-flung cities as Amsterdam and Mexico City and San Francisco, with their longtime band joining in to shape the album's explosive yet artfully crafted sound. "On the first record my goal was to make something that felt modern but without using any loops or programming or editing of any kind--everything was completely live," says Quesada. "With this record, we threw out all those rules and created something that's very much a studio album but also captures that crazy energy that happens in the live show."
The first piece recorded for Chronicles of a Diamond, opening track "More Than a Love Song" instantly reveals the heightened creative freedom Black Pumas brought to the album-making process. After building a potent momentum with its brisk beats, effervescent strings, and brightly buzzing guitar riffs, the long-beloved live staple shapeshifts into a moment of pure unbridled exultation powered by radiant gospel harmonies and a spellbinding bit of spoken word from Burton. "My entire approach to singing was definitely informed by our live show," Burton points out. "Whenever we take the stage it's the classic us-against-the-world kind of thing, and in reaching for my greatest strengths I ended up discovering new ones. With this album I felt very free in my vocal performance, which has a lot to do with Adrian hearing something in my voice and helping me to explore that."
Next, on "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)," Black Pumas present a fuzzed-out and falsetto-laced love song Burton wrote years ago, then further developed with bassist/keyboardist Josh Blue during an impromptu session at two in the morning. "When left alone I tend to work in an unorthodox way, where the colors don't go together quite like you'd expect them to," says Burton, whose lyrics playfully interpolate a classic jump-rope rhyme. "With that song the big distorted guitar doesn't seem like it should work with how I'm singing, but it sounded so soulful in a way that felt just right to me." Completed by Quesada at his studio, "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)" ultimately induces a trance-like euphoria thanks to its hypnotic rhythms and swirling guitar lines. "A lot of Eric's ideas lately have had a meditative quality, where all these repetitive motifs are happening in the background while the song changes around them," says Quesada. "As soon as I heard 'Ice Cream' I loved it, because it was so radically different from anything we'd done before, or anything I would've come up with on my own."
On songs like "Mrs. Postman," Black Pumas reaffirm their status as a vital force in moving the genre of soul music forward. A piano-driven serenade spotlighting the phenomenal versatility of keyboardist JaRon Marshall, the timeless yet exquisitely left-of-center track took shape from an off-the-cuff collaboration between Marshall and Quesada. "JaRon and I used to get together on afternoons and make hip-hop beats for fun, and 'Mrs. Postman' ended up coming out of one of those sessions," says Quesada, noting that the song marks the first time Black Pumas have co-written with another musician. In adding his contribution to "Mrs. Postman," Burton imbued his lyrics with equal parts idiosyncratic poetry and humanistic sensitivity. "I was partly thinking about how much joy the postmen can bring to people's lives, but I also wanted to encourage the people in my family and anyone else working a blue-collar job," he says. "I know from firsthand experience how arduous it can be, and I wanted to send a message saying, 'I still see all the beauty and light in you.'"
As Chronicles of a Diamond unfolds, Black Pumas endlessly follow their outsize imagination into unexpected directions. To that end, the album's sprawling title track emerged after Quesada unearthed a full-band recording they'd cut live at a San Francisco studio years earlier, then sampled and looped the most dynamic elements of that performance. Meanwhile, Burton dreamed up the lyrics to "Chronicles of a Diamond" by tapping into his deep affinity for Curtis Mayfield and penning a song from the perspective of a diamond in the back of a Cadillac. On "Angel," the band shares a mesmerizing slow-burner graced with majestic guitar work, moody mellotron melodies, and soul-baring lyrics Burton composed in a laundromat over a decade ago. "I remember feeling overwhelmed by everything going on with my family and the neighborhood I was living in, and hoping to find sanctuary in the actual voice of an angel," he says. "There was a laundromat nearby that served as a quiet place for me, and that song started to come to me as I stared into a still-life painting of flowers." And on "Hello," Chronicles of a Diamond takes on an otherworldly quality, casting a powerful spell with the track's sublime synth tones and celestial harmonies (courtesy of Black Pumas background vocalists Lauren Cervantes and Angela Miller). "Eric brought in that odd synth loop, and I loved the idea of building a song around something so out of the ordinary for us," says Quesada. "It was probably the most challenging song for me to finish, but mostly because I was completely obsessed with it and needed to get it right."
On "Rock and Roll," Chronicles of a Diamond closes out with a gloriously strange epic that Black Pumas first began developing during sound checks and mainly recorded at a spur-of-the-moment session at an Amsterdam studio. "We were on tour and I was feeling excited about life and wanted to capture that, and somehow convinced everyone that going into the studio was the most fun thing we could do with our time in Amsterdam," says Burton. One of several tracks featuring additional production from John Congleton (a Grammy Award winner known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen), "Rock and Roll" fully channels the raw urgency of that session while encompassing so many eccentric details, including a deluge of delightfully warped vocal effects. "Eric was in my studio and we started running his vocals through my Space Echo--a tape-delay unit from the '70s--then manipulated that into what you hear at the end of the song," says Quesada. "At one point the track was almost ten-minutes-long; we were just having so much fun playing around and recording the craziest sounds we could come up with."
For Quesada, one of the most memorable experiences in the making of Chronicles of a Diamond took place on a solo trip to Mexico City in the final stages of the album's production. "I was finishing up a lot of the sonic manipulation of the tracks and needed to be completely immersed, which ended up feeling like a very full-circle moment," he recalls. "That same summer when I first started working with Eric, it was in Mexico City that I got inspired by the whole jungle-cats motif--which is how we came up with the name Black Pumas." First introduced by a mutual friend back in 2017, after Quesada began seeking a potential collaborator who "liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke," the two musicians quickly felt a near-telepathic musical connection. "We never had to discuss much or plot out what we wanted to do with the project--it all came together so easily and naturally," says Quesada. "The way Eric creates is so in-the-moment and fits perfectly with how my brain works, and it makes everything immediately come to life in a way that's so exciting and inspiring."
When it came time to create Chronicles of a Diamond, Black Pumas leaned into that intuitive understanding while pushing their artistry to an entirely new level. "Making this album was much different from playing acoustic guitar by myself and writing from a place of self-reflection like I have in the past," says Burton. "It felt like a metamorphosis in a way that was both beautiful and difficult, but in the end feels more true to who we are as collaborators." In sharing the album with the world, the band hopes to impart a similarly transformative sense of joy and discovery. "I hope when people hear the record they feel the same excitement that we felt while we were making it," says Burton. "And I hope they understand that being excited about life isn't synonymous with having everything you've always wanted--it's something we can all choose today, and every single day moving forward."
~~~~~~~~~
Sometimes, a mystical, life-changing connection can be closer than you think. In 2017, Grammy Award-winning guitarist / producer Adrian Quesada had recorded some instrumentals in his Austin studio, and he started looking around for a vocalist -- he knew a lot of singers, but he wanted something different. He reached out to friends in Los Angeles, in London, but nothing seemed right.
Meantime, Eric Burton had recently made his way to Texas. Born in the San Fernando Valley, he grew up in church and then got heavily involved in musical theater. He started busking at the Santa Monica pier, where he brought in a few hundred dollars a day and developed his performance skills. Burton traveled through the Western states before deciding to settle down in Austin -- setting up his busking spot on a downtown street corner, at 6th Street and Congress, for maximum exposure.
A mutual friend mentioned Burton to Quesada, saying that he was the best singer he had ever heard. The two musicians connected, but Burton took a while to respond ("My friends were like 'Dude, you're a mad man, you need to hit that guy back!'") Finally, he called Quesada, and started singing to one of the tracks over the phone. "I loved his energy, his vibe, and I knew it would be incredible on record," he says. "From the moment I heard him on the phone, I was all about it."
The results of that inauspicious beginning can now be heard on the self-titled debut album from Black Pumas, the group that Quesada and Burton assembled, which has become one of the year's most anticipated projects. Described as "Wu-Tang Clan meets James Brown" by KCRW, Black Pumas were the winner of Best New Band at the 2019 Austin Music Awards.
Quesada has a storied reputation from playing in bands like Grupo Fantasma and Brownout, accompanying artists from Prince to Daniel Johnston, and producing such acclaimed projects as 2018's Look at My Soul: The Latin Shade Of Texas Soul. For the tracks that kicked off this project, though, he had a different direction in mind. "I was looking for somebody with their own identity," says Quesada, "who liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke."
Burton's taste, range, and experience proved to be exactly what Quesada was seeking. "We just take to the same kind of music," he says. "I listen to East Coast hip-hop, old soul music, folk music. When Adrian sent me the songs, it was like I had already heard them before. We were on the same wavelength from the get-go."
The first day they got together in the studio, they recorded the dusty funk that would become the Black Pumas' first two singles, "Black Moon Rising" and "Fire." Quesada had written the music for "Black Moon Rising" on the day of the 2017 solar eclipse, and Burton took that concept and ran with it. "Right away, the hair stood up on the back of my neck," says Quesada. "I knew, 'This is it -- this is the guy.'"
Burton sensed the potential, as well. "When I saw that Adrian played with Prince and had a Grammy," he says, "that he was a serious, respected artist, I knew that I would do my best not to squander that. If you can do it on the street, for a long time, without making yourself crazy, you can do it with a guy who's won a Grammy."
The duo also knew that they didn't want their sound to be too retro or imitative. "We didn't want to just do throwback soul and pretend that hip-hop never happened," says Quesada, noting that it was listening to Ghostface Killah that initially triggered him to start writing this material. "It had to feel sincere coming from us. I have a certain aesthetic in the studio, Eric has a voice that evokes a certain era, but I don't think we reference that too directly."
"Adrian has had the time and the interest to really dive into a specific sound, to recreate something he heard on a Motown record," adds Burton. "And because of that specific knowledge, he provides an interesting sandbox for me, whose background is in theater, to do something super-unorthodox -- to be an art student and play with all the colors I have, but to put it on something that's more familiar to listeners' ears."
With Black Pumas having evolved from an idea to a session to an album, they decided to put a band together and see how this music sounded live. They booked a residency at C Boys (a sister venue to Austin's famed Continental Club), initially playing every Thursday for a month. "We only rehearsed twice, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," says Quesada. "But with the first show, we knew it was unique, special -- the chemistry and fire were there immediately. And what Eric could do as a frontman was like nothing I'd ever seen."
As word got out, the C Boys shows turned into a local phenomenon ("the hottest party in town," according to the Austin American-Statesman), with lines around the block despite the fact that the band had only released one song. The reaction to the group's recent South by Southwest appearance helps explain the mania -- the Chicago Tribune called Burton's performance "a whirlwind of movement and gesture," while Rolling Stone, in naming Black Pumas "One Of The 30 Best Bands We Saw In Austin," wrote that "the hometown six-piece's grooves were funky in a thick, viscous way, oozing out in ambitious jams that wandered into heady territory without meandering" and praising Burton's "tireless, charismatic energy."
The other, unexpected result of the C Boys residency was that Burton presented more of his own songs to help fill out the set, which led Black Pumas into new territory. "Eric had all these other songs based on other styles, going back into what he was doing when he was busking," says Quesada. "It was a real spark that we could huddle around him and his songs, too, and get a real sense of what our sound was."
In fact, the final song recorded for Black Pumas was "October 33," a tense, pleading ballad by Burton. "I didn't feel like we had the right last song," says Quesada, "we needed something with more of Eric on guitar. I said 'I want to put down one more, do you have anything?' and he texted me back exactly what I was imagining -- it was almost unspoken."
Quesada and Burton both return, over and over, to this almost mystical connection they felt from the beginning. It's this sense of common purpose, of shared vision, that gives Black Pumas its focus and power -- and that points to great things ahead.
"It's so seamless, it's like we're musical brothers to some degree," says Burton. "It feels so easy to meld together that what's most important for us now is to continue to look for new sounds -- to make sure we're feeding ourselves the knowledge to continue to evolve. Every time we get together, it's better than the last time."
When Black Pumas made their self-titled debut in 2019, the Austin-bred duo set off a reaction almost as combustible and rapturous as their music itself. Along with earning a career total of seven Grammy Award nominations (including Album Of The Year) and winning praise from leading outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada achieved massive success as a live act, touring large theaters all over Europe and North and South America and delivering a transcendent show Burton aptly refers to as "electric church." As they set to work on their highly awaited sophomore album, the band broadened their palette to include a dazzling expanse of musical forms: heavenly hybrids of soul and symphonic pop, mind-bending excursions into jazz-funk and psychedelia, starry-eyed love songs that feel dropped down from the cosmos. Wilder and weirder and more extravagantly composed than its predecessor, Chronicles of a Diamond arrives as the fullest expression yet of Black Pumas' frenetic creativity and limitless vision.
In creating the follow-up to one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years, Black Pumas made a point of tuning out any sense of anticipation from the outside world. "I knew the first record was good when we finished it, but I had no idea people would respond like they did," says Quesada. "This time around there was a lot of pressure and expectation that we hadn't felt before, which was overwhelming at times, but we did our best to tune that out and focus on trusting ourselves like we always have." As a result, Chronicles of a Diamond wholly echoes an essential intention behind its creation. "More than anything I wanted to make something we'd be thrilled to play live 200 days a year," says Burton. "I wanted to be able to laugh, cry, bob my head, do the thing: it was all very much a selfish endeavor."
Like Black Pumas, Chronicles of a Diamond once again harnesses the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Burton (a self-taught musician who got his start busking on beaches and subway platforms in his native Los Angeles) and Quesada (a Grammy Award winner whose background includes playing in Latin-funk orchestra Grupo Fantasma and accompanying legendary artists like Prince). Produced by Quesada and primarily mixed by six-time Grammy Award winner Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, The War on Drugs), the ten-song LP finds Burton taking the role of co-producer and infusing his free-spirited musicality into every track. Although Black Pumas made much of the album at Quesada's own Electric Deluxe Recorders in Austin, Chronicles of a Diamond also came to life in such far-flung cities as Amsterdam and Mexico City and San Francisco, with their longtime band joining in to shape the album's explosive yet artfully crafted sound. "On the first record my goal was to make something that felt modern but without using any loops or programming or editing of any kind--everything was completely live," says Quesada. "With this record, we threw out all those rules and created something that's very much a studio album but also captures that crazy energy that happens in the live show."
The first piece recorded for Chronicles of a Diamond, opening track "More Than a Love Song" instantly reveals the heightened creative freedom Black Pumas brought to the album-making process. After building a potent momentum with its brisk beats, effervescent strings, and brightly buzzing guitar riffs, the long-beloved live staple shapeshifts into a moment of pure unbridled exultation powered by radiant gospel harmonies and a spellbinding bit of spoken word from Burton. "My entire approach to singing was definitely informed by our live show," Burton points out. "Whenever we take the stage it's the classic us-against-the-world kind of thing, and in reaching for my greatest strengths I ended up discovering new ones. With this album I felt very free in my vocal performance, which has a lot to do with Adrian hearing something in my voice and helping me to explore that."
Next, on "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)," Black Pumas present a fuzzed-out and falsetto-laced love song Burton wrote years ago, then further developed with bassist/keyboardist Josh Blue during an impromptu session at two in the morning. "When left alone I tend to work in an unorthodox way, where the colors don't go together quite like you'd expect them to," says Burton, whose lyrics playfully interpolate a classic jump-rope rhyme. "With that song the big distorted guitar doesn't seem like it should work with how I'm singing, but it sounded so soulful in a way that felt just right to me." Completed by Quesada at his studio, "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)" ultimately induces a trance-like euphoria thanks to its hypnotic rhythms and swirling guitar lines. "A lot of Eric's ideas lately have had a meditative quality, where all these repetitive motifs are happening in the background while the song changes around them," says Quesada. "As soon as I heard 'Ice Cream' I loved it, because it was so radically different from anything we'd done before, or anything I would've come up with on my own."
On songs like "Mrs. Postman," Black Pumas reaffirm their status as a vital force in moving the genre of soul music forward. A piano-driven serenade spotlighting the phenomenal versatility of keyboardist JaRon Marshall, the timeless yet exquisitely left-of-center track took shape from an off-the-cuff collaboration between Marshall and Quesada. "JaRon and I used to get together on afternoons and make hip-hop beats for fun, and 'Mrs. Postman' ended up coming out of one of those sessions," says Quesada, noting that the song marks the first time Black Pumas have co-written with another musician. In adding his contribution to "Mrs. Postman," Burton imbued his lyrics with equal parts idiosyncratic poetry and humanistic sensitivity. "I was partly thinking about how much joy the postmen can bring to people's lives, but I also wanted to encourage the people in my family and anyone else working a blue-collar job," he says. "I know from firsthand experience how arduous it can be, and I wanted to send a message saying, 'I still see all the beauty and light in you.'"
As Chronicles of a Diamond unfolds, Black Pumas endlessly follow their outsize imagination into unexpected directions. To that end, the album's sprawling title track emerged after Quesada unearthed a full-band recording they'd cut live at a San Francisco studio years earlier, then sampled and looped the most dynamic elements of that performance. Meanwhile, Burton dreamed up the lyrics to "Chronicles of a Diamond" by tapping into his deep affinity for Curtis Mayfield and penning a song from the perspective of a diamond in the back of a Cadillac. On "Angel," the band shares a mesmerizing slow-burner graced with majestic guitar work, moody mellotron melodies, and soul-baring lyrics Burton composed in a laundromat over a decade ago. "I remember feeling overwhelmed by everything going on with my family and the neighborhood I was living in, and hoping to find sanctuary in the actual voice of an angel," he says. "There was a laundromat nearby that served as a quiet place for me, and that song started to come to me as I stared into a still-life painting of flowers." And on "Hello," Chronicles of a Diamond takes on an otherworldly quality, casting a powerful spell with the track's sublime synth tones and celestial harmonies (courtesy of Black Pumas background vocalists Lauren Cervantes and Angela Miller). "Eric brought in that odd synth loop, and I loved the idea of building a song around something so out of the ordinary for us," says Quesada. "It was probably the most challenging song for me to finish, but mostly because I was completely obsessed with it and needed to get it right."
On "Rock and Roll," Chronicles of a Diamond closes out with a gloriously strange epic that Black Pumas first began developing during sound checks and mainly recorded at a spur-of-the-moment session at an Amsterdam studio. "We were on tour and I was feeling excited about life and wanted to capture that, and somehow convinced everyone that going into the studio was the most fun thing we could do with our time in Amsterdam," says Burton. One of several tracks featuring additional production from John Congleton (a Grammy Award winner known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen), "Rock and Roll" fully channels the raw urgency of that session while encompassing so many eccentric details, including a deluge of delightfully warped vocal effects. "Eric was in my studio and we started running his vocals through my Space Echo--a tape-delay unit from the '70s--then manipulated that into what you hear at the end of the song," says Quesada. "At one point the track was almost ten-minutes-long; we were just having so much fun playing around and recording the craziest sounds we could come up with."
For Quesada, one of the most memorable experiences in the making of Chronicles of a Diamond took place on a solo trip to Mexico City in the final stages of the album's production. "I was finishing up a lot of the sonic manipulation of the tracks and needed to be completely immersed, which ended up feeling like a very full-circle moment," he recalls. "That same summer when I first started working with Eric, it was in Mexico City that I got inspired by the whole jungle-cats motif--which is how we came up with the name Black Pumas." First introduced by a mutual friend back in 2017, after Quesada began seeking a potential collaborator who "liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke," the two musicians quickly felt a near-telepathic musical connection. "We never had to discuss much or plot out what we wanted to do with the project--it all came together so easily and naturally," says Quesada. "The way Eric creates is so in-the-moment and fits perfectly with how my brain works, and it makes everything immediately come to life in a way that's so exciting and inspiring."
When it came time to create Chronicles of a Diamond, Black Pumas leaned into that intuitive understanding while pushing their artistry to an entirely new level. "Making this album was much different from playing acoustic guitar by myself and writing from a place of self-reflection like I have in the past," says Burton. "It felt like a metamorphosis in a way that was both beautiful and difficult, but in the end feels more true to who we are as collaborators." In sharing the album with the world, the band hopes to impart a similarly transformative sense of joy and discovery. "I hope when people hear the record they feel the same excitement that we felt while we were making it," says Burton. "And I hope they understand that being excited about life isn't synonymous with having everything you've always wanted--it's something we can all choose today, and every single day moving forward."
~~~~~~~~~
Sometimes, a mystical, life-changing connection can be closer than you think. In 2017, Grammy Award-winning guitarist / producer Adrian Quesada had recorded some instrumentals in his Austin studio, and he started looking around for a vocalist -- he knew a lot of singers, but he wanted something different. He reached out to friends in Los Angeles, in London, but nothing seemed right.
Meantime, Eric Burton had recently made his way to Texas. Born in the San Fernando Valley, he grew up in church and then got heavily involved in musical theater. He started busking at the Santa Monica pier, where he brought in a few hundred dollars a day and developed his performance skills. Burton traveled through the Western states before deciding to settle down in Austin -- setting up his busking spot on a downtown street corner, at 6th Street and Congress, for maximum exposure.
A mutual friend mentioned Burton to Quesada, saying that he was the best singer he had ever heard. The two musicians connected, but Burton took a while to respond ("My friends were like 'Dude, you're a mad man, you need to hit that guy back!'") Finally, he called Quesada, and started singing to one of the tracks over the phone. "I loved his energy, his vibe, and I knew it would be incredible on record," he says. "From the moment I heard him on the phone, I was all about it."
The results of that inauspicious beginning can now be heard on the self-titled debut album from Black Pumas, the group that Quesada and Burton assembled, which has become one of the year's most anticipated projects. Described as "Wu-Tang Clan meets James Brown" by KCRW, Black Pumas were the winner of Best New Band at the 2019 Austin Music Awards.
Quesada has a storied reputation from playing in bands like Grupo Fantasma and Brownout, accompanying artists from Prince to Daniel Johnston, and producing such acclaimed projects as 2018's Look at My Soul: The Latin Shade Of Texas Soul. For the tracks that kicked off this project, though, he had a different direction in mind. "I was looking for somebody with their own identity," says Quesada, "who liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke."
Burton's taste, range, and experience proved to be exactly what Quesada was seeking. "We just take to the same kind of music," he says. "I listen to East Coast hip-hop, old soul music, folk music. When Adrian sent me the songs, it was like I had already heard them before. We were on the same wavelength from the get-go."
The first day they got together in the studio, they recorded the dusty funk that would become the Black Pumas' first two singles, "Black Moon Rising" and "Fire." Quesada had written the music for "Black Moon Rising" on the day of the 2017 solar eclipse, and Burton took that concept and ran with it. "Right away, the hair stood up on the back of my neck," says Quesada. "I knew, 'This is it -- this is the guy.'"
Burton sensed the potential, as well. "When I saw that Adrian played with Prince and had a Grammy," he says, "that he was a serious, respected artist, I knew that I would do my best not to squander that. If you can do it on the street, for a long time, without making yourself crazy, you can do it with a guy who's won a Grammy."
The duo also knew that they didn't want their sound to be too retro or imitative. "We didn't want to just do throwback soul and pretend that hip-hop never happened," says Quesada, noting that it was listening to Ghostface Killah that initially triggered him to start writing this material. "It had to feel sincere coming from us. I have a certain aesthetic in the studio, Eric has a voice that evokes a certain era, but I don't think we reference that too directly."
"Adrian has had the time and the interest to really dive into a specific sound, to recreate something he heard on a Motown record," adds Burton. "And because of that specific knowledge, he provides an interesting sandbox for me, whose background is in theater, to do something super-unorthodox -- to be an art student and play with all the colors I have, but to put it on something that's more familiar to listeners' ears."
With Black Pumas having evolved from an idea to a session to an album, they decided to put a band together and see how this music sounded live. They booked a residency at C Boys (a sister venue to Austin's famed Continental Club), initially playing every Thursday for a month. "We only rehearsed twice, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," says Quesada. "But with the first show, we knew it was unique, special -- the chemistry and fire were there immediately. And what Eric could do as a frontman was like nothing I'd ever seen."
As word got out, the C Boys shows turned into a local phenomenon ("the hottest party in town," according to the Austin American-Statesman), with lines around the block despite the fact that the band had only released one song. The reaction to the group's recent South by Southwest appearance helps explain the mania -- the Chicago Tribune called Burton's performance "a whirlwind of movement and gesture," while Rolling Stone, in naming Black Pumas "One Of The 30 Best Bands We Saw In Austin," wrote that "the hometown six-piece's grooves were funky in a thick, viscous way, oozing out in ambitious jams that wandered into heady territory without meandering" and praising Burton's "tireless, charismatic energy."
The other, unexpected result of the C Boys residency was that Burton presented more of his own songs to help fill out the set, which led Black Pumas into new territory. "Eric had all these other songs based on other styles, going back into what he was doing when he was busking," says Quesada. "It was a real spark that we could huddle around him and his songs, too, and get a real sense of what our sound was."
In fact, the final song recorded for Black Pumas was "October 33," a tense, pleading ballad by Burton. "I didn't feel like we had the right last song," says Quesada, "we needed something with more of Eric on guitar. I said 'I want to put down one more, do you have anything?' and he texted me back exactly what I was imagining -- it was almost unspoken."
Quesada and Burton both return, over and over, to this almost mystical connection they felt from the beginning. It's this sense of common purpose, of shared vision, that gives Black Pumas its focus and power -- and that points to great things ahead.
"It's so seamless, it's like we're musical brothers to some degree," says Burton. "It feels so easy to meld together that what's most important for us now is to continue to look for new sounds -- to make sure we're feeding ourselves the knowledge to continue to evolve. Every time we get together, it's better than the last time."
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In creating the follow-up to one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years, Black Pumas made a point of tuning out any sense of anticipation from the outside world. "I knew the first record was good when we finished it, but I had no idea people would respond like they did," says Quesada. "This time around there was a lot of pressure and expectation that we hadn't felt before, which was overwhelming at times, but we did our best to tune that out and focus on trusting ourselves like we always have." As a result, Chronicles of a Diamond wholly echoes an essential intention behind its creation. "More than anything I wanted to make something we'd be thrilled to play live 200 days a year," says Burton. "I wanted to be able to laugh, cry, bob my head, do the thing: it was all very much a selfish endeavor."
Like Black Pumas, Chronicles of a Diamond once again harnesses the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Burton (a self-taught musician who got his start busking on beaches and subway platforms in his native Los Angeles) and Quesada (a Grammy Award winner whose background includes playing in Latin-funk orchestra Grupo Fantasma and accompanying legendary artists like Prince). Produced by Quesada and primarily mixed by six-time Grammy Award winner Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, The War on Drugs), the ten-song LP finds Burton taking the role of co-producer and infusing his free-spirited musicality into every track. Although Black Pumas made much of the album at Quesada's own Electric Deluxe Recorders in Austin, Chronicles of a Diamond also came to life in such far-flung cities as Amsterdam and Mexico City and San Francisco, with their longtime band joining in to shape the album's explosive yet artfully crafted sound. "On the first record my goal was to make something that felt modern but without using any loops or programming or editing of any kind--everything was completely live," says Quesada. "With this record, we threw out all those rules and created something that's very much a studio album but also captures that crazy energy that happens in the live show."
The first piece recorded for Chronicles of a Diamond, opening track "More Than a Love Song" instantly reveals the heightened creative freedom Black Pumas brought to the album-making process. After building a potent momentum with its brisk beats, effervescent strings, and brightly buzzing guitar riffs, the long-beloved live staple shapeshifts into a moment of pure unbridled exultation powered by radiant gospel harmonies and a spellbinding bit of spoken word from Burton. "My entire approach to singing was definitely informed by our live show," Burton points out. "Whenever we take the stage it's the classic us-against-the-world kind of thing, and in reaching for my greatest strengths I ended up discovering new ones. With this album I felt very free in my vocal performance, which has a lot to do with Adrian hearing something in my voice and helping me to explore that."
Next, on "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)," Black Pumas present a fuzzed-out and falsetto-laced love song Burton wrote years ago, then further developed with bassist/keyboardist Josh Blue during an impromptu session at two in the morning. "When left alone I tend to work in an unorthodox way, where the colors don't go together quite like you'd expect them to," says Burton, whose lyrics playfully interpolate a classic jump-rope rhyme. "With that song the big distorted guitar doesn't seem like it should work with how I'm singing, but it sounded so soulful in a way that felt just right to me." Completed by Quesada at his studio, "Ice Cream (Pay Phone)" ultimately induces a trance-like euphoria thanks to its hypnotic rhythms and swirling guitar lines. "A lot of Eric's ideas lately have had a meditative quality, where all these repetitive motifs are happening in the background while the song changes around them," says Quesada. "As soon as I heard 'Ice Cream' I loved it, because it was so radically different from anything we'd done before, or anything I would've come up with on my own."
On songs like "Mrs. Postman," Black Pumas reaffirm their status as a vital force in moving the genre of soul music forward. A piano-driven serenade spotlighting the phenomenal versatility of keyboardist JaRon Marshall, the timeless yet exquisitely left-of-center track took shape from an off-the-cuff collaboration between Marshall and Quesada. "JaRon and I used to get together on afternoons and make hip-hop beats for fun, and 'Mrs. Postman' ended up coming out of one of those sessions," says Quesada, noting that the song marks the first time Black Pumas have co-written with another musician. In adding his contribution to "Mrs. Postman," Burton imbued his lyrics with equal parts idiosyncratic poetry and humanistic sensitivity. "I was partly thinking about how much joy the postmen can bring to people's lives, but I also wanted to encourage the people in my family and anyone else working a blue-collar job," he says. "I know from firsthand experience how arduous it can be, and I wanted to send a message saying, 'I still see all the beauty and light in you.'"
As Chronicles of a Diamond unfolds, Black Pumas endlessly follow their outsize imagination into unexpected directions. To that end, the album's sprawling title track emerged after Quesada unearthed a full-band recording they'd cut live at a San Francisco studio years earlier, then sampled and looped the most dynamic elements of that performance. Meanwhile, Burton dreamed up the lyrics to "Chronicles of a Diamond" by tapping into his deep affinity for Curtis Mayfield and penning a song from the perspective of a diamond in the back of a Cadillac. On "Angel," the band shares a mesmerizing slow-burner graced with majestic guitar work, moody mellotron melodies, and soul-baring lyrics Burton composed in a laundromat over a decade ago. "I remember feeling overwhelmed by everything going on with my family and the neighborhood I was living in, and hoping to find sanctuary in the actual voice of an angel," he says. "There was a laundromat nearby that served as a quiet place for me, and that song started to come to me as I stared into a still-life painting of flowers." And on "Hello," Chronicles of a Diamond takes on an otherworldly quality, casting a powerful spell with the track's sublime synth tones and celestial harmonies (courtesy of Black Pumas background vocalists Lauren Cervantes and Angela Miller). "Eric brought in that odd synth loop, and I loved the idea of building a song around something so out of the ordinary for us," says Quesada. "It was probably the most challenging song for me to finish, but mostly because I was completely obsessed with it and needed to get it right."
On "Rock and Roll," Chronicles of a Diamond closes out with a gloriously strange epic that Black Pumas first began developing during sound checks and mainly recorded at a spur-of-the-moment session at an Amsterdam studio. "We were on tour and I was feeling excited about life and wanted to capture that, and somehow convinced everyone that going into the studio was the most fun thing we could do with our time in Amsterdam," says Burton. One of several tracks featuring additional production from John Congleton (a Grammy Award winner known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen), "Rock and Roll" fully channels the raw urgency of that session while encompassing so many eccentric details, including a deluge of delightfully warped vocal effects. "Eric was in my studio and we started running his vocals through my Space Echo--a tape-delay unit from the '70s--then manipulated that into what you hear at the end of the song," says Quesada. "At one point the track was almost ten-minutes-long; we were just having so much fun playing around and recording the craziest sounds we could come up with."
For Quesada, one of the most memorable experiences in the making of Chronicles of a Diamond took place on a solo trip to Mexico City in the final stages of the album's production. "I was finishing up a lot of the sonic manipulation of the tracks and needed to be completely immersed, which ended up feeling like a very full-circle moment," he recalls. "That same summer when I first started working with Eric, it was in Mexico City that I got inspired by the whole jungle-cats motif--which is how we came up with the name Black Pumas." First introduced by a mutual friend back in 2017, after Quesada began seeking a potential collaborator who "liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke," the two musicians quickly felt a near-telepathic musical connection. "We never had to discuss much or plot out what we wanted to do with the project--it all came together so easily and naturally," says Quesada. "The way Eric creates is so in-the-moment and fits perfectly with how my brain works, and it makes everything immediately come to life in a way that's so exciting and inspiring."
When it came time to create Chronicles of a Diamond, Black Pumas leaned into that intuitive understanding while pushing their artistry to an entirely new level. "Making this album was much different from playing acoustic guitar by myself and writing from a place of self-reflection like I have in the past," says Burton. "It felt like a metamorphosis in a way that was both beautiful and difficult, but in the end feels more true to who we are as collaborators." In sharing the album with the world, the band hopes to impart a similarly transformative sense of joy and discovery. "I hope when people hear the record they feel the same excitement that we felt while we were making it," says Burton. "And I hope they understand that being excited about life isn't synonymous with having everything you've always wanted--it's something we can all choose today, and every single day moving forward."
~~~~~~~~~
Sometimes, a mystical, life-changing connection can be closer than you think. In 2017, Grammy Award-winning guitarist / producer Adrian Quesada had recorded some instrumentals in his Austin studio, and he started looking around for a vocalist -- he knew a lot of singers, but he wanted something different. He reached out to friends in Los Angeles, in London, but nothing seemed right.
Meantime, Eric Burton had recently made his way to Texas. Born in the San Fernando Valley, he grew up in church and then got heavily involved in musical theater. He started busking at the Santa Monica pier, where he brought in a few hundred dollars a day and developed his performance skills. Burton traveled through the Western states before deciding to settle down in Austin -- setting up his busking spot on a downtown street corner, at 6th Street and Congress, for maximum exposure.
A mutual friend mentioned Burton to Quesada, saying that he was the best singer he had ever heard. The two musicians connected, but Burton took a while to respond ("My friends were like 'Dude, you're a mad man, you need to hit that guy back!'") Finally, he called Quesada, and started singing to one of the tracks over the phone. "I loved his energy, his vibe, and I knew it would be incredible on record," he says. "From the moment I heard him on the phone, I was all about it."
The results of that inauspicious beginning can now be heard on the self-titled debut album from Black Pumas, the group that Quesada and Burton assembled, which has become one of the year's most anticipated projects. Described as "Wu-Tang Clan meets James Brown" by KCRW, Black Pumas were the winner of Best New Band at the 2019 Austin Music Awards.
Quesada has a storied reputation from playing in bands like Grupo Fantasma and Brownout, accompanying artists from Prince to Daniel Johnston, and producing such acclaimed projects as 2018's Look at My Soul: The Latin Shade Of Texas Soul. For the tracks that kicked off this project, though, he had a different direction in mind. "I was looking for somebody with their own identity," says Quesada, "who liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke."
Burton's taste, range, and experience proved to be exactly what Quesada was seeking. "We just take to the same kind of music," he says. "I listen to East Coast hip-hop, old soul music, folk music. When Adrian sent me the songs, it was like I had already heard them before. We were on the same wavelength from the get-go."
The first day they got together in the studio, they recorded the dusty funk that would become the Black Pumas' first two singles, "Black Moon Rising" and "Fire." Quesada had written the music for "Black Moon Rising" on the day of the 2017 solar eclipse, and Burton took that concept and ran with it. "Right away, the hair stood up on the back of my neck," says Quesada. "I knew, 'This is it -- this is the guy.'"
Burton sensed the potential, as well. "When I saw that Adrian played with Prince and had a Grammy," he says, "that he was a serious, respected artist, I knew that I would do my best not to squander that. If you can do it on the street, for a long time, without making yourself crazy, you can do it with a guy who's won a Grammy."
The duo also knew that they didn't want their sound to be too retro or imitative. "We didn't want to just do throwback soul and pretend that hip-hop never happened," says Quesada, noting that it was listening to Ghostface Killah that initially triggered him to start writing this material. "It had to feel sincere coming from us. I have a certain aesthetic in the studio, Eric has a voice that evokes a certain era, but I don't think we reference that too directly."
"Adrian has had the time and the interest to really dive into a specific sound, to recreate something he heard on a Motown record," adds Burton. "And because of that specific knowledge, he provides an interesting sandbox for me, whose background is in theater, to do something super-unorthodox -- to be an art student and play with all the colors I have, but to put it on something that's more familiar to listeners' ears."
With Black Pumas having evolved from an idea to a session to an album, they decided to put a band together and see how this music sounded live. They booked a residency at C Boys (a sister venue to Austin's famed Continental Club), initially playing every Thursday for a month. "We only rehearsed twice, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," says Quesada. "But with the first show, we knew it was unique, special -- the chemistry and fire were there immediately. And what Eric could do as a frontman was like nothing I'd ever seen."
As word got out, the C Boys shows turned into a local phenomenon ("the hottest party in town," according to the Austin American-Statesman), with lines around the block despite the fact that the band had only released one song. The reaction to the group's recent South by Southwest appearance helps explain the mania -- the Chicago Tribune called Burton's performance "a whirlwind of movement and gesture," while Rolling Stone, in naming Black Pumas "One Of The 30 Best Bands We Saw In Austin," wrote that "the hometown six-piece's grooves were funky in a thick, viscous way, oozing out in ambitious jams that wandered into heady territory without meandering" and praising Burton's "tireless, charismatic energy."
The other, unexpected result of the C Boys residency was that Burton presented more of his own songs to help fill out the set, which led Black Pumas into new territory. "Eric had all these other songs based on other styles, going back into what he was doing when he was busking," says Quesada. "It was a real spark that we could huddle around him and his songs, too, and get a real sense of what our sound was."
In fact, the final song recorded for Black Pumas was "October 33," a tense, pleading ballad by Burton. "I didn't feel like we had the right last song," says Quesada, "we needed something with more of Eric on guitar. I said 'I want to put down one more, do you have anything?' and he texted me back exactly what I was imagining -- it was almost unspoken."
Quesada and Burton both return, over and over, to this almost mystical connection they felt from the beginning. It's this sense of common purpose, of shared vision, that gives Black Pumas its focus and power -- and that points to great things ahead.
"It's so seamless, it's like we're musical brothers to some degree," says Burton. "It feels so easy to meld together that what's most important for us now is to continue to look for new sounds -- to make sure we're feeding ourselves the knowledge to continue to evolve. Every time we get together, it's better than the last time."
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