[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. It's September 2006. A kid in Oklahoma named Bartees Cox flips through channels on TV and is drawn in by something he's never seen before.

David Letterman: Please welcome TV on the Radio.

[applause]

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: The rock band TV on the Radio is playing David Letterman's Late Night show, and its intense, wrenching guitar-driven music being played by a group made up mainly of Black musicians.

[music]

Bartees Strange: That was the first time I think I saw a Black man that looked like me, that sounded like me, that had a story that felt like mine, and that I could really relate to. I remember right after that getting so deep into guitars and it was just over from there. I loved hardcore music and punk music, but I didn't see a lot of bands that had Black people in it or people of color in it. I remember hearing about At the Drive-In, and they were all brown kids from El Paso, Texas, who were screaming in Spanish. I was living in Western Oklahoma and I was just like, "Wow, they've made it happen by being themselves."

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Young Bartees was inspired by seeing other people who looked like him playing music he loved, but in his 20s, Bartees realized he couldn't make it happen for himself. He wasn't able to pay his bills by making music. Still, he held onto the dream. Following stints doing communications in the Obama administration and for various non-profits, Bartees finally broke out in the fall of 2020 when he released the album Live Forever under his stage name Bartees Strange.

[music]

A man bled out this morning, I'm the antecedent, yeah

It's not the first time I fell in my arms

The pain of being pure again

Walking home at 4:00 AM

Hours ago before it ends

It's hella dark and I can't avoid the heat

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, this month he's out with a new album, Farm to Table, which finds Bartees celebrating everything he's achieved while taking his music in new sonic directions. When we sat down to talk, we started off by talking a bit about his childhood in western Oklahoma.

Bartees Strange: It's so interesting being a Black artist from Oklahoma because of course there are the horror stories that everyone across the country knows about, but there's also such a deep, rich history of Black success and power and prominence in Oklahoma. For my family, we lived in a mostly white part of Oklahoma in Mustang. My parents, they faced a lot of challenges, and my brother and sister, we faced a lot of challenges too. You have this upbringing that's predicated on fear. You can't be out this late, you can't date X person, you can't go to X side of town, you need to be home at X time. Everything was just about getting to the next day.

I felt like when I moved from Oklahoma to the East Coast that was the first time that I was able to kind of peek my head out from the covers and start to ask some bigger questions about who I actually wanted to be and what I actually wanted to do because in Oklahoma it was all about survival mode in a way. It was a different world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Fascinating to hear you frame it that way. An existence predicated on fear and all of the things you can't do. Especially there's an aspect of parenting where you're constantly trying to put bumpers and seat belts and protections around your kids, but ideally you want your young people to be as free as they can be. If your whole existence has to be predicated on fear, that reduces that freedom.

Bartees Strange: Right. It also limits what you think you can do. I tell people how do you know you want to be a doctor if you've never met a doctor? That's how I saw music. My mom was an opera singer but I knew I didn't want to do that. I knew I loved music, but I didn't really see how I could do it the way I wanted to do it from Oklahoma until I saw TV on the Radio and bands like that and bands like Beauty Pill with Chad Clark here in DC. That was a big part of me getting the courage to explore and move and decide, "Okay, it's time for me to go somewhere else."

I did and got jobs and flourished once I left the state. Despite everything we've talked about it was still very hard to leave because there's a lot of good people back there that I love still. It's a bittersweet vibe.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The new album is Farm to Table. Can we talk about Hennessy?

[music]

And they say Black folks drink Hennessy

But I want you over me in the dark, on a tree

But these days, we don't talk anymore (we don't talk these days)

We don't talk anymore

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me the story of Hennessey, because this I love for so many different reasons.

Bartees Strange: I'm so glad you like that song. That's my favorite song in the album. Over the course of 10 songs, I feel like I'm telling people a lot about my life and how I feel after experiencing a huge transition during the pandemic. I put a record out called Live Forever a couple of years ago and it blew up. I was able to quit my job. All these incredible things were happening in my life but it was the worst period of time for everyone else in my life. People were dealing with COVID. People were losing jobs. People were getting divorced. People were just at home with nothing to do. No one knew what to do with themselves and it was hard to celebrate.

Over the course of this record, it's me celebrating and me talking about this transition I was experiencing. After doing all these peaks and valleys, big songs, small songs, personal moments, huge pop moments, Hennessy is like a reminder to the listener and a reminder to myself that I'm just a person. Some days I feel like the rapper in Cosigns. Some days I feel like the little boy in tours, but at the end of it, I'm just a kid. I'm just a guy that makes music in his basement and I really just want to be loved. That's what the song is about.

It's hard for a lot of people to see a Black person as someone that has a lot of ideas or thoughts or emotions. They're so quick to categorize us. That song is saying, "I know you think Black folks just drink Hennessy, but I want you to just really see me for who I am. I'm a person that carries a lot, that feels a lot, that expresses a lot. I want to connect with you on more than one level," and that's what that song is about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, we already jumped to Farm to Table, but I do want to go back for a minute to Live Forever. Again, back to this 2020 juncture because that album was getting such a positive reception and music was taking a very particular relevance for so many of us to make it through that pre-vaccine moment. What does success feel like, or success in the thing that you love and are finally doing feel like when you can't exactly go out of the house?

Bartees Strange: Well, everyone has asked me that. They've been like, "Oh, it must be a bummer that you can't tour," but I was looking at all of them saying like, "Yo, I just got to quit my job." I quit my job. I was getting a lot of production work for the first time. I got so much production work that I didn't have to go to my day job anymore. Even though I wasn't touring I was making records for people. I got a studio down here that I had access to, so banned for flying in and I was tracking records. I was busier doing the thing I loved more than I'd ever done in my life. Then as soon as the pandemic let up just enough we started touring. I've been touring for the last year and it's been all on Live Forever.

I felt like I got the best of it all. The moment happened. I got to enjoy that moment with my family and my partner in our house. Let the transitions come in, but we were able to sort through them on our own time and then go out on the road and do the thing I've always wanted to do. I honestly don't feel like I lost anything. I feel like I was given this gift where I was able to process it in a timeline that was healthy for me and my family. I think it happened the way it was supposed to happen.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As I'm listening to you talk about work, talk about the multiple chapters, and also just talk about whatever else it was, quitting your job, you said that two or three times like, "I got to quit my job." Do you all notice what that is? I heard that in the album in the ways that you talk about your dad and this way that he was working, always presumably rushing around.

[music]

I never wanna miss you this bad

I never want to run out like that

Sometimes I feel just like my dad

Rushing around

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are you trying to capture about the story between you and your dad?

Bartees Strange: I think that for me I always felt like my parents made all these sacrifices so I could be better, make more money, have a better job, live in a nicer neighborhood. Kind of move up a notch. I think a lot of Black people and a lot of immigrants feel this. All of the sacrifices that were made weren't made for me to do something I want to do. It was made for me to do something bigger. The older I got, the more I realized my parents, they did all that so I could be happy, healthy, safe, more so than make money.

I saw no point in working all these jobs and being depressed and exhausted and stressed. Honestly not making a ton of money, just making more money. Just putting myself in a situation where I'm just going to work until I'm 60 and then what? I was like, "I think my parents would rather me be happy. Do something I love to do." That realization was what inspired this deeper dive into the things I love, which is music and music production.

I think in that song Heavy Heart I'm saying why work so hard if you can't fall back? Why let guilt be this primary motivator and why you work so hard? Why? Why depend on a heavy heart? You can just do the thing you love, be happy. That means a different thing for everybody. I wasn't able to just quit my job and do music day one. I've been doing this for many, many, many years, [laughs] but I needed to do that just so I could stay sane and just so I could eventually make this transition.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's another father-child relationship at the core of one of the tracks on the new album, Hold the Line. This is really about George Floyd, and particularly about George Floyd's daughter.

[music]

Again, you've taken something of mine

You're reaching for more than my life

What happened to the man with that big old smile?

He's calling to his mother now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you tell me a little bit about how this track came to be?

Bartees Strange: I live in DC. I was living in Northeast DC right off of Benning Road when George Floyd was murdered and when the marches started coming to DC. I remember just watching Gianna Floyd speak on the news about her father dying in this extremely brutal and public way. My heart just broke because Black kids don't get to be kids very long. Something happens. There's a time before the thing happened and a time after the thing's happened where you realize that you're Black and your life ain't going to be like everybody else's life. I felt like for her it was that times 100 having to see her father die that way, and then have to address the free world and speak on that.

I felt like a lot of people admired her, and I just felt really bad for her because I felt like that kid's childhood is gone now. She'll never be the same again. We've taken that from her as a society by putting her in this position in so many ways. My heart just went out to her and her family.

The words "Hold the line" came from seeing all these people come in DC and start to fight for justice around that situation, and shining a light on this continued insanity that happens in this country. Like that song and the marches, there's no exact call to action. Just us all mad and confused and sad and saying, "We need something to change." That's what that song is. I don't have the answers but I know what's wrong, and that's what that song is about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I feel like we've come full circle here with the vision about young people and young Black folks and freedom and the capacity to actually grow up to be yourself. You've talked a couple times about how can you-- Even if you have a sense that your path isn't quite right, that it can help a lot to have that path breaker in front of you. A little bit of a guiding light notion of what is possible. You have any light you want to shine? A little message perhaps for young Black folks who might also still be looking for the courage to be fully themselves.

Bartees Strange: For me, I personally think the most inspiring and revolutionary act a Black person can have is to make something new; creating anything. Doesn't even have to be publicly viewed. It could be journaling. It could be writing a song. It could be stitching pictures together. I think that expression is so important. I don't see enough avenues for Black people to be able to express all the things that they want sometimes. That can manifest itself in a number of ways but I can't stress how valuable your voice and your opinion is, especially in a world where people are always telling you that what you have to say and what you think and what you create don't matter. Historically, that's what we've been taught.

I feel like through my project and through what I've been doing, I feel when I make something new I'm putting something out into the universe that it's bigger than me. It's about the people that came behind me and the people that are going to come ahead of me. I feel like the more Black people who are just making things generally, it's inspiring for us. It's good for us to do that. I would just encourage you to make things, whatever that may be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bartees Strange, thank you so much.

Bartees Strange: All right. Thank you, Melissa.

[music]

Damn

Just got out the van

Universal hit me 'bout some texts I need to send

Need my address for some checks that they forgot to send

Time to flip this transit, I think I'mma need the Benz

I'm in LA, I'm with Phoebe, I'm a genius, damn

I'm in Chi-Town, I'm with Lucy, I just got the stamp

Hit up Courtney, that's my Aussie, I already stand

I'm on FaceTime, I'm with Justin, we already friends

We already friends

We already friends

I'm on--

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