Personality Clash: Bartees Strange & Tunde Adebimpe – clashmusic.com

Bartees Strange is the genre-smearing guitar virtuoso exorcizing insular fears on his latest masterwork, ‘Horror’. Opening up his inner sanctum to a fresh slate of co-creators, Bartees synthesizes his love of era-defining folk, funk, rap, rock and country, channeling his homespun tales into more anthemic, hookier territory. 
Tunde Adebimpe is a singer-songwriter and auteur. Cutting his teeth in turn-of-the-millennia bands, he blazed a trail as the acrobatic lead vocalist of avant-pop outfit TV On The Radio. This Friday, Tunde unveils his first-ever formal solo album, ‘Thee Black Boltz’, via Sub Pop. 
The two artists linked up for CLASH to discuss origin stories, the verve and volatility of early-2000s New York rock, embracing collaboration, moving past creative ennui, Parliament-Funkadelic and racialised genres.
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Tunde: It’s great to connect. We didn’t get a second to hang when we performed in New York. It was hectic, but I’m so glad we got to do it. 
Bartees: Thank you. I had a blast. I don’t normally get to do a bunch of acoustic sets. I lived in New York for many years. You come back and think, do you remember I was one of you? I loved that you had Soul Glo and L’Rain open as well. They’re both amazing. 
T: This used to be my playground. It was so rad. I could not have asked for a better crew. That was my opportunity to see people from the side stage. We need to talk about your record. To my ears, there’s a lot of longing. A lot of requited and unrequited love on it. All aspects of love have been represented. 
B: It’s a weird record but also my favourite. 
T: Congratulations. I remember when we first met in Zebulon in LA. You were touring and told me you had this one done. 
B: I thought I was done but when I came back and sat with it. I needed to go deeper and deeper.
T: You change and come back and are like, who is this? 
B: I’ve played live for a year and a half and that’s something to explore. Also, I wanted to explore being in home mode. I started refining it. I met Jack Antonoff at a festival and sent him the record. Then it became about adding another layer. 
T: Who co-produced and guests on the record? 
B: I started in 2021 with Yves and Lawrence Rothman. Yves Rothman worked on the Yves Tumor record that really inspired me. I was really intrigued by the way his drums sounded. It’s full of my friends and close collaborators. Then I took it home and it was me in my basement for a year testing things, re-harmonising chords and milking the songs for whatever they could be. I turned in my last record in around ten days and it was a mortifying experience. 
T: Why was it mortifying? 
B: Because I like to baby the record. It was a two week process. I had the demos, me and a couple of friends went to London in the studio under 4AD, Ed (Horrox) listened and gave it the thumbs up. 
T: I couldn’t do that. There’s something good about the energy of instantaneous creation. My record is nearly done. It took a long ass time to create. In a compositional sense, I sit with it and really needle it. That’s when the doubt sets in. My producing partner, Wilder Zoby, helped. It was great to have someone as a soundboard. I feel like two thirds of what I did I feel solid about it. The other third is out of my control. That’s for someone else to worry about. This time, how long did it take? 
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B: I came back from touring in 2022 and then it was two years of consistent recording mostly at home. When I met Jack, we did stuff at Electric Lady, which was awesome. I felt the tide turn because I’d grown as a producer. But when I met Jack it was almost done and together we unlocked the rest of it. 
T: You’re incredibly open to collaboration. Have you ever hesitated with it? 
B: I have had that but the beauty in taking the stems home is ultimately you’re the chef. I’m always down to hear what people think. The only thing that worries me about collaborating is the music industry side of things. I’m pretty gracious with that stuff because I’m not a rich man. There are times when I’ll say no, and those feel tough. People are trying to protect themselves. 
T: A lot of creative industries have that hustling and grifting feel. I heard the saying: closed mouths don’t get fed. Yeah but that open mouth doesn’t have to lie! It’s always admirable when you can admit as a musician that you don’t have all the tools. It’s cool to be in a position when you’ve done enough as a writer and producer; to be able to team up with someone and see what can get out of it. When you started making music, were you pretty set on being a solo artist or did you ever envision being part of a band? 
B: I started off in bands. I loved guitar playing, that was my first musical love. I played guitar in emo bands, hardcore bands, country bands, and eventually jazz bands. I moved to school in Oklahoma and then the East Coast. I had to get a job. For six years, I didn’t do any music and I was super miserable. I eventually joined a band in D.C. I moved to New York, and then kept having a band on the side. I joined this hardcore band called Stay Inside and really felt like I could do this music thing. I put out a folk record by myself, people loved it so I went down to a four-day and then a three-day working week. I never wanted to be a solo artist but I was just making stuff on my own that no band wanted to play. 
T: Good on you for being steadfast. 
B: I bet on myself for once. I made the call. What about you? 
T: I had no intention of ever being in a band or making music full time. I grew up in Pittsburgh, in a very musical family. I was convinced I was going to be a cartoonist – an underground cartoonist. I experienced the connection between comics and the music scene. I had this friend who introduced me to comics in high school and also made me mixtapes. It would have Mudhoney, Sebadoh, very DIY, alternative rock stuff.
Then I started to learn about these hardcore bands, where you don’t need to be a virtuoso to get up and sing. Just the idea of making your own shit on an independent level spoke to me. I was still in the animation mindset when I got into this New York art school. I fell into this bunch of kids making music on 4-track tapes. I started beatboxing because I can’t play instruments. I’d make these songs as an antidote to boredom, a kind of audio sketch book. And then I met a few people in Williamsburg in 1996 when there was no scene per se. Eventually we made a noise rock band called Strugglepuss. The way we played was setting up a bunch of toy instruments on the floor, and we’d sample into a swirl and loop. It was totally unserious. During the day we’d rehearse. It was just something to do. 
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While that was trailing off, I stayed on in the apartment block. Jason Sitek moved and later his brother Dave Sitek did as well. Strugglepuss broke up, and from there I started making stuff with Dave. It was a band combined with visual artists meandering in this in-between state. 9/11 happened and there was a collective vibe of what’s going on? If I’m going to die, I’m going to do what I love. These New York bands started going as hard as they could. I still don’t really feel I’m qualified to say I’m a musician. It’s just something I’ve consistently done. When you say you’ve played guitar bands, I can’t do that. I don’t have the range. 
B: I have similarities to your origins. I’m probably the worst musician in my family. My mum is an opera singer, my brother is a freak piano player, and my sister is a beautiful vocalist. I struggled to find my way. My mom put me on trumpet and I was so bad. I was quite discouraged. But then I saw Norma Jean play, this huge hardcore band. I thought you had to be good to be good? But then I realised, you just have to be yourself. The best guitar players have signature sounds. I was about 16 when that occurred to me, that this was my instrument. 
T: Your definition of good is rooted more in feeling than technical ability. 
B: Taste is so important. That’s what I respect about Jack Antonoff. He’s a very good instrumentalist but he’s got taste. He knows where things go. He approaches music like a plumber approaches a house. I write and produce from that vibe. That was something that drew me to music. I worked in politics, I was a lobbyist. I worked for Obama as a press secretary, for labour unions in New York and then I pivoted to environmental justice non-profit. I felt good that I could help people but I didn’t like the feeling that my future was predestined. I love to make stuff. I like sound!
T: What you’re doing now is also helping people. 
B: And it makes me feel good. I was foregoing so many feelings I wanted to feel. Now, I can feel them all. I wanted to have an experiential experience. I didn’t want time to pass me by. 
T: Are you music first or words first? Or a combination? 
B: Music first. What about you? 
T: I’m a combination. More recently I’m music first. I try to write every day but not always the lyrics, just words on a page. Do you write in bursts or daily? 
B: It depends on what’s going on in my life. There was a time when I was prolific. Right now, it’s mostly around guitar and melodies. I’ll collect voice memos and favourite ones that are great. I’ll love to be this monk-ish musician; the sun has risen, I’m going to be proactive. But I still like to watch horror films at 3am. 
T: I have an alarm on my phone. 5.30 – time to write. I probably kept up with that for three months and since then I’ve not been able to do that for various reasons. Life be lifing.
B: It do. 
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T: In terms of writing lyrics, are you a diaristic writer or do you get inspired by melodies and texture, and dream up lyrics that way? 
B: On this record, it’s a combination of both. On some songs, there’s straight up Neil Young pastoral literature. Like a Philip Roth book, like a painting. Other songs are a little more inspired by the composition. What is the composition telling me? When I’m feeling things, I want to make something. Songs like ‘Sober’ are mostly the music, and then the lyrics follow. I’d love to get better at writing a song about my dog who died. Every song is about my life at different stages. I envy people like Matt Berninger from The National, who can write a five minute song about the minutiae of a specific event. 
T: Don’t sideline yourself from Matt. I feel you can do those things. It definitely shows. You know what I realised? I like Bruce Springsteen.
B: I think Bruce is great. I have this take and I speak about it often with my band. We have a category of bands that I call Bernie Sanders. We love them but not their fans. 
T: I want to ask about influences. When I started working on my record, it came from the worst time in my life. I was really disenchanted. I was done. This terrible time coincided with me signing with Sub Pop and having to deliver a record. As a starting point, I wrote down bands I loved when I was 16 to 25: Nirvana, Sugacubes, 808 State, Buzzcocks, Massive Attack, Fever Ray. What is the throughline that makes me want to be involved in music? Also, where is the personality? What is the mode that I can build everything out from. That was a good starting point. I felt like I had cultural amnesia after this depressive episode and this was a vision board for me. Do you start out like that? 
B: I did for this one. It was the first time where I had a clear visual idea. I was collecting images and video clips. But it became too big and I didn’t know how to distill and explain it to people. So, I lost track of it. I had this vision board that had films and paintings on it. My artistic influence was all Parliament-Funkadelic. 
T: Your song ‘Hit It Quit It’ has that all over it. I saw bright red and violet when I heard that song. 
B: I love getting caught up in eras in music. My first record was a very 2005-10 New York indie record. My second record was like: I can write songs I promise, here’s some rock songs for you, let me stay please! This one is Neil Young and Rick James being friends, and Parliament and Fleetwood Mac are there listening to each other’s music. There’s this racial divide with all that music that didn’t exist for the musicians but did for the listeners. I want to make something that marries this world but is me. It’s this funk-rock-country thing. 
T: It’s all there and it has a mixtape feel. Listen to it and find your place in it. I also hear Sonic Youth and some Pacific Northwest indie on there. It’s such a fine mist, music now. The same stratifications don’t exist. It’s all meshed together. It’s a strange thing because I grew up in a household where we listened to everything. Black people listening to classical music and opera music – what many call ‘white music’ – wasn’t weird. I never really thought about it. When TV On The Radio started, the question was always racial divides in music. What cave did you stumble into as black person making rock? It was disappointing. Interscope did not know what to do with us. They didn’t know how to market us. Thankfully the music got out to who it was going to get to. Have you come up against it? 
B: I felt like my entire thing flowed from that feeling. I was inspired by bands of colour, like you and Bloc Party. I did my research into The Isleys and Parliament-Funkadelic; funk that’s essentially rock, a genre that was taken from us. I wanted to be part of saying we do this and we did it first. I wanted to be part of that lineage. It’s still an issue I face. People listen to me and look at me and say: what are you? If I was a white kid, I’d be a genius. But it’s become a wind beneath my wings in a way. People are getting it. I am weird, I am my own road. It’s frustrating but liberating at the same time. 
T: This record is 100% you. You’re revelling in your artistry and your influences. Being a Black artist making rock. You’ve put hip-hop into it as well. I feel like you’re a part of that lineage. The more free we are, the more moot all of this is. 
B: I remember seeing your band for the first time. I remember hearing ‘I Was A Lover’. I’ve heard these sounds before but in a different context. It was inspiring.
T: ‘I Was A Lover’ was Dave and I sitting in the studio improvising. We had a sandbox attitude. We were doing everything and anything. Everybody worked in shifts. I’d walk into what they had done and I felt inspired. If your response is, what the fuck is that? Take that as a positive. You know you’re onto something. 
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Featured in CLASH Issue 130. Order your copy here.
Bartees Strange commences his North American tour April 23rd. Get your tickets here.
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Intro: Shahzaib Hussain
Photo Credit: Elizabeth De La Piedra & Xaviera Simmons

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