Black Pumas goes from studio project to Grammy nominated
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — When Eric Burton and Adrian Quesada first started playing together in an Austin studio in 2017, they had just met each other and weren’t even entertaining the idea that one day they’d be performing live.
“We weren’t really a band. We were a studio project,” said Quesada, a veteran guitarist-producer who had been honing his craft for years in about a half-dozen bands.
“I just knew that it was going to be something enchanting and very beautiful just between the both of us,” said Burton, who sings, writes and plays guitar. “I don’t think that we could ever have guessed that we’d end up playing the inauguration and being nominated for four Grammys.”
But creativity sparked in Quesada’s analog studio and this cross-cultural fusion of retro and modern, psychedelic rock and soul became Black Pumas, going from under the radar to breakout band in just a few short years.
After releasing a selftitled album in 2019, Black Pumas earned its first nomination for best
new artist at last year’s Grammy Awards, but lost when Billie Eilish swept the awards show. They are back again with three nominations for album of the year, record of the year and best American roots performance.
Quesada, 43, is used to getting the question about the “overnight” success of their band, but back-toback
nominations in the top Grammy categories makes him think of all the hard work they both had put in before they met each other.
“It’s definitely humbling. And then sometimes I have to remind myself of how many ups and downs I have been through, how many ups and downs Eric has been through,” said
Quesada, who has two decades of experience in music. There were times when he had to take a job delivering pizzas to make money for his family while also working as a musician.
Burton, 30, was raised in the San Fernando Valley and grew up singing in church, then moved on to musical theater. He busked at the Santa Monica pier to raise a little money before making his way to Austin, where he sang at the corner of 6th Street and Congress.
Quesada is a man of multitudes: he was part of the Grammy-winning Latin funk band Grupo Fantasma who also had gigs as a backing band for Prince and later played in bands such as Brownout and Echocentrics. Before Black Pumas, Quesada produced an album in 2019 of Chicano-Texas soul music that brought new light on the contributions of Latino artists and music.
“It’s like this perfect intersection of Black, brown, white, all kinds of different people,” he said of soul music. “What I love about it is it’s actually the most inclusive.”
The pair was playing in Europe when the pandemic hit and shut down touring, so they did what came natural to them. They went back into the studio and recorded new songs and live versions for a 2020 deluxe edition of their debut record that includes fantastic covers of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman.
The duo’s song “Colors” has been a No. 1 hit on Triple A stations and got some love from Top 40 and rock radio as well, but they are an underdog in the record of the year category alongside platinum hits by Eilish, DaBaby, Doja Cat, Post Malone, Dua Lipa and Megan Thee Stallion.
But the momentum of the band earned them a chance to perform the uplifting anthem as a part of President Joe Biden’s inauguration night television special.
The duo doesn’t easily fit into genre lines with songs inspired by gospel, funk and ’60s-era rock, but anchored by a tight percussive and modern beat. The pair said they let their label decide what genre categories to nominate them in.
“One thing we have in common is we also didn’t want to be just a soul band,” said Quesada, who said they both are heavily influenced by hip-hop rhythms as well. “We like it kinda being rock ’n’ roll.”
Burton said their first album together felt like a handshake, and now they really know each other’s musical tastes as they go back in the studio to start on their second album, which he promises will be different than the first.
“My favorite thing about what we do is that we have successfully made something that feels very familiar yet relevant and new and fresh,” said Burton.
NEW YORK — Stephen King doesn’t think of himself as a horror writer.
“My view has always been you can call me whatever you want as long as the checks don’t bounce,” King said during a recent interview. “My idea is to tell a good story, and if it crosses some lines and it doesn’t fit one particular genre, that’s good.”
Readers may know him best for “Carrie,” “The Shining” and other bestsellers commonly identified as “horror,” but King has long had an affinity for other kinds of narratives, from science fiction and prison drama to the Boston Red Sox.
Over the past decade, he has written three novels for the imprint Hard Case Crime: “Joyland,” “The Colorado Kid” and “Later,” which came out
March 2. He loves sharing a publisher with such giants of the past as James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane, and loves the old-fashioned pulp illustrations used on the covers.
At the same time, he enjoys writing a crime story that is more than a crime story — or hardly a crime story at all.
“Joyland” is a thriller set around an amusement park and could just as easily be called a comingof-age story. “The Colorado Kid” has a dead body on an island off the coast of King’s native Maine, but otherwise serves as a story about why some cases are best left unsolved.
“It’s the beauty of the mystery that allows us to live sane as we pilot our fragile bodies through this demolition derby world,” he writes in the book’s afterword.
His new novel has a lot of crime in it, but as King’s
narrator suggests, it might actually be a horror story. Jamie Conklin is looking back on his childhood, when he was raised by a single mother, a New York literary agent. Like other young King protagonists, Jamie has special powers: He not only can see dead people, but when he asks them questions, they are compelled to tell the truth.
“Later” also features a bestselling novelist and his posthumous book, and a police detective who for a time is the girlfriend of Jamie’s mother.
The 73-year-old King has written dozens of novels and stories, and usually has three or four ideas that “are half-baked, kind of like an engine and no transmission.” He doesn’t write ideas down because, he says, if something is good enough, he’s unlikely to forget it.
For “Later,” he started with the idea of a literary agent who needed to get her late client’s manuscript finished, and thought of having a son who communicates with the dead. He then decided the mother needed a companion.
“And I thought, ‘You know what, I’m going to make the love relationship female.’ Then I thought to myself, ‘Cop,’ and the cop is dirty and everything fell into place,” he says.
King, who publishes most of his work with Simon & Schuster, is part of the founding story of Hard Case Crime. Back in 2004, Charles Ardai and Max Phillips were launching a line of books to “revive pulp fiction in all its lurid midcentury glory.” Hoping for some publicity, they wrote to King and asked for a blurb. A representative for the author called and said King did not want to write a blurb for Hard Case Crime; he wanted to contribute a book. That became “The Colorado Kid.”
“I sat on the other end of the phone while this sank in and tried to sound cool, like this was the sort of phone call I got every day and twice on Fridays,” Ardai wrote in an introduction to “The Colorado Kid,” which came out in 2005.
“But inside I was turning cartwheels.”
Toward the end of “Later,” Jamie observes that his writing has improved as the story went along, “improved by doing, which I suppose is the case with most things in life.” Asked during the interview to evaluate his own writing, King, the baseball fan, likens himself to an aging but resourceful pitcher.
“I’ve gotten better in some ways, but you lose a little of the urgency,” he says. “In my 40s, the ideas were like people jamming into a fire door to get out . ... Nowadays, you’re almost feeling people are looking over your shoulder and they’re apt to be a little more critical. You slow down a little bit. I’m aware I’m getting older. You lose the blazing fastball and start to count more on your change-ups and curves and be a little more careful and mix them up.”