Baltimore-based musician Bartees Strange linked up with superstar producer Jack Antonoff — who's worked with Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey — for his latest record "Horror."
It's an album about facing the inevitable fears we all face as we get older. And it's also a very personal record. As a queer Black kid growing up in rural America, Strange had a certain set of fears that were unique to his own experience.
Bartees recently caught up with WUNC's music reporter Brian Burns to talk about the record, horror movies, and his friendship with Sylvan Esso.
This is an excerpt of an edited transcript of that conversation. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.
You worked with superstar producer Jack Antonoff on this record. Tell us about that experience.
Oh, it was really cool. Jack is a really generous guy, really hard working. We met at a festival getting food in line. He invited me up to his place and we hung out and I showed him my record and he was like, "I've got some ideas if you're interested," and I was like "Of course!" At that time I was pretty close to finishing the record, but after I met him we took another pass which opened up another eight or nine months of us working together to finish it. It became a really cool friendship through that experience. So, a lot of love for Jack.
Why was "Horror" the right title for the record?
The record is really about facing your fears as a person moving through the world, and less so about the external fears that enter your life. It's funny, as I was writing it, there were a lot of reasons why I called it "Horror." When I started writing songs for it, I didn't really know how to complete them, and it became kind of this ball of music that was really intimidating. And then, I started wading through it, but that's kind of how I came up with the title and the ethos of the album.
You come out the gate swinging on this record with the song "Too Much." Tell us the story of that song.
It was the first song I wrote for the record, and it's basically a song about feeling overwhelmed in life, and just being like, how do I sort through all of these things I'm feeling, and kind of coming to the realization that sometimes it's just too much to hold. That song kind of became the thesis for the rest of the record.
