Bartees Strange needs a new hobby. Back when he wasn’t playing football in high school, studying communications in college, or working a nine-to-five at the FCC, he devoted every free hour to music. Now, his only job is writing, recording, and performing songs that defy the gravity of genre to scale some of the highest ambitions on the planet — and that leaves him with time to kill.
He’s thinking of taking up rock climbing.
“I’ve been watching all the documentaries,” Strange, 33, says between spoonfuls of pho on a gray late-March afternoon in Brooklyn. He’s never actually been rock climbing, he’s quick to add: “I’m horrified of heights, which is probably why I want to do it.”
Whatever Strange wants to do, odds are he’ll pull it off. That doggedness is a big part of what has made him, in just two short years, one of the most riveting voices in rock and beyond. He announced himself in March 2020 with Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, less a covers EP than a wholesale reimagining of five songs by the National, one of his favorite bands. Seven months later, in the thick of the pandemic, he released his debut album, Live Forever. It was pop punk, indie rock, hip-hop, emo; it was R&B, psych-noise, deep house, country. It was all of this, seamlessly distributed across 11 tracks, and sometimes packed into one perfect song, like the instant stunner “Boomer.”
Jamie Coletta, Strange’s co-manager, remembers hearing Live Forever for the first time in 2019: “At first, frankly, I was scared of it. As someone in the music business, you’re always looking for something like this… It was like hearing the future.”
Live Forever was a fixture on critics’ lists in 2020, and it put Strange at the center of a bidding war that eventually landed him a deal with 4AD, the venerable U.K. label that will release Strange’s second album, Farm to Table, on June 17.
Bartees Strange wrote some of the key songs for his new album at the same London flat where TV on the Radio once worked
Daniel Dorsa for Rolling Stone. styling by Marissa Pelly. Top and bottom by Angel Chen. Shoes by Dr. Martens. Jewelry by Bernard James.
The new album came as a surprise to Strange, who was working on an entirely different LP when this one sprang into being last fall. It was a time of big change: opening for Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, upgrading his Ford Transit to a roomier ride, flying out to London to record at 4AD’s studio, thinking about the where-are-you-going, where-have-you-been whirlwind of his life.
Fifteen years earlier, in 2006, a young Bartees Cox Jr. had channel surfed into TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe howling “Wolf Like Me” on Letterman — a crystallizing moment that gave …….
Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bartees-strange-interview-new-album-1347462/