Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It’s not so very long ago that life was hard for 47-year-old Adrian Quesada. Though Grupo Fantasma, the Latin funk band in which he played guitar, were nominated for a Grammy award in 2009 and won one in 2011, he wasn’t exactly living the high life. “I’d be leaving for 100 days [to tour], and my wife was having to work two jobs back home with a kid. That puts a lot of stress on a person and on family life. Then I would get home from tour and have to deliver pizzas at night. I started to wonder: ‘Why am I beating myself up and putting this stress on my home life?’”
Things are different now. Since he and singer Eric Burton teamed up as Black Pumas in 2018, there have been six more Grammy nominations, this time accompanied by mainstream success, the pair’s inclusive, open-hearted take on psychedelic soul evidently having struck a chord. “My wife doesn’t have to work two jobs now,” Quesada says with a smile. “That certainly takes a little bit of the pressure off.”
Though not a huge chart hit, Black Pumas’ eponymous debut album was a slow burner, bringing people to their explosive live shows and winning unlikely admirers (Harry Styles was spotted in the audience at the 2021 Grammys, singing along as they performed their single “Colors”). The newly released follow-up, Chronicles of a Diamond, is even better, more expansive and adventurous.
Burton, 34, says it reflects the simple fact he’s now seen an awful lot more of the world than he had before he and Quesada came together. “I was writing from a place of experiencing travelling and different cultures, and the camaraderie of being in a band.” The chemistry between the pair, Burton says, “completely transformed the band from what you hear on the first record to what it is now. We went from a very smooth kind of R&B to a very cool way of inflecting our rock’n’roll approach.”
Quesada and Burton are very distinct personalities, so interviewing them separately turns out to be preferable. When I first saw Black Pumas perform a few years ago, Quesada played so many guitar solos it was easy to assume he was the flamboyant one. In fact, he is very focused in conversation, answering questions directly. Burton, by contrast, flips all over the place, his sentences long and flowery.
Theirs is a partnership of professional circumstance that worked out, not one that came from years of friendship. Burton grew up in California, and decided to trek east with some friends in 2015, ending up in Austin, Texas, where Quesada lived. “It was really hard for me to feel like I belonged in California,” Burton says. “It’s just so oversaturated — the playing field for musicians is massive. And I received an opportunity to travel with a couple of guys I was busking with.”
It was 18 months after his arrival in Austin in 2015 before a mutual friend put him in touch with Quesada, who was looking for a singer. Burton was delivering packages and busking, not finding a break, but still felt he had made the right decision. “As soon as I got to Austin I felt a sense of resolve, and the absence of the pressure you get in a bigger city filled with musicians. It was more of a feasible situation for cultivating artists.”
When Burton visited Quesada’s studio, singer and guitarist gelled immediately. But then came the tricky task of learning to be in a band together. “We got thrown into the deep end,” Quesada says. “We went from hardly knowing each other to playing a residency once a week for a month, which turned into two months.” And then they went out on tour.
It’s sometimes forgotten that a band is a workplace. So imagine spending 200 days a year in a van with your colleagues, and doing your day’s work every evening together. “There’s no free personal space, especially early on, when we were in a passenger van or a cargo van,” Quesada says. “If somebody’s having a bad day, they’re literally right next to you. If somebody’s having an argument with their spouse or partner, they’re staring right in front of you, and then you’re supposed to work later that day. So that’s a good crash course in getting to know somebody.”
As a duo of one black man and one Latin man playing a form of classic American music, it’s tempting to see Black Pumas as representing something. That might be why they were one of the acts chosen to take part in Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration concert in 2021 (albeit via a pre-recorded live set on an empty soundstage due to social distancing restrictions at the time). Do they find that people have political expectations of them?
“For sure, there have been times where I feel like people are trying to project what they want to see on to us,” Quesada says. “We started to feel that particularly with the success of ‘Colors’, when people were projecting their own meaning on to it, then getting angry if it wasn’t the correct meaning. We started to get asked: ‘Why are you shying away from politics?’ But we’re not.
“I do think we have a responsibility — I have a responsibility as a citizen, first and foremost. I’m involved in state and local politics here with my wife. We’re active participants but the band was not formed with a political message in mind.”
‘Chronicles of a Diamond’ is released on ATO and available now
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend
