Adeem the Artist joins ‘Proud Radio with Hunter Kelly’ to talk about what inspired songs off their sophomore album ‘White Trash Revelry’. They also discuss the process of creating a community around this record, and protesting against drag show protestors.
Listen to the episode in-full anytime on-demand at apple.co/_ProudRadio on Apple Music Country.
Adeem the Artist on their growth from their debut album to ‘White Trash Revelry’.
I think I got blindsided by the success of ‘Cast Iron Pansexual’ in a lot of ways. I think that it was a very unrefined project. I did not spend a lot of time perfecting those songs. They were a record of a moment of me processing things.
The new record, I think these songs have just been through so much more with me. For one, half the record has been written longer than ‘Cast Iron Pansexual’ was even an idea. Those songs were sitting around, like I want to do something with these, but they’re too good to record them myself, they need something more than I can give them, I know that. For the rest of the writing process, especially for the songs that were written after ‘Cast Iron,’ there was definitely this like, “Oh, I can go into the places that societally we want to hide from everybody else,” and for some reason that’s really cool in music.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the giving or receiving end of a, “How are you,” that’s taken too earnestly? And there’s a bit of a TMI response, that you can’t catch before it pours out of you, or you get awash with it when you were just not expecting so much vulnerability. But that’s how it feels a little bit, like you can really dig in with your heels though in songwriting, and go to some really dark and sacred spaces that you might not casually invite people into. Through the art medium, it becomes really accessible for them.
On creating a community for their most recent album.
It was just a lightning bolt of a situation. The band that came together for this, nobody had ever met each other in real life before. I flew everybody into Knoxville. I went and picked them up from the airport or whatever, and then we all just assembled, and it was like, all right, let’s do this. And the pool of people that we drew from were all really people who were doing the work, in all the ways that seemed meaningful. It was just lucky that we had such a great energy, and such a good meshing. But Joy [Clark] was such… I didn’t know that she would do it. She wasn’t even… I’d be too afraid to ask her at this point probably, because of all the cool stuff she’s done since then. At the Black Opry House, I saw her play with Lily Lewis, I saw her play with some other folks, and just her ability to just find the pocket, find the space where she needed to give space, and where she needed to chime in, she’s got a very intuitive way of playing.
Adeem the Artist talks about drag show protestors and the backlash for their song ‘Going to Hell’.
I got the attention of these, I’m not even going to say who they are, but they’re just right-wing activists, they’re pretty violent people. These are people who are so driven by fear, it’s their catalyst for every emotional experience they have. It came at a time where my friends were throwing an all ages drag show, and they were going to protest, these people were showing up, they were going to protest and everything, so I made a video about it.
Apparently, there’s a law on the books in Tennessee state that you cannot have a drag show within a thousand feet of a church. Living in east Tennessee, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single business that’s not within a thousand feet of church. So this is kind of by design, this way of oppressing freedom, the thing that they’re always talking about being real champions of.
So I made some really explicit statements. I showed up to counter-protest. They didn’t show up. Only one priest showed up, she was very sweet, and loved on us, and told us how much she believed in what we were doing, and how sorry she was that people stood against us. That’s another thing about all this, everybody wants to frame this as Christians versus queer people, and that’s patently false. This is Republicans versus seats they cannot occupy unless they create some fake enemy for the people. That’s all any of this is. You’ve been a victim of this, and seen the mechanism in operation, especially as it gears up close to midterms and all this stuff. It’s by design.
Where the song, “Middle of a Heart” came from
How do I talk about this? Well, for starters, one of my first jobs was working as a CNA. One of my best friends in high school had cerebral palsy, and he was like, “I could put you more than Dick’s Sporting Goods if you want to come hang out and play video games.” And I was like, “Yeah, that sounds great.” So I did that.
He accidentally decided that’s what I was going to do for a job for the first 10 years of my life or so, as a grownup. And so when I moved to Tennessee, that’s what I kept doing. I got a job working for this guy named Bob. I went out to his house, I didn’t like him, he was really gruff, slept with a loaded gun in bed with him all the time, laid in bed all the time watching Fox News.
We’d sit and have bacon and eggs together, and watch the news, watch the birds. We’d talk about his life. And that’s what we did every day, that was just our life together, me and Bob. He was racist as hell. He was deeply, deeply homophobic. He would always find a way to say the wrong thing worse.
But I loved him. I loved him very deeply. He made me love him. That was the worst part of it, he made me love him. He was, in so many ways, a figure shaped by fear and sorrow. So much of his life left him, his children died, his wife died. He told me horrible stories about the war, about things he did as an officer. He told me some terrible stories, but he also told me so many things that humanized him for me in a way that nobody on that side had ever been really humanized before. He made himself really vulnerable. He thought of me as a kid, he told me that many times. He was like a dad to me in a lot of ways.
I quit working for him, and he was like, “You going to come over?” So I just kept going. We just kept being friends. I didn’t work for him anymore. I’d still go make bacon and eggs, and have bacon and eggs with him, and talk about the birds.
He taught me a lot, to remember there’s a human being on the other side of all those horrible ideological ideas that are harmful. Yeah, I wrote this song about him. I wrote this song about all the ways that the systems of masculinity, the systems of power, who gets power, who keeps it, what it means to have power, to hold it, what it means to have that responsibility, that’s the stuff that I saw as the gun. In a lot of ways, that’s what I saw, like a world so founded on scarcity and fear, and that followed him his whole life. I saw that. I saw him get in bed and never get up again. And then one day he just was gone.
