Eric Burton (left) and Adrian Quesada in Nashville. The two musicians, who make up psychedelic-soul duo Black Pumas, are up for a Grammy.
David McClisterBlack Pumas’ journey to the Grammys began with a potentially awkward phone call. In late 2017, long-standing Austin-based guitarist and producer Adrian Quesada needed a singer for some new instrumentals he’d been recording. On the recommendation of a mutual friend, he left a message for a local talent, Eric Burton, who had virtually no track record in the business. Burton hadn’t heard of Quesada, either, and he didn’t bother to call back — until some friends clued him in to Quesada’s high-end reputation. “They said, ‘Dude, hit that guy back up,’” recalls Burton. “They kind of scoffed at me for leaving him hanging for so long.” Finally, Burton dialed the number — “I felt, ‘Hey, this could be an opportunity to make some money’” — and Quesada, who was driving at the time, answered. “He sang over the phone, and I couldn’t hear him that well,” Quesada says. “But his passion and energy were so contagious.”
This unlikely pairing of two men 13 years apart in age, and coming from very different musical backgrounds, paid off: At this year’s Grammy Awards, Black Pumas will be competing in the Best New Artist category against the formidable likes of Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, Yola, Maggie Rogers, and Rosalia, all of whom have sold more records than Black Pumas have. “I don’t even know how we made it onto [the list],” says Burton. “We feel like this is a battle against a bunch of Goliaths. It really is kind of mind-boggling.”
Then again, surprise twists are part of the group’s DNA. Growing up in Laredo, Texas, Quesada ignored his parents’ music in favor of hip-hop and hair-metal. He moved to Austin to study art in college, playing guitar in a punk-jazz act, the Blue Noise Band, before circling back to Mexican dance music from the Fifties and Sixties. Eventually, he and his group joined forces with another, more funk-oriented local band, the Blimp, to form Grupo Fantasma.
Quesada would log nearly 15 years with that limber, multi-faceted group, who played a cool, jacked-up version of traditional music. Their reputation growing, Grupo Fantasma were recruited by Prince for a series of dates at his Glam Slam club; Prince also jammed with them at a few VIP gigs in 2007. And in 2011, after losing out on an earlier Grammy, Grupo walked away with an award for Best Latin Rock, Alternative or Urban Album for 2010’s El Existential.
Even when he was in the band, Quesada was restless; early on, he started a harder, more metallic side project, Brownout, which released a bunch of Black Sabbath covers under the name Brown Sabbath. In the years after Grupo Fantasma’s Grammy win, Quesada reached a point where he felt he had to leave his musical mothership for good, in part due to the group’s rigorous road work. “I was starting to have a hard time committing to that schedule,” he says. “More than that, it was just a very specific palette. It was difficult [to leave], honestly, because it had turned into a family. But I never felt like the primary songwriter or anything, and if I was going to invest that much time in anything, I want to be more directly involved. It was time.”
For another side project, Quesada joined up with My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan in the one-off band Spanish Gold in 2014. But he remained in search of an indefinable sound to call his own, and had begun working on his own instrumentals with local musicians when Burton entered the picture.
Burton’s story had started across the country, in Los Angeles. Living in a religious household with his mother in the San Fernando Valley, he heard more gospel than pop music. “I grew up kind of sheltered through the church,” he says. “As far as secular music, I just heard what was on the radio while we were doing chores.” The rare non-gospel record he remembers from that time is Pras’ 1998 hit “Ghetto Supastar”; his first CD purchase was 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. (Though not a huge hip-hop fan, he loved 50’s catchy tunes.)
As part of his high school’s theater-geek crowd, Burton envisioned himself an actor, and thanks to an industry connection, he landed a bit part in the music-themed Keira Knightley/Mark Ruffalo movie Begin Again in 2013. Through that, he met former New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, who encouraged Burton’s music side. After a brief trip to college in Arizona, Burton wound up back in L.A, selling T-shirts while busking on the Santa Monica Pier. He and two musician friends played up and down the West Coast before driving to Austin, where Burton decided to stay.
When he first heard Burton’s name suggested as a possible collaborator, Quesada was perplexed. “I looked him up, and the first thing I thought was, ‘How have I not heard of this guy?’” says Quesada, who watched YouTube videos of Burton singing in clubs. “I pride myself on knowing. But I thought it was awesome. I love that I had no preconceived notions of this guy.”
When the two finally met at Quesada’s Austin studio, it became immediately clear that they could complement each other. Burton’s smooth but gritty voice and original songs, like his rainbow-themed “Colors” (“My sisters and my brothers/See ’em like no other”), fit alongside the tracks Quesada had already cut, which were heavy on old-school electric pianos, live drums, and Quesada’s rumbly surf guitar. Quesada enhanced the classic-soul mood by introducing his younger collaborator to vintage R&B. “It made me want to go back and listen and figure out how to project the way Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye could,” Burton says. “Adrian really appreciated the tonality of my voice and the way I was reaching to embody these older artists that fit the canvas he was giving to me.”
Quesada agrees, but begs off the old-school comparisons. “We didn’t really set out to be a soul revival band or anything like that,” he says. “I wanted the soul to be that it came from our souls, not so much a carbon copy of any particular era or artists.”
Soon enough, the duo had a name, Black Pumas, inspired by Quesada’s fascination with jaguars (his studio has a jaguar logo) and a play on the Black Panthers. The moment of creative truth came on stage, when they debuted their act at an Austin club. “I remember telling my wife not to come — give us a few weeks, because it might suck the first couple of times,” Quesada recalls. Quesada assumed Burton would be seated with his guitar, but to his — and Burton’s — surprise, the singer opted to stand up and perform, drawing on his theatrical background. “When I got to put the guitar down, I found it was very freeing,” says Burton. “It elevated what we were doing.”
“Everything I had ever seen, Eric was playing troubadour, singer-songwriter style with a guitar,” says Quesada. “I didn’t even know that he had James Brown-level frontman chops. As soon as we stepped off the stage the first time, we pulled each other aside and said, ‘There’s a spark here.’”
From there, buzz began building. Black Pumas released “Black Moon Rising” on Spotify, scored a single deal and then a full-album contract with ATO Records (the label co-founded by Dave Matthews and currently home to My Morning Jacket, Brittany Howard, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard). About a year ago, they scored a Best New Band award at the Austin Music Awards and released their debut, Black Pumas, a few months later.
Next came the band’s left-field Grammy nomination, which remains a mystery, even to those who work with the band. “I have no idea how that happened,” says ATO head Jon Salter, who submitted the band’s record for consideration but heard nothing more until the nomination was announced. “Maybe they wanted some guitar rock in there.” Sales certainly weren’t a factor: To date, Black Pumas has only sold around 23,000 combined physical and digital copies, according to Alpha Data.
But Quesada’s Grammy history didn’t hurt, and it’s also likely the group benefited from the Recording Academy’s secretive blue-ribbon panel, which whittles down dozens of nominees in the four leading categories to ensure those categories retain a patina of cool. “When the nominations came out and I saw Black Pumas, I said, ‘What the fuck? This makes no sense,'” says a label executive who participates in the Grammy process. “I pride myself in knowing every record that comes out and listening to everything. But then I thought about it and I thought, ‘That’s kind of cool.’ They and Yola are really good acts.” (The Recording Academy declined to comment on the process.)
The Puma’s next stop will be Los Angeles for the awards show. Quesada already has one Grammy appearance under his belt, for Grupo Fantasma’s first nomination. But for Burton, whose last day job was delivering packages for Amazon for $150 a day, the trip and the A-list competition are a reminder that he’s now in much bigger leagues than he even imagined. “I still can’t believe we’re part of the conversation, because we haven’t been a band very long,” says Burton. “I’ve had to be more professional, or else I’m going to get fired.”
ON THE RISE
I've sometimes felt as though every piece of music is an exploration of our perception of time. What sparked the idea of focusing on time as the main focus for your new work?
The focus on time in this work emerged quite unconsciously.
What actually happened is that the title came last, after I received an email from John (Benedict ndr) regarding the production timeline. In the middle of that email, those two Latin words appeared, and for me, as an Italian reading them in an English context, they had an almost striking, illuminating effect.
At that point, I went back to the pieces I had written, listening again to how they had been developed and recorded, and also considering the broader time span over which the entire EP had been composed. It became clear to me that Tempo Fugit was the most fitting title to represent the work.
I've been listening to Tangerine Dream's Zeit a lot recently but that album is based on a very specific concept of time, as pioneered in the West bei Parmenides, that time does not, actually, move. What are your own reflections on time?
Time is perhaps the most objective construct that exists in nature, and yet the most paradoxical aspect of it is that it is entirely perceived in a subjective way.
At times, time seems not to pass at all; at other times, it rushes forward, or even feels as if it stops. But this sense of flow, its rhythm, its pace, is not determined by time itself, it is determined by us.
This is precisely why I see it as such a fundamentally objective dimension. It is inescapable, it is constant, and yet our perception transforms something absolutely objective into something deeply subjective.
Time is not just the medium through which music flows, it can also be a musical tool in its own right. How did you work with it for Tempo Fugit?
For this EP, I worked with time in two main ways.
On one hand, there are pieces built around a very clear and explicit temporal reference, a metronome. On the other, there are works that were recorded almost entirely without any fixed time reference. This applies both to the piano pieces and to the electronic ones.
In some tracks, the presence of a grid allows for a very precise perception of construction, almost as if the composition were being built brick by brick. In others, there is a deliberate need to remove any external reference and instead follow what I would describe as an inner sense of time.
These two approaches reflect the way I usually compose, and they are both clearly present and articulated throughout this EP.
Many contemporary composers have tried – or are still trying to make – time transparent by opting for extreme lengths. Your music, however, is quite to the point, on your earlier van Gogh EP even radically so. What is satisfying about concision for you?
I don’t usually approach composition by asking myself how long a piece should be.
When I work on immersive projects, of course, there are specific durations dictated by the storyboard. In those cases, the shorter the piece, the greater the risk of it sounding like a jingle. It becomes more difficult to preserve an emotional depth rather than just leaving behind a catchy motif.
At the same time, I find it very interesting to impose, in a way, constraints of brevity. I have written pieces that last twenty minutes or more, though they are often less suited to streaming platforms, and in some cases they have not even been officially released, as they belong to installations or more experimental contexts.
On the other hand, I also created a collection of one hundred one-minute pieces as part of a creative exercise called “100 days.” The idea was to repeat a creative act every day for one hundred consecutive days. My approach was to sit at the piano, even before having my coffee, and write exactly one minute of music.
Over time, this became a fascinating process. In the beginning, I relied on a timer, constantly checking the clock. But toward the end, I developed an internal sense of that one-minute span. Despite differences in tonality, meter, and tempo, I could almost instinctively feel when to begin and when to end each piece.
That experience taught me that duration is not something I impose from the outside, but something that can be internalized and shaped from within.
I understood that the process on Tempo Fugi was very different from piece to piece, with some finished quickly while others taking a lot of time. What is it about some works, do you feel, that makes them harder to nail down – how would you describe the sensation that something is “done”?
In this case, it was not really about how long it took to finish each piece. The tracks were written at different times, sometimes even years apart.
What happened later, when I listened back to them, was that I felt the need to create a stronger sense of cohesion across the EP. By “cohesion,” I mean introducing elements that could give more consistency to the role each track plays within the overall narrative.
So I revisited older demos that had been sitting in my archive for quite some time, pieces I still considered valid, and approached them almost as a form of rearrangement within the context of the EP. It was not about struggling to complete a piece, but rather about shaping it so that it could fully belong to this specific body of work.
For me, a piece is finished when I feel a strong coherence in the message I want to convey, when every sound has found its place, and when the musical discourse flows naturally and feels complete. It is not something I can define in purely rational terms. It is, above all, a sensation.
Since the process for Tempo Fugit was quite extensive, were there possibly overlaps between tracks composed for this project and the Van Gogh show? If so, how similar do pieces composed at the same time but for different projects tend to be?
There was no overlap. The music for the Van Gogh project we are referring to was written before the pandemic, whereas the material for Tempo Fugit dates back, at most, to about two or three years ago.
If we talk about similarities between pieces, I would distinguish between two different aspects.
From a purely musical perspective, meaning harmony and melody, it is actually more likely for similarities to emerge over time rather than within the same period. When you develop a certain awareness in your musical language, it naturally creates a kind of continuity, almost like a diary of melodic and harmonic ideas that evolves over the years.
On the other hand, pieces written within the same timeframe may resemble each other more from a sound design perspective. For example, if you are exploring a particular instrument, a specific synthesizer, a new effect, or even a certain way of miking the piano, these elements can shape the sonic identity of multiple pieces. Even choices like register or tonality can be influenced by those explorations.
So, if there is a form of resemblance within the same period, it is more likely to emerge from the sound and the tools being used, rather than from the underlying musical writing itself.
The release opens with a piece called “Repetition,” which called to mind a sentence by Ryoko Sekiguchi: “Time doesn’t pass, it returns.” How do you see that yourself – and how do you use repetition and variation in your work?
I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.
The presence of a pattern becomes almost a kind of subtle game with rationality, with perception, with the listener’s intelligence. It invites a process of recognition, almost like solving a riddle.
This is what I find particularly compelling about minimalism. An idea is explored, listened to, gradually exhausted, then transformed, and the cycle begins again.
Since one part of the project seems to have been to use music to capture specific moments in time – how do you see the relationship between the moment and the music created in it? Quite often, sad music gets written in happy times of an artist's life and vice versa, so it seems like a complex relationship.
I agree that it is a complex relationship, and I would even extend it beyond the idea of writing sad music in happy times, or happy music in sad ones, as a way of balancing or compensating.
For me, it also involves the relationship with instruments. My work moves between acoustic instruments, like the piano, and more electronic forms of production, and I often experience this dialogue between emotional states and sound through them.
For instance, I might be drawn to more experimental electronic instruments during a more rational phase, while in a more instinctive or emotional moment I might turn to something structurally more defined, like the piano. In this sense, the contrast or interplay between different emotional states becomes symbiotic with the choice of instruments.
So yes, I would definitely describe this relationship as complex, but also deeply fascinating.
Luca Longobardi Interview Image (c) the artist
“I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.“
