My interview with Mike Adams is up now over at D FrontRow, the official arts and culture blog of D Magazine. I sat down with Mike in anticipation of his upcoming show in Dallas to talk songwriting, hustling in the age of social media, and the occasional meatball in the pecan pie of life.
“It’s like, if life is a big old pecan pie but the guy who made it stuck a meatball or a sardine in there every once in a while, just for a prank. It’s awful, and you don’t want it to happen to you, but it is pretty funny, you know?”
My latest for Oxford Karma is a profile on one of my all-time favorite artists, the unsinkable Charlie Wilson. Here, I reflect on Wilson’s legacy as a musical innovator and take a close look at his 2005 R&B masterpiece, Charlie, Last Name Wilson.
“This album shouldn’t work. The thing shouldn’t hang together so seamlessly. A soft-spoken, 53-year-old preacher’s son from Oklahoma, whose last hit single was released in 1982, shouldn’t still have this sort of fire in his voice. He shouldn’t be able to rebound from those strung-out years on the street with such poise, bouncing back into the pop arena as if he had never left it in the first place. This record shouldn’t be so compulsively playable, so delicious, 10 years after the fact.”
My feature story on multimedia artist Eli Casiano is up now at Oxford Karma. Casiano’s art grapples with notions of identity and belonging as a brown face in a white space.
“I remember wanting to wear what I thought were ‘white people’ clothes — Tommy Hilfiger, or whatever,” he said. “I wanted to eat what they ate. It was a crazy jealousy I had towards [white] kids. And to them, I was always ‘not that kind of Mexican,’ if that makes sense. ‘White-Mexican.’ I didn’t talk with an accent, and my parents didn’t work at the egg farm or saddle shop.”
