England-born, Washington D.C.-based producer and soulful indie rocker Bartees Strange spent years holding tight to a musical Pandora’s Box of audio files in a folder simply entitled “horror.”
It lurked in the background as he released his acclaimed sophomore album, Farm to Table, in 2022. Eventually, he relented and hunkered down to explore and set free the depths of his own challenging personal cycles. Then he unleashed Horror upon the world.
Nearly eight months after releasing his latest LP to 4AD Records, Strange talked to me on the day of his freshest drop — an EP called Shy Bairns Get Nowt, which deepens but softens his most recent soulful searching. His experimentation with collaborator and lauded producer Jack Antonoff continues, even as he slips into a more natural mode on this latest projects. It feels like now that the “horror” has been unleashed, Strange is taking a breath and letting it go.
On the morning of our interview, he shared that he had been reading Stephen King in the park while waiting to chat. By the time our conversation ended, he was talking about how the Vivarium, where he’s set to perform Nov. 2 in Milwaukee, shares a name with one of his favorite horror movies.
His was one of the most full-circle interviews I’ve ever had, and it felt on-track with Strange coming to terms with his own cycles and circles on his latest full-length. It underlined his notion that to get through life’s challenges, sometimes you need to take what’s coming and let it pass through. Sometimes, the horror is just part of life’s journey.
Bartees Strange interview highlights
On cyclical journeys and facing your fear (or horror):
I feel like for most people, they face the same things over and over and over. If you don't kind of move through them, you stymie your self-growth.
I was thinking about old mean people — people that age and are kind of crotchety and have a tough outlook on the world. I always wondered if they're that way because they just never moved through this cyclical thing and that they just eventually just accepted the fear, and the fear ate them alive and turned them into this thing that's kind of hard to be around. And I didn't want to be like that.
Having a therapist is great for things like this, where it's like you have these challenges and you're trying to face them and work through them. But I think another thing that I've kind of learned in the last couple years is sometimes life is gonna life. And you’ll have to just take what is coming, and it's going to hit you very hard, and you just have to feel every inch of it and then pass it through.
It’s just accepting these feelings and being like, “These feelings aren't necessarily facts, but they're very real right now.” And you just let them work on you, and then you push them out. I feel like I was able to push them out onto this record. I feel [that] for other people, pushing it out can look totally different, but that was like one of the exercises of this record was to kind of examine things like this.
Why the word “horror” encapsulates that particular batch of songs:
It had that name really early. I started working on the songs \way before they came out, kind of when I had my second album coming out, and I had both albums while I was working on them in parallel. One collection of songs just felt really intimidating to me, and I filed it in a file on my computer just called “horror.” I was just like, “This is too much. I don't want to even face these things about myself right now. I just need to finish this record and turn it in.”
So that's why I did Farm to Table, and I was like, “I just need to get something in and move on with my life, and I will come back to these at another time,” which is kind of emblematic of the cycle I was talking about where sometimes things come up, and you can choose to face them or not. And I was like, “No, I don't want to, it hurts too much.”
So, after Farm to Table and all that concluded, I kind of was like, “Okay, well, let me just look at this now,” and that kind of became the process or started the process of me finishing that record. From the jump, it was always an intimidating piece of work.
Also, when I first started coming up with it, I didn't feel like I had all of the skills to finish it. And that was also kind of scary — where there were things I was hearing that I didn’t actually know how to do, and I was like, “I just can't start figuring it out right now.”
On enlisting producer Jack Antonoff to capture the precise sonics of Horror:
I’d been working on the songs for almost three years, and I was kind of coming to my wit’s end. I was playing a festival in D.C., and I met him there, and we kind of just became fast friends. We started working together. I worked on some stuff for his record, and he worked on some stuff for mine, and he gave a handful of the songs on the record — just like that push over the top.
His ideas kind of shook everything loose and allowed us to be able to finish the album, which was really amazing. It really blossomed when Jack came into the process. These small things can mean a lot. In the chorus [of “Sober”], there’s these pads and layers of reverbs and synths that are happening beneath the drums that are kind of being triggered off the drums in a way that you can't really, really tell. But if you take it off, you could definitely tell.
There are other songs on the record where he put his foot in, like he was able to create on top of the scaffolding of the production that I had already done — like make the big things bigger and the small things smaller. It was more of a game of dynamic arc, like we have all the right pieces, but when do we want to put the pieces in? We don’t need all the pieces all the time, you know? Honestly, I learned a lot working with him. It was awesome.
About his new EP, Shy Bairns Get Nowt:
I think these are just beautiful melodic songs, and I feel myself kind of being pulled in that direction — just a little less flashy, you know? Getting to the heart and soul of things, just like focusing on those vocal melodies and really giving those the push, not worrying too much about it being perfect, either.
The title is Northern English. It's something a lot of people in Northern England say, and I think definitely in Scotland too, but it kinda means “closed mouths don't get fed,” which I love.
I was on tour a couple months ago in England, and we were getting this EP ready, and I wasn't really happy with the title or the cover. I was like, “Eh, I still don't know, but I'll go with this if this is what happens.” I was just hanging out with some people after the show, and one of the women I was with just said it. And I was like, “What does that mean?” And she told me, and I was like, “That is the coolest. I love that. I love that. I'm gonna call it that.”
