MOJO PRESENTS
Taking soul, gospel and R&B into the future, BL ACK PUM AS are the odd couple dream team with The Rolling Stones’ stamp of approval. Their second album promises next-level scenes, as long as their clashing personalities don’t generate too much friction. “It’s what makes the creative sparks fly,” they tell ANDREW PERRY.
Cool for cats: Black Pumas’ Eric Burton (left) and Adrian Quesada put in some screen time, 2023.
Photography by JODY DOMINGUE
Jody Domingue
ONE LAZY AFTERNOON IN 2009, 18-YEAR-OLD ERIC BURTON DOZED OFF ON HIS uncle’s roof in Alamogordo, New Mexico, an arid desert city one hundred miles up from the USA’s southern border. Upon waking at dusk, the young musical-theatre student reached for the acoustic guitar on which his uncle, Steve Harrison, a contemporar y Christian recording artist, had been teaching him to write songs.
“I only had three or four strings on there,” recalls Burton today, now 32 and the frontman of Black Pumas, “but I was able to pick out four notes that felt really nice together, and I just started singing to what I was seeing at the time – the colours of the beautiful New Mexico sunset.”
Burton’s grandparents were missionaries, initially based in Philadelphia, but after a period in Liberia, west Africa, settled in California, establishing a nomadic family business of updating church musical programmes along the West Coast.
“I was just getting into journalling my own feelings,” Burton continues, speaking to MOJO in a friend’s kitchen in his adopted hometown of Austin, Texas. “I’d been hired by a Presbyterian church in Alamogordo to lead their hymns. That day, I think I was tr ying to write my own version of a hymn – for me, from my highest self, to connect with the people that surround me.”