Out-of-the-box success can be a double-edged sword — and the Recording Academy had a catbird seat to the Black Pumas' rise.
Back during the 2020 GRAMMYs, the psychedelic soul duo of Eric Burton and Adrian Quesada was nominated for Best New Artist. The following year, the deluxe edition of their 2019 debut, Black Pumas, was nominated for Album Of The Year, and its lead single "Colors" received nods for Record Of The Year and Best American Roots Performance.
Their acclaim only swelled. At the 2022 GRAMMYs, their fly-on-the-wall release Capitol Cuts - Live From Studio A garnered nominations for Best Rock Album, and for "Know You Better (Live From Capitol Studio A)," Best Rock Performance.
Three years of GRAMMY nominations, for essentially one set of songs — this was a downright surreal way to kick off a career. "It's not something you ever take for granted," Quesada, their guitarist, as well as a composer and producer with an array of other projects, tells GRAMMY.com.
So when it came time to craft a follow-up to Black Pumas and its sister release, naturally, the pressure was on.
"When we first started working on music together… we were just making something we thought was cool and we wanted to listen to," Quesada says. "On this one, we had to remind ourselves a lot that that's the formula we need to stick to."
Released Oct. 27, the Quesada-produced, Shawn Everett-mixed Chronicles of a Diamond simultaneously plays to the band's strengths and chart new territory. Songs like "Mrs. Postman" and "Gemini Sun" feel meatier, more limbic, more exploratory.
"We just have so many more ideas, and the musical connection is a lot heavier and deeper now," Quesada says, noting that he and Burton had just met when Black Pumas started taking off. "So, it was really important to get some of that music out there."
Ahead of the album's release, Quesada spoke with GRAMMY.com about the genesis of Chronicles, the Pumas' adventures with the Recording Academy, breaking out of his comfort zone on the guitar, and much more.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
I remember meeting you guys on the red carpet at the 2022 MusiCares Person Of The Year event, honoring Joni Mitchell. You both were very stoked for the album you were working on. So how would you trace that arc of time leading to Chronicles of a Diamond?
A lot happened. We were on tour a lot, but we thought it was really important to show this new music we'd been working on. We were on tour so much for the first album, and we were kind of largely defined by it. So we knew that we had these cool ideas and these different directions and things that we wanted to take things.
And I would say late last year and the beginning of this year for the first five, six months was really when things kicked into high gear with this album really coming into focus and wrapping up.
Can you talk about feeling "defined" by your last album?
Obviously, it did really well, so it was hard to complain, and people reacted to it and connected with the music, but it was a moment in time. It was 2017. Eric and I hardly even knew each other.
I think Eric has said it was like the "handshake period." We were getting to know each other and we weren't even a band yet. We hadn't even played a show when we worked on most of it, so it was really like a studio project — something we kind of did for fun. And it caught legs, took off, and we decided to focus on it.
We were on tour so long and it was like we were still defined by this music we did in 2017.Even last year we were like, "God, that was four, five years ago.
You guys were in the GRAMMYs machine the entire time. Can you talk about spending this crucial, pivotal period in the Recording Academy universe?
Oh, it was surreal to be recognized for all that, for something with such humble beginnings, something that we did in my home studio, not ever thinking or dreaming of GRAMMYs.
It's not why we set out to make the music. But when, all of a sudden, you're getting recognized in the same conversation of some incredible artists that are having either long legacy careers or breakout years — to be in that conversation of albums that are connecting not only with listeners, but with GRAMMY voters and just fans, is incredible. It's totally surreal.
I think we went to three GRAMMYs and every one, we never… [pauses] It's not something you ever take for granted.
How do you feel you guys built off your past successes, and honed the elements people really connected with?
One of the things we had to remind ourselves a lot was that when we made the first album we had literally no pressure, no management, no label, no anything.
I mean, eventually, by the time it came out, we did. But when we first started working on music together, we didn't really have any pressure around us; we were just making something we thought was cool and we wanted to listen to.
On this one, we had to remind ourselves a lot that that's the formula we need to stick to. Because we started to feel the pressure of following up an album like that, following up a song like "Colors" — a GRAMMY nomination and sales and accolades and things like that.
You kind of have to tune out all the noise and be able to focus on what it was that made you enjoy making it, and that made a bunch of people connect with it — that it was honest.
Can you talk about how the live experience was channeled into your performances in the studio?
We had the advantage of a couple of these songs being road tested — we were already playing them in our live show, and those just morphed.
With the first album, we recorded all these songs, and then the live show became something else. Each song changed radically over the course of every night; organically, things started to happen with the reaction of the crowd and certain moments, and the arrangements just changed.
This time around, we had the advantage of actually feeling these songs sort of change live. Then, we took that back into the studio, and kept that kind of live energy and those movements of what was happening at the live show, but utilized the studio as an instrument to make it.
It didn't have to sound live, but it felt live. So that was super advantageous this time around — all that being super road tested, and all that experience on tour.
When it's time to build off a past success, the demon of self-doubt tends to show up. If that happened, how did you beat it back?
Yeah, that was the hardest thing for all this. But I think having each other's backs, and pushing each other to make sure we were doing the best thing we could, I think was important. And I think we still wrestle [with it]... there are days you wake up with self-doubt.
A big thing for me was when you start to listen to the music with other people. When you're kind of head down in a zone, like in a studio dungeon cave all the time, that's when I think some of those doubts start to happen.
But as soon as you get out of that room and go play for [people], or somebody else comes in and listens, I feel like I listen in a different way. And if I see other people reacting in a good way, it suddenly makes me kind of perk up and be like, "Oh, OK, I was right. We were right on these instincts."
That's important, really getting our heads up and getting some other people around for their feedback. You kind of start to trust some other people.
How do you feel you've evolved as a guitarist and producer over the last several years?
One thing that was big for me this time around was to challenge myself, get out of my comfort zone and not repeat the same ideas.
I've been playing guitar for so long — and producing records — that I have certain little tricks that I know work. This time around, it was really important for me to just block my first instinct and play something different on the guitar — on this album in particular.
The easiest thing would be to play what I know works, but I would stop myself from playing something. I would even record the idea and then be like, No, delete that and let me come up with something different.
So, that was really important to me. Otherwise then it's not challenging myself — or challenging the listener at all, either.
Give me a tune where you felt you broke out of a box, guitar-wise.
I would say probably maybe like "Gemini Sun" or "Rock and Roll" on the album. The last two songs on the album were songs where I kind of was trying a different approach on something and trying to always fit in around what everybody else is playing.
I'm a big ensemble player. I used to be in a 10 piece band, so I really like when all the instruments complement each other. So, a lot of times, if everybody else has really heavy parts, I'm already trying to figure out where can I fit into all that — and not overplay, but still make my voice heard.
I love that quality in a rock band, where they operate more like a jazz band — every player a cog in the machine.
"Rock and Roll" was a good one, where it was such a different kind of song for us. We recorded that one mostly live — well, obviously, we overdubbed a lot of things on it, but what you hear on the album is mostly what we played in the studio.
We had just learned that on tour, went in there, and I think you can kind of hear the well-oiled machine going into the studio. And the best Pumas stuff with our band is [material where] every part just kind of fits like a glove.
Can you talk about how Shawn Everett helped to elevate the material and glue it into a cohesive whole?
Oh, yeah. That was our first time using an outside mixer, and Shawn was perfect. I've been a fan of his work for a long time. Shawn is not afraid to take chances or risks, and he also hadn't really heard the material like we had. We'd been working on it for years.
So, when he opened up the files, he just found these hidden treasures in there — I might've been too obsessed or scared at that point to ruin anything, to change anything.
And Shawn would just go and go in there and it was almost jarring at first, the first day we worked with him, to hear what he was doing, because we were like, "Oh, that's not how it goes." There's the demo-itis thing. We've been sitting with our rough mix for a long time.
But I feel like he brought another layer of artistry to it and helped shake things up a little bit in the final stages. He's a crazy, mad-genius engineer and he moves so fast that I was trying my best to steal secrets from him — from the wizard, but he just moves so fast when he's doing things and added a lot of character to it.
Do you remember any particular tunes or moments that Shawn cracked open in a scary but ultimately rewarding way?
In the song "Hello," there was a synthesizer thing that was just supposed to be slightly complementing the bass, and it was kind of one of those things that was supposed to be just felt but not really heard. Those are the little details we were obsessing over.
But then Shawn found that part and was, he's like, "That's cool." And he just completely cranked that part up where we were like, Oh God, that's crazy. That was kind of intense. We almost had to get up. I think we literally got up off our seats and were kind of uncomfortable. We were like, That's not good. I remember even our label was like, "What happened to that one? Did something go wrong?"
We dialed it back a little bit, but he found something dug in there that he kind of wanted to revolve a lot of the mix around. I could've spent a year mixing that, and I would've never done that — and I think it was for the better.
*Black Pumas (L-R: Adrian Quesada, Eric Burton). Photo: Jody Domingue*
How would you say your friendship and creative relationship with Eric has deepened throughout the years?
We've been through so much in the last few years. We had literally just met when we started to work on this music.
And at this point, when you are that embedded with somebody and toured so much — it's like you live together, you work together, you party together, you have ups and downs together. You see everybody through their best and their worst and everything. And really just strengthens the relationship you have with everybody that you're on the road with like that.
I think it translates into the music at some point — when there's more of an emotional connection between everybody and some history.
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