by Jeff Yerger (@jyergs)
“Woo!” What else can you say? It’s a moment of pure exultation. It’s the sound of someone who knows they’ve just struck gold, and it comes on smack in the middle of Live Forever, the great debut album by Bartees Strange, on the track “Stone Meadows.” It’s then and there you know that Strange is fucking feeling it. He knows he’s in the middle of a slam dunk.
Bartees Strange, real name Bartees Cox, Jr and mastermind behind Live Forever, has presumably lived what has felt like numerous lifetimes already. Born to an opera singer mom and military dad in Ipswich, England 1989, his family moved around constantly in his early years, living in Germany, Greenland, and a number of states across America before settling down in Mustang, Oklahoma, where he found himself surrounded by Christianity and racial tension. In recent interviews, Strange (who now lives in Washington D.C.) has talked about how he learned over the years not to pigeon-hole himself into any expectations set by society. It’s this non-conforming spirit that makes Live Forever so great.
When I first learned about this album and saw that Will Yip was involved (he only mastered it; Strange and his crew did the rest), I admit I had a certain expectation in mind. The first two singles – “Mustang” and “Boomer” – burst like fireworks and are very much within the Yip wheelhouse. As great as those songs are, they are red herrings, and they sound nothing like what comes next.
Instead, what comes next is a paella of influences and sounds that on paper shouldn’t work as well together as they do here. Like an indie-rock Kendrick Lamar, Strange doesn’t stay in one lane for very long. As Strange himself puts it in “Mossblerd,” “Genres keep us in our boxes […] Keep us from our options.”
To wit, Live Forever has a little bit of everything. There are traces of Kid A/Amnesiac-era Radiohead (“In A Cab”), early 2000s R&B (“Kelly Rowland”), soft-spoken Bon Iver (“Fallen For You”), 90s house (“Flagey”), and even grungy Death Grips-type shit (“Mossblerd”). The lines between genres are blurred from track to track and sometimes within the songs themselves, like in the aforementioned “Boomer” – one of the best songs of 2020 by far – which somehow manages to combine Outkast with early-Kings of Leon in the best way possible. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song like it.
In lesser hands, this genre-bouncing could make for a clumsy endeavor, but the thing that brings it all together is, well, Strange, who sings with power and earnest conviction no matter what setting he finds his voice in. He has fearlessly thrown everything he has into crafting these songs, and the result is something that could only be made by Bartees Strange.
Live Forever is the sound of something that can only exist when an artist is given the creative freedom to fulfill a vision. Something this beautiful, unique, and powerful can only come from someone confident in themselves, who isn’t bound by any restrictions. Why should there be any limitations? Why can’t Lil Nas X reach number one on the Billboard charts with a country-rap song that samples Nine Inch Nails? Why can’t a black kid from Oklahoma like both The National and TV on the Radio and write songs that sound like Paramore? We are no longer limited to the amount of music we can consume, and Live Forever is a reflection of this limitless reality. It is uniquely Bartees Strange, and it is nothing short of a game-changer.