On feeling in control

You recently put out a new EP, Brontez Purnell Trio, and you’ve talked in the past about your different practices—dance, music, and writing—informing and generating each other. How has the relationship between text and music in your work evolved?

I think it’s all about language arts, essentially. I’ve been making music and writing since I was a teenager. Anything you keep practicing you’ll probably get better at, hopefully. And I feel like those things have finally hit that mark, after years and years of experimenting. It’s nice to explore one thing in very many forms, because it looks vastly different. Getting to do that lends more options in my writing.

When I got [to the Bay Area], I took these experimental writing workshops. A lot of people exposed me to lots of crazy things. There’s a lineage of the Beats and so many other different writers. I definitely think I follow partly in that lineage, amongst a hundred others.

What role does collaboration play in your process?

The freedom to experiment… You never know if there’s enough money, enough time. I think everyone being very cool and very open is what helps. Open to the idea of possibility and failure.

Do you like to collaborate in your practice space?

Here in Oakland, I mostly practice in my garage. When it comes to writing and every other thing that happens: in my bedroom by myself.

Including lyrics?

Well, it depends. Lyrics can happen all over the place. For the longest time when I was writing, I wrote the songs while playing drums, because notes don’t inspire me, but rhythm does.

I love your cover of the gospel song “If You Can’t Help Me.” Would you be willing to talk a bit about your exposure to and relationship with gospel music, and how you see it in an indie rock context?

I mean, gospel music is basically rock and roll. I remember my grandma told me about how she saw Sister Rosetta Tharpe in this gymnasium in Alabama in 1954. She’s one of the main rock and roll influences in America for a lot of people, but also one of the main gospel influences. It is always hard to say who necessarily originated the gospel song. They are all kind of standards. I feel like people have been singing these songs for hundreds of years. Who got the most popular recording them first is the record we have.

I never started listening to Sister Rosetta Tharpe until, gosh, probably my late twenties or thirties, but I was shocked to find out that about half the songs we sing in church she had recorded decades before. It’s like any tradition. Any traditional ethnic songs that just get passed down, but they’re very catchy and they lend themselves to blues, they lend themselves to gospel, and more often than not they always have kind of a great message. [“If You Can’t Help Me”] was the one I particularly loved because it was the one that my grandma sings. It was like her showstopper song every Sunday.

Where does your attention gravitate as you continue to make new music?

My favorite part is playing. Touring, recording, practicing—oh god, that is such a drag. But if I can just make it to the show and plug my guitar amp in, then everything else is all worth it. One thing I would change is I would have a lot more money.

I have always played music kind of out of tradition. It runs in my family. There’s something just very joyful about singing a song to guitar, in whatever capacity. I’ll find a way to do it in some form the rest of my life, I’m pretty sure. But basically I’m tired, old, and fat. I’m sick of carrying amps up stairs. I want to headline Glastonbury and then retire, whenever they will let me do that. That is the plan at this moment.

For others trying to balance music with other disciplines, is there anything you would advise or anything that you feel like you’ve learned?

To be quite honest with you, I don’t think I’ve learned anything. I know because it’s habit. Making music has been with me so long, it’s like breathing or brushing my teeth, and it returns as chaotic as it can be.

There’s something about creation that brings something nurturing back to your life, where it reminds you that we are put on earth to do more than just survive. We have lots of other complex thoughts, and I don’t know, it’s something that soothes me a lot. In a world where we have so little control, I feel like being able to write a song is the one thing that I still have control over. Minimal, but still.