Terry Blade joins Preston Frazier to discuss his brutally honest, emotion-filled new album, ‘Ethos: Son of a Sharecropper’:
PRESTON FRAZIER: I first became aware of your music after the 2021 release, American Descendant of Slavery. I was so captivated by your writing, the production style you employ, your vocals, the story – and now, of course, you have out the album, Ethos: Son of a Sharecropper. Would you tell us a little bit about the album?
TERRY BLADE: I’ve been sort of a multi-gen artist, over the past four years or so I experimented with multiple genres of music. There’s a lot of room for communicating my personal ethos and my style and expressing what I wanted to express. Most recently I got into Americana, and this kind of stemmed from me wanting to kind of be a steward of black music or what is considered black music. And we’ve been having these conversations, I think a lot about country music and some of these other genres that are not considered black, even though there are major, major, major black contributions to blues and all that other stuff.
I set my eyes on Americana to kind of show and emphasize this is black music too, not just, you know, what we think of as traditionally black music, r and b and hip hop and, and soul and that sort of thing. This is like the foundation of traditional roots, American roots music. And I drew from my grandfather’s experience, my grandparents are from the south, and my grandfather in particular is from North Carolina. His dad was a sharecropper, and he was, when he was very, very young, he was taken out of school to work. A lot of Americana and roots music and blues comes out of the south and that experience. I wanted to capture my ethos that I got from my grandfather and my, my mother and my grandmother and kind of capture that experience and to show how like this is a black experience, this is a black experience, not the black experience, but this is my black experience.
As a queer person, as an openly gay queer person who comes from, you know, what we consider to be very traditional, traditional Southern roots, that’s my history, but this is who I am. So that was the inspiration. And again, it’s, this idea that black music can only be this one thing, and it’s just, it’s just wrong. It’s folk, its country, its bluegrass, blues – so, it’s all of that. And historically it has always been that.
PRESTON FRAZIER: The thing is your music, it’s unapologetically Americana. Your lyrics are very much in the folk tradition in terms of, they’re very direct and very vivid and very descriptive. When did you start thinking about this process, this project?
TERRY BLADE: I probably started thinking about in 2022. I probably spent all year on it. It was something just kind of happened organically. I started working with my vocal coach. I started out with a gospel feel, which is really, which is interesting because I have a contentious relationship with some of the traditions of gospel and the culture in the black community. But then I thought about how could make those things work. I write from a very personal place. It is about my experience. It is therapeutic. It is the way that I wrestle with and cope with the world on a day-to-day basis by writing about it and expressing my feelings and telling my stories, talking about what I observe. I got out of my comfort zone,
So, it’s like blues, gospel, country. I’ve also been an acoustic person. A lot of my early work is just raw acoustic, raw acoustic stuff, just me and an acoustic guitar. And I have always thought “What’s more roots than that?” Less is more. This isn’t a collection of songs and merely a genre exploration. It’s paying homage to my history and the ways in which history has affected, you know, my present, my life today. I spent that part of the year work recording and writing and recording and writing and recording and writing and listening. Some things I started; I didn’t like. I had to think, “What am I really saying?” I had like a hodgepodge of different emotions and different stories, but making them cohesive, a narrative that is Terry and the son of a sharecropper. These are my ethics, these are my values, these are my beliefs. This is my culture.
PRESTON FRAZIER: In terms of your writing process, do you start with the music or is it lyrics?
TERRY BLADE: I almost always start with music, but I am not like some amazing instrumentalist. Producer Ryan Jenkins has a treasure trove of just acoustic just him and an acoustic guitar beat and or instrumentals. You start out with a loop, it just depends on my mood, and it just kind of happens. The process probably started with, with journaling. I didn’t always set out to do a song. I write all the time. I took some of that and turned it into a song. My writing is very, my journaling is very deep and personal. Therefore, my music is, because it kind of forms the foundation of that. A lot of it was me turning in, again, my experiences that I’ve journaled into, into songs and, and kind of drawing inspiration from, the music. It has to feel right; it has to be the right mood.
PRESTON FRAZIER: How many of the 10 songs on Ethos: Son of a Sharecropper were a result of your journaling?
TERRY BLADE: Probably 70 percent. I’d probably say seven out of the 10 were the result of like, previous journal entries – or at least were inspired from journal entries. Probably about three songs where I was just like, I love how this sounds, and I’m inspired by the music and let me just write lyrics to it. One of those songs was “Jimmy James.” That’s not a journal entry song; that was just I heard the music and liked the vibe.
PRESTON FRAZIER: “Jimmy James” has fascinating lyrics. I mean, the first verse …
“There was a soul named Jimmy I once knew, Brown liquor for eyes when he made his debut. He showered in hope but he always smelled of regret – concealed in the smoke of a single cigarette.”
TERRY BLADE: That’s not a journal entry, but definitely inspired by real events. I was thinking of somebody who was homeless, who had this really rich life. But they’re kind of like reduced to their status of being unhoused. I just grew up with a lot of Jimmys. They had story to tell, very entertaining, like real people – but just unhoused and drunk, probably struggling with mental illness and a bunch of other things like that. I remember when I was a child, I would see so and so in front of the liquor store or whatever, or I would hear so and so used to be best friends with your uncle – and now they were homeless.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Why don’t we talk about a few other ones? I picked out a few to talk about: “Won’t Be Around”?
TERRY BLADE: That’s a journal entry. “Won’t Be Around” took off in a way that I don’t think any of my other songs did. Bobby Cole was a composer on that which was a journal entry about not doing what I say I’m going to do. Okay. So, I had been, I’ve been wrestling with the idea that I was going to do something, or I was going to leave a situation, and I ultimately didn’t. I felt accountable for that. And I felt I wasn’t being true and honest to myself. And I also felt like my words and my commitment to myself had very little value. I was wrestling with that. I was journaling about it.
On a surface level, it’s about being in a bad relationship or a bad arrangement – and actually, leaving it. So, like, “I told you I was going to leave. I meant that shit. Now I’m doing it.” Being a black person in corporate America and that sort of relationship can be unhealthy and toxic. So, you leave that, or having a relationship with drugs or alcohol. It’s codependency. It is a very personal one, but it seems to have really resonated. I’ve gotten some awards because of it. It was runner up for recently with the International Acoustic Music Awards. I did not expect that. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” It’s done well, and I’m happy about that.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Your website, terryblademusic.com, lists a bunch of the awards that you’ve been up for some and the wars you’ve won, including the Global Music Award, the Indian Independent Film Fest, Josie Music Award, and recently the California Music Video Award. These are a bunch of tremendous accolades for your music and for the album. Tell me about the song “Rigor Mortis.”
TERRY BLADE: That was a journal entry, but it’s really eerie because my aunt died, but I wasn’t aware that she had died. I wasn’t aware that she had died; I was just in this very somber mood. I thinking about what is death like, what does it feel like? What does it mean? You know, where do I go from here? On some deeper level, I think maybe I just, I was picking up on something that was happening with my aunt because she had, she had passed away. The song is about a march towards death. It is a march towards the end, or the beginning or the after.
I kind of hitched my imagination to the idea of, you know, being escorted there by a dark figure, You’re in bed and then, you know, there’s this dark figure that kind of takes you away. And it’s like, can I take my time? The composer there again, Adrian Berenguer just did great work. I never did anything like that before. That’s not usually my space. Again, this is black music – this is the music that I’m doing. I can still talk about my experiences and my themes that way.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Next to my list is “Rainbow Child.”
TERRY BLADE: I probably spent a couple years writing “Rainbow Child.” It wasn’t just a journal entry; it was an opus of things of journaling and therapy. “Rainbow Child” is about growing up, growing up gay or queer or non-gender conforming. And as someone who was black, that was rough. It was one of the most painful experiences. I didn’t think I would survive it. It ended up kind of being a letter to me. It’s like, “What would I say to me if I was 12 years old?” The whole “it gets better” thing didn’t make sense to me at the time, because I was like, how? You just can’t see. You don’t know that things can change or that people can change, or that things can evolve.
You just don’t see it – particularly when it’s, you know, so normal and so normalized to be homophobic and heteronormative at the time. You just don’t really see a world where it isn’t that way. It was kind of a way of reconciling with that. It’s literally me talking to me, but universally it’s me talking to every queer, bisexual, trans, pan person who is not considered the norm. It’s over five minutes. I worked with Nicholas Rowe on that, and it took me a couple years to write it to get it right – because it was like super emotional and very difficult. It was very triggering and all of that. But as son of a sharecropper, it was very much my experience.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Next is “Talk About It.”
TERRY BLADE: There’s another version of this song. It started out one way and it ended up going another way. In part because my vocal coach pushed me on this. It’s just guitar and me, right? That is fundamentally who I’ve been as an artist. If you go back to my first single “Unlovable,” it’s guitar and me. So, it’s literally getting back to the roots of Terry. But it’s a folk singer, singer/songwriter kind of song about wanting to talk when someone isn’t ready to talk to you – and wanting to talk about something when someone you love isn’t ready to talk about it.
It kind of took me some time to realize that I really didn’t want to talk about it for them. I wanted to talk about it for me. “There’s things, but Terry, you’re not ready to talk about it.” Even with people you love very, very dearly and who do love and care about you and all of that – and they just want to help. And so, that follows “Rainbow Child,” because I didn’t want to talk about my painful experience, and I had plenty of people in my life who didn’t want to talk about it – and I didn’t wanna talk about it.
PRESTON FRAZIER: How about “Wasn’t Mine”?
TERRY BLADE: “Wasn’t Mine” didn’t start out the way it is on the album. It was a fully produced thing with instrumentation behind it and all of that. I thought, “Well, you know, does it have to have that?” The song is about the burden of blackness in America, the weight of that. It’s like some of the work songs and things that are very much tradition, with just clapping and stomping. It also touches on things like poverty, social injustices and personal injustices.
It structured in the way like Negro spirituals, where it’s just my voice in the tradition of a work song.
PRESTON FRAZIER: How about the final song of the album, “In My House”?
TERRY BLADE: I would say “In My House” is probably the one that I am most proud of. My house is literally not my house; house is a metaphor for soul or body. It was sort of my way of reconciling what I talked about earlier about the gospel tradition. It is done in a traditionally gospel way, in a traditionally gospel verse by verse kind of a thing. It was my way of acknowledging that that is very much a part of who I am and my history without any of the religion or any of the other things that I have kind of felt excluded me from that or I didn’t relate to. I could talk about my soul, and I could talk about those things in a way that was not condemning or exclusionary.
It’s just personal. Aside from “Rainbow Child,” it was probably the most physically purging or like cathartic song that I did on the album. “Rainbow Child” was pretty cathartic too.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Finally, what are your five favorite albums?
TERRY BLADE: Lianne La Havas by Lianne La Havas, A Seat at the Table by Solange, Mama’s Gun by Erykah Badu, Nina Simone Sings the Blues by Nina Simone, and Our Bright Future by Tracy Chapman.
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