Words & Photography by Ella Cope
Adeem the Artist took the stage on February 22nd at Rumba Cafe, engaging the audience in an intimate, playful performance that centered their charisma and songwriting. A loose setlist bolstered by audience requests created a conversational set that felt like equal parts concert, stand-up, and sermon. Stand-out songs of the evening included a heartfelt performance of “Caroline”, and an emotional dedication of “ICU” to Nex Benedict, the 16-year-old nonbinary student recently killed in a hate crime while at school.
Adeem also performed their song “I Wish You Would’ve Been a Cowboy” for the first time since the death of Toby Keith. The song criticizes the country music industry’s predation of low-income rural communities for profit and cites Toby Keith as a culprit. Adeem had stopped performing the song when Keith was diagnosed with cancer out of respect for his family, but agreed to play the audience-requested song at Rumba, reflecting that: “Toby Keith had the chance to correct his legacy and didn’t”.
They followed an opening set by the captivating and eccentric Abe Partridge, accompanied by Austin Harper on pedal steel–or as Abe calls it, the “sad machine”. Songs like “Preaching the Blues” called attention to Abe’s inspiration from blues songwriter Son House. Other songs, like “Abe Partridge’s 403d Freak Out” and “Alabama Astronauts”, tell meta-aware, wild stories and invite sing-alongs from the audience.
I had the chance to talk with Adeem before their set about artistry, identity, and politics. Our conversation follows:
Ella: What is your first country music memory?
Adeem: Oh, man. I mean, hearing Garth Brooks on the radio, was a sort of musical awakening for me—the twang. I guess I just think Garth Brooks sounds hot on some level. I loved Garth Brooks. And then I remember going to the rodeo when I went out to see my grandma in Kansas and just feeling like: “This is as cool as it gets!”
Ella: I’m interested in your other influences, artistically. The people who shaped your sense of musicality when you were young.
Adeem: It’s tough to gauge. I think Deana Carter and Reba McIntyre were hugely important influences on my early years and the way I thought songs should be constructed. I love Diamond Rio, but I also got obsessed with Savage Garden. I still have just an infinite crush on Darren Hayes. He’s incredible. You know, he has a solo career, and he’s got a record called The Tension of the Park. That is the final Savage Garden record you didn’t know you needed.
Ella: You recently announced a forthcoming album, and you set about to create your albums in a unique way. Can you speak about the crowd-funded model that you use for your projects?
Adeem: It’s been great for me because I feel very embarrassed by asking people to buy things from me. I try really hard to be good at capitalism–and my tax lady would say that I am not bad at it–but I don’t like it, and I’m not comfortable with it. I find that gift commerce is way more practical within music and within any creative pursuit. I think that there are some things that just should be given without cost and that by being given without cost, they’re somehow paid for. I’ve lived that truth a long time.
I think the first record that I crowd-funded this way was White Trash Revelry, which came out in 2022. I had this record. It felt important to me. I had these songs–I really wanted to address race in country. I really wanted to address sexuality in country music as a genre. And I really wanted to look at some of the intersecting cultural trappings of country. I assembled this list of people who I thought the world should know about: Joy Clark, Jake Blount, Jason Hannah, Jessi Silva, Mia Burn, Ellen Angelo. This cast of people, I could do this project with, I can pay them to do it, and I can hopefully set myself up to pay people better and do more creative projects like this. So that was how I was able to make myself not feel totally weird about asking for $15,000. We raised it $1 at a time. Like, if you’ve got a dollar to spare, just send me a dollar. And it worked. It took about a month of fundraising, and famous people gave, like Vincent D’onofrio, Brian Koppelman, and Brian Fallon from Gaslight Anthem. It was just really, really wild.
Ella: People came out of the woodwork.
Adeem: Yeah! So I got to make that record. To be honest, I stumbled at the beginning of last year into a relationship with one of my heroes. He said: “I’ve got a couple weeks in May if you wanna make a record”, and we did. The new one had a crazy expensive budget–much more than the last one, and I pulled as many strings as I could. I was still, like, $20k short on what I wanted to do to make this record work. So I did it again. I came back to people and was like: let’s see what we can do. People showed up again. We had about half as many people contribute this time, and we made, like, $8,000 more dollars.
Ella: How does that feel, as an artist, to know that people not only want to hear your art, but are so willing to support it?
Adeem: In some ways, it still feels very embarrassing. I would have liked to have been more financially capable by the time this record was ready to go. It felt like a failure of character in a lot of ways that I wasn’t able to just pay for it myself. But I also didn’t plan on recording another record less than six months after White Trash Revelry came out. It just felt like such a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. I am blown away by the kindness of people who believe in what I do. It does make me feel like there is some importance to the medicine that I try to put into these songs. It does make me feel like I am showing up as best as I can to be the champion that people need, or there wouldn’t be that kind of support behind it.
Ella: You have this very indie model of funding your work, but also, in general, your art can be considered anti-establishment and on the frontier. What do you feel your relationship is with the country music establishment?
Adeem: I would say we don’t have a relationship. I feel like it’s really important to distinguish between the tradition of country music (that is associated with a certain culture, lifestyle, and appreciation for the simplicity of life) and with the genre of country music and the institutions and systems of that genre that are white supremacist by design. There’s some difficulty for me, knowing what occupying space there would even look like.
I made my first country album in 2020. It was called Cast Iron Pansexual. It came out in 2021, and it was a collection of really strange country songs about stuff that country songs weren’t supposed to be about. It was largely me processing my gender identity and my sexuality and reflecting on the politics of my culture and my family lineage and my own shame. And my Christian shit–which is a central theme of country music. But it’s always always filtered through a lens of toxic positivity. The reason I call it toxic positivity is not because it’s bad to have positive music about faith, but that the suppression of music reckoning with the abuse of faith systems and faith ideology feels toxic. We’re talking about “three chords and the truth”, and the truth is: everybody has kind-of a complicated relationship with the faith of their childhood, whether they’re still in it or not.
I think when I released that record, I thought that there was not a huge demographic for it, but then there was. People wanted to hear it. People wanted to hear what I was saying enough that they gave me $15 grand and I was able to make this bigger, more complex record about intersectionality and marginalization. I think I missed the mark in a few ways. I think there are things I would do differently now. But overall, I think the songs resonated with a bigger pool of people even than the [album] before it had. That makes me feel like it’s worth being in those [institutional] spaces, but I really don’t think I want to be there.
Ella: I suppose that is a flaw in my question: assuming that all country artists desire a relationship with the mass-produced country establishment, which is just not necessary or true. In your initial description of White Trash Revelry, you said that you wanted to make an album that tackled difficult issues of race and class. I think you are rare in the sense that you’re a country artist who’s willing to speak about the white working-class experience and identity from a progressive lens. Often, country music uses white working-class lifestyle symbols as dog whistles for conservatism. How have you been able to use your art to claim space within Southern and Appalachian culture as a leftist?
Adeem: I got to play the Grand Ole Opry on Stonewall Day last year and dedicate it to Marsha P. Johnson. That was a pretty special thing that I didn’t think I’d ever get to do on the Grand Ole Opry stage. I think for the most part, it’s just by proxy of being who I am and being in the spaces that I am. People talk about the normalization of Trump, of racism, of classism. I’m not normalizing it by having a conversation about it–it’s already normal because it’s getting elected. It’s getting votes. It’s winning power. It’s growing in number. People are easily susceptible to it as the disparity of reality increases and the disparity of wealth increases. That’s why I think I feel unafraid of talking about some of the topics that I do, and going to places that other people won’t go to.
Sometimes I don’t say anything about anything, but I’m there and I have lipstick and a blouse on, and nobody’s ever seen somebody who was assigned male at birth wearing lipstick and a blouse. I played a show with Josh Ritter in Virginia, where a woman working the door laughed out loud belligerently at me. She said: “Are you the comedian tonight?” I said: “No, I’m just a regular old gay!” and laughed it off. She’s not being cruel to me, she’s just never engaged with anybody that looks like me outside of the context of a funny Halloween costume or a silly thing.
So, next time she sees somebody show up with a blouse and lipstick and maybe facial hair, she thinks: “This could be somebody goofy, or could it be like that last person that came and played and talked about how hard it was to understand their gender?” Just having one other example of a thing could be enough. Sometimes I think maybe I do as much damage in these rooms as I do anything else.
Ella: Hmm, expand on that.
Adeem: Well, I don’t think Americana is eager to get more non-binary people!
Ella: Are you at all concerned about being such a front-facing member of the queer community in spaces that have never have never seen that before? Is there pressure on you to feel like you have to perform queerness ‘correctly’?
Adeem: I don’t think so. I didn’t wanna be a spokesperson for the queer community. I didn’t write Cast Iron Pansexual with the goal of only playing pride events for the rest of my life. That record was just something I needed to make. It was like medicine that I needed, and it was really good medicine for me. I think it opened up a lot of internal doors and passageways that I needed. “Trans” doesn’t feel like an important part of my identity, it’s just who I am. I’m not trying to be the first “trans” anything. I don’t want anyone to think that I represent the entire community or that we can be viewed as a monolith. There are many trans people who violently disagree with some of my thoughts on gender.
Ella: Obviously when you set out to make music into a career, I’m certain that you were indeed not trying to be the “first” of anything. But, how do you square that with the fact that in many cases you are? I know that you never intended to become a representative of the queer community. I think a lot of us never intend to be the only queer voice in a room, but when we are, there’s a mantle that you’re expected to–or that you want to–take up.
Adeem: Sure. It’s impossible not to be cognizant of the shoulders that I’m standing on in every room. I think it’s tough for me, in part because I come from such a low-class, blue-collar background that I think I feel a lot of sympathy. There are so many people that view me showing up in those spaces as confrontational and combative, and I struggle to see myself as that. I probably am seen as a kind of ‘wild card’ who’s willing to be really confrontational. But truly, it’s like the gospel in me. Sometimes I just get a fire in my gut and I gotta say something. I’m not trying to check anybody’s privilege on the regular. I’m not trying to be a safe space for cruelty, but also, I want people to feel comfortable and safe around me to say the wrong thing and talk our way through it.
Ella: You talked about the process of making Cast Iron Pansexual as something that helped you process a lot of your gender experience and your sexuality. I love the song “I Never Came Out”, and in that song you describe feeling guilt for not being able to be vocal about your identity earlier in your life. You questioned whether or not it ‘mattered’ or was worth it to come out after getting married, having kids, and ‘settling down’. How has navigating the process of coming out and embracing your queerness later in life influenced your development as an artist?
Adeem: That’s tough for me to parse. So much of my life has been really interrupted by material success. So much of my personal reflection and direction has started to orbit the meetings that I have to get to and the shows that I’m scheduled for. It’s tough because I think that in the same way that my identity as a queer person and my identity as a low-class, blue-collar person sometimes feel like they’re making unfair compromises, the part of me that is on this gender journey is also on this weird journey of celebrity that’s been really strange to navigate. I don’t even have time to sit with my therapist and work through if I wanna look into HRT, or what I want the future of my life to look like because everything is gonna end up getting trickled through the lens of a marketing brand narrative. I did that with Cast Iron Pansexual because nobody was listening. Those songs were me during COVID, starting to think for the first time about my sexuality and processing all the ways that I felt afraid to come out as queer and take up space. I realized I was using a lot of that same math on myself when it came to questions of gender. It had been over 10 years of me saying that I didn’t identify with the gender binary, but I wasn’t calling myself nonbinary, or doing some “attention seeking” thing like that. Then finally, as I worked through it, I asked: “What are the lines that I’m drawing around myself so that I fit into this he/him masculine box that I’ve been told I fit into?”
Ella: I really relate to that. I think the working class mindset is a ‘dream small’, ‘don’t get too big for your britches’ mindset that conditions us to be risk-averse and even deny some aspects of ourselves in that pursuit. I have found that in the Appalachian or Southern working class, there exists a very difficult-to-describe sense of nostalgia that is wrapped up in loss and longing. If you’ve grown up in a Southern working-class family, you intrinsically understand it and come to internalize it. Your songs Books and Records and Middle of a Heart put that feeling into language using material culture–memories, photo albums, land. You tune in to that sense of grief that is often unspoken but very deeply felt. As young people, how do you think that sense of nostalgia can serve us, and what do you think we need to leave behind?
Adeem: Ultimately, I think nostalgia is usually manipulated in really toxic ways within the genre of country. The real heart of what I was getting at with Books and Records were the days full of reading and listening to music, and laying underneath the trees in a hammock, and listening to the birds sing, and making myself a lunch, and taking my time to taste the strawberries–all those things are the things that I’m giving away, $15 an hour at a time, if I’m lucky. I think that’s a lot of what’s tied to the working-class lament that you’re talking about. If you look at American colonialism and how it played out in the South, there’s families that own these little plots of land and they eat the food they make. There’s homesteaders all up and down Appalachia who are still doing that. I think that there’s something about that way of life.
In the book Siddartha, the main character starts as this poor rice farmer, but he wants for more. So he thirsts for knowledge, and he thirsts for skill. And then he tries to find love, he gets married, and eventually becomes a king. He ascends in every worldly way, and then, after indulging in all these hedonistic pleasures, finds no real intrinsic value in any of it, and gives it all away after seeing human poverty for himself. In the end, he is now fully actualized as a rice farmer, but he’s not the same rice farmer as he was in the beginning. He understands what he has now and what it means.
In our country, in a lot of ways, the government just decided they owned our land, and now you pay money to live there. A lot of people are calling this late-stage capitalism–or at least the kids are. If you look at where we’re at, then it seems like many of us are actually pining not for a false nostalgia–an unjust peace that is policed and patrolled by a white supremacist order–but rather the simplicity of being in communion with the land and with the animals on it, trying to be in a harmonious relationship with the earth. I think that the pining that so many of us have right now is like: “I wish I just had a little tiny farm with some blueberry bushes. I just wanna read books. I just wanna listen to records. I just wanna taste the wine that I made on my land and know that my family is gonna be safe.” It’s very primal in some way. There’s this knowledge that I don’t own my life anymore. I don’t own my time. I have to sell my life by the hour to some corporation who sells me back all the things that I need. The entire system just seems like we are farmed to make other people’s wealth sustainable.
Ella: That idea of being a cog in the machine is really at play in Middle of a Heart, which takes it to its most dramatic conclusion: the exploitation of the lower class to serve as a source of disposable bodies for the U.S. military.
Adeem: Chasing a carrot on a string into complete psychological warfare.
Ella: I think almost anyone raised in our culture recognises that story. At each verse, I thought of a different member of my family who had that exact experience. I’m really moved by the way that you are able to bring insight to that through your art in a way that’s accessible to people. These Marxist concepts of alienation and late stage capitalism–most people can’t materially understand what that means. But when they have access to art like yours that allows them to see those concepts at work in their life and in their family, I think that’s a really powerful tool to be able to bring class consciousness to people who don’t have the kind of formal education that allows you to be able to read Marx.
As a final question, is there anything that you wish people knew more about you or your work?
Adeem: That’s a really thoughtful question. I’m married, and my partner Hannah is a visual artist. She came up with the concept of For Judas, and helped me finish writing that song. She did all the artwork and cover art for the records. To be honest, I got so much more success with Cast Iron Pansexual than I thought I would. I didn’t know how to explain to people that I was married to a woman even though I was queer. I felt like it was gonna confuse people in a way that was gonna make the work hard to digest. It’s not that I was afraid of being rejected by queer people as much as I was just afraid that who I was would not be able to be seen or understood if a larger view of my life was on display. And so I think in some ways, I became more reserved.
My wife, who goes by High Five Hannie, found these fractal wedding vows. Fracture is this old German way of painting–it’s folk art. She made a dress for Americana [Music Awards] that was made of these wedding vows. It was representative of her and her spiritual journey, and had her cultural identity stitched into it. On the front, there was a heart that said: “Do Not Deceive”. And the other wedding vow had a heart on it that said: “I Will Never Deceive You”. And so my hat that I wore to Americana says “I Will Never Deceive You”, because I surprised Hannah, and painted that on my hat the night of the awards show.
We’ve been collaborators for a long time, and one of the hard things about the last year or two, and how chaotic it’s been, is that Hannah is single-handedly parenting a lot, while I’m trying to keep up with everything, which means less collaboration for us, and also less unified time. She’s had to put so many of her creative pursuits on hold to be the primary parent while I’m on the road. We’re trying to get into a better balance. I think that the thing that I would want people to know about me most, that they might not know, is how important of a role my partner plays in the music that I make. She named the act Adeem the Artist, and now that’s the name on my Grand Ole Opry parking space.
Ella: That’s a very lovely way to end our conversation. Thank you so much for talking with me today. I’m really excited to see you tonight at Rumba. On behalf of Ohio State Student Radio, we’re big supporters of your art and can’t wait to play you on the station.
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