Early in aninterview with Chad Browne-Springer of the New Haven-based band Phat A$tronaut, Eric Rey had a realization. He and Browne-Springer had shared a stage before, perhaps a few times. He had seen Browne-Springer perform at least a dozen times. But, Rey said, “you and I have never had a conversation.”
Rey and Browne-Springer remedied that situation virtually Friday afternoon during the New Haven Free Public Library’s Artrepreneur Series, in which Rey, host and musician, engages in “a conversation with prominent New Haven artists as they discuss the opportunities and challenges unique to being an artist and an entrepreneur,” as the series’s tagline puts it. The series, which began during the pandemic, has now been running for several weeks and will have its next installment on Aug. 7 with artist Finn Henry.
Rey began by jumping right into the fact that they first met in a performance space — a way of meeting that would be impossible now. “I don’t know that we’ve stopped mourning for what we’ve lost” since the pandemic began, he said.
“The quarantine itself wasn’t difficult for me,” said Browne-Springer. They didn’t mind spending time alone. They did, however, mourn “what the world was — dreams, ambitions, goals, passions … that seemingly can no longer exist.” Maybe those dreams could exist again, they said. “But everything has changed.”
Rey agreed. “The hopes and dreams were connected to a reality that doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “We may get back to places and spaces together, but we’re all changed.”
Rey was interested in talking to Browne-Springer because, he said, “I absolutely love your work. I love what you do. I love the music that you make.” As a member of the audience, Rey said, he was “totally enamored with your persona on stage … the way that Phat A$tronaut moves and responds to you — you’re the guy in front, you’re the guy on the mic.” He described how funk legend James Brown led his band from the microphone with both voice and body movement. “The way James’s band responded to every movement and his words — I feel that very much with how you interact with your band. I don’t know what happens behind the scenes, but on stage it’s a beautiful thing to watch,” Rey said.
Brown-Springer responded with humility. “Phat A$tronaut has been educational for me,” they said.
Browne-Springer was born and raised in East Hartford (see this recent article in the Arts Paper for more detail) and flung themselves into school, including various choirs and marching band. They sang with jazz singer Orice Jenkins, with whom they went to high school. They’d sung solo. But Phat A$tronaut represented a turn.
“Being in that band, and letting people into that artistic collaborative experience,” they said, was a new level of collaboration. The band, features Browne-Springer on vocals, Dylan McDonnell on saxophone, Stephen Gritz King on keys, Brendan Wolfe on bass, Trav Hall on drums, Mike Knobloch on aux percussion, and Mark Lyon on guitars. Lyon, Browne-Springer said, was also musical director. He “knows the musical jargon better than I do,” they said. They were “going with the radio in my mind”; sometimes Lyon acted as translator.
“We’ve been a band for four years now, and we practice weekly. And we’re really good friends,” Browne-Springer said. “I feel the most free and expressive and vulnerable onstage. They have taught me how to be a better leader and challenged me to direct them.”
“To bring seven heads of talented people into one focal point — that’s Phat A$tronaut,” they continued. “The music would not sound the way it does” if not for the way each member of the band played, and thought and felt about music. “I come in with a jaunty tune and they bring it six levels up,” they said. They had heard stories of bands in which the members didn’t particularly like each other outside of music, or bands that simply treated it like a job. They didn’t want to have that kind of situation. “Being onstage with friends makes total sense to me, in how much music means to me. It has saved my life more than once.”
The Purpose
That was when Rey asked: When was the first time music saved Browne-Springer’s life?
“Wow, what a question,” Browne-Springer said. They reached back into their childhood. “I grew up in the hood, but I grew up hood-adjacent ... I wasn’t out on the streets” because they were invested in music, they said. “It shifted my entire life spectrum and course…. I love singing and writing and sound.” It went hand in hand with the upbringing they got from their mother, who “had some restrictions on what I could watch” and “hard curfews” — if she set a curfew at 10 p.m. and they were to arrive home at 10:01, “you don’t live here,” they said. Rey said he’d had a similar upbringing — an involved mother, curfews, regulations of what he could hear and watch. “She was the kind of mom that would take the little wires out of the back of the TV so I couldn’t watch cable when she wasn’t home,” Rey said.
But Browne-Springer talked about how the attitudes toward music developed in youth carried straight into adulthood. “I’ve been doing music all my life, and it’s an expressive, connective, cathartic outlet that has always given me great purpose.” The pandemic, they said, has given them time to reflect. “I haven’t had pride in anything other than my music…. I’ve always put all my emotions and thoughts into it,” they said. “I have always been under the assumption that the reason I am alive is for my music…. My purpose lies in the difference that I see and feel and can observe when I’m onstage…. I’m down to meet people and be kind and connect in other ways, but there is a visible difference between when I meet someone after singing and before. I know that and I can see it. So I’ve continued to lean into it.”
Lately, and particularly as the pandemic-induced shutdown has given them a chance to reflect, Browne-Springer said that they have been thinking even more broadly. “I have had all my purpose and pride in music, and now I am trying to recode the DNA ... to have more pride in my Blackness and my queerness,” they said, “where before I said ‘it is what it is.’”
Browne-Springer always knew about being Black from their mother, who told them that “you will never have a fair chance” because they were Black. They also knew how others viewed young Black men, “I need to be cautious, on my Ps and Qs,” they knew. But it took them longer to discover the pride in “my lineage,” they said, “the makers and creators.”
Musically, as a child they loved Elton John, Coldplay, the Fray. Up until high school, they didn’t know a lot about R&B, hip hop, and jazz. Their friend Orice Jenkins was “a big push,” they said. “He put me onto his inspirations, and soul music.” They also got to sing with soul stalwart Kenny Hamber. “I want to fuse sound to make things that haven’t been heard,” they said. “But I am so grateful to have been in Kenny’s band,” singing soul music. “That whole thing is beautiful.”
And they are still evolving. “This is my process of being under construction — being more outspoken about the things that I am, the things that I care about, instead of … going back into my shell” after being on stage, they said.
They noted that, of their early influences, “I didn’t hear myself and what I wanted to create in the sound of their music…. Nobody was making the sound that I wanted to sing over.” Figuring out what that sound would be has been a journey of years. In high school their friend Kyle brought a laptop over once and showed him how to make loops and beats, “and I never moved from that couch,” they said.
They got into producing. They discovered Jon Bellion, in particular the song “The Wonder Years,” who had “this J Dilla like pocket, but there’s this Disney, pop-like sound to it,” they said. “The fusion of this blew my mind.” Using a “light, trickly sound,” Bellion was asking a hard question: “When do we go from the bliss and ignorance of a child to killing each other for shoes and money?”
“My niece was blowing bubbles in the yard,” they recalled. “It was a great question, it was posed so well…. It has everything,” they thought. Including a production detail: “A secondary vocal under it that sounds like he’s underwater,” they said.“I went on a mission to find out how to do that sound.”
They began experimenting with pitch shifters and other effects, and in time purchased a particular box, a TC-Helicon VoiceLive Play. “That had the vocal shifts I was looking for, but also had a loop setting,” they said. The box had other effects as well that let them create a complete sound. “That stumbled me into building songs out of scratch, and being the whole barbershop quartet, the whole choir.” They “got strategic with it” and “got more expansive.” They went through another gear upgrade recently that they are still experimenting with. “It’s fun to buy things just to see what happens,” they half-joked.
“Following the rules, it’s going to set you up to do what everyone else is doing,” Rey said. “Bringing your own naivete, you figure out something new…. You’re not bound by rules that other people find really important.”
Evolution And Revolution
Rey then had a chance to ask a question he had been holding on to since Browne-Springer had mentioned the theme of Jon Bellion’s song. “When did you lose your innocence?” he asked.
“As Black people, we don’t get to have innocence,” Browne-Springer said. They recalled something their mother told them as a younger person: “If you go to jail, I won’t visit you.” But the question led them to the year 2017, with Browne-Springer in their early 20s. Their grandfather died. The next month, their father was hospitalizaed. Then an aunt died. Then their mother was hospitalized.
“I think it’s around death that we find a lot of change — in the depth of pain, or dealing with the absolute of death,” Browne-Springer said. “That four-month period really made me reflect on the perceptions and coding that we put into place as kids.” That early coding, the view of the world, “may be the truth to you then,” but it’s not “the reality of reality,” they said. They recalled trying to connect with their grandfather on his deathbed. When grandfather was on deathbed. “Tell me stories — I’m ready,” they said. But their grandfather didn’t wake up. “They were too late. Later, when their father was hospitalized, “I’d never seen him sick. I’d never seen him ask for help,” they said. “To have him tell that he needs me because he was too weak to do something was unveiling.” The time in the hospital was also “the first time I’d seen my father as a brother, as a younger brother,” dealing with his sisters as they fussed over him. “It felt like I was watching myself with my sisters,” they said. “My father isn’t necessarily who I thought he was.”
It helped them connect with their father in a way they hadn’t when they were younger. They became more perceptive about “how people want to be loved, how they receive love,” they said. “My father showed love through financial support, when I wanted emotional support.” It wasn’t until the hospitalization, they said, that Browne-Springer and their father figured out how to communicate better. Browne-Springer noted that the transformation could have been gradual, but for them it felt sudden. “You wake up and you’re an adult, and your back hurts.”
“There’s all these pieces of adulthood that keep unfolding,” Rey said with a smile. He related that he recently bought a washer and dryer. “Ridiculously mundane, and somehow this weird rite of passage — a marker of our capitalism and whatever else.” But, he said, “I love going to the basement and washing my clothes in my washer and dryer…. It’s emblematic of the complexity that we find ourselves in.”
For Browne-Springer, part of that complexity lay in hearkening back to the past. “I’m digging and recoding, and I’m looking up Malcolm X and Spike Lee and James Baldwin,” they said. “I didn’t get the depth of how potent what they were saying was…. As I am growing and changing and adapting with the times, I have found real connection to Nina Simone, to Sam Cooke, to Muddy Waters,” they continued. “To music that I knew and was aware of, but for some reason they sound different. They feel different. Nina hits! Good Lord!”
Rey agreed. “There’s a maturity you need to appreciate everything that’s going on with that music in particular,” he said. He recalled his own first exposure to Simone: “Who is this?” he remembered thinking. At the time he was deep into hip hop. However, “in the past five years I’ve come back to stuff, and am like, ‘mind blown.”
“The music is great an the story is beautiful, but most of what I’m connecting to in the civil rights movement is how they chose to use their platform at the time these changes were happening,” Browne-Springer said. They related Simone’s move from classical music and “having her hair permed” to “making a conscious choice” to “uplift black people” and “be so fucking raw.” They noted that her career suffered “because she made that choice.”
They also gravitated to Prince. ”I’m really bonding with his sexual fluidity, his relentlessness — his music bangs, top to bottom,“ they said. ”I want that. I’m a realist — I understand my platform isn’t that big. But we’re in a revolution. This feels like a revolution that we haven’t seen, across the world. It’s beautiful and terrifying and joyful.”
Rey placed the making of music in the middle of that. “That’s the beauty of art,” he said. “We release something into the world as artists, and once we do that, it doesn’t belong to us anymore. It belongs to the world…. You don’t really have a say in it.”
“Music for me is a matter of life or death. If I don’t do it, what am I here for?” Browne-Springer said. “Art is the catalyst that will push us forward. It always is…. It makes change more feasible. It’s not through politicians. It’s musicians, artists, dancers, those who move you in that chemical way that can’t really be explained.”
“As long as there’s sound in my head,” they said, “that’s what I’m going to aim for.”