The Atlanta-based artist on the overwhelming emotion of a seminal live performance
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
Emerging from London’s DIY scene, Puma Blue’s early work stitched together smoky jazz, lo-fi R&B, and dreamlike alt-pop, earning comparisons to King Krule and Jeff Buckley. His 2021 debut In Praise of Shadows was a nocturnal fever dream of hushed falsettos and submerged drums, but with his latest LP antichamber, he takes an even starker approach – paring everything down to its barest, most vulnerable form.
Recorded alone in a house in Decatur, Georgia, antichamber is a ghostly exhale of a record, a collection of hushed confessions and vaporous melodies that feel like they might dissolve if you listen too hard. The sultry groove of his past work is gone, replaced by something even more fragile – just an acoustic guitar, some distant echoes, and a voice that sounds like it’s whispering secrets into the void.
For his One Track Mind selection, Puma Blue breaks the rules and picks a deeply affecting live performance of two songs from a jazz legend.
Puma Blue on Nina Simone – Stars / Feelings Live at Montreux
I’m swerving the rules of this prompt a bit to talk about Nina Simone’s 1976 performance of ‘Stars/Feelings’ from Montreux. It’s technically two songs, and she didn’t write either of them, but that’s not what’s important to me here. Actually I think for me this is where both compositions reached their highest spiritual potential.
I have never been able to listen to this recording without it puncturing through to that deeper, secret part of me. It’s almost too much, like a breakthrough in a therapy session where the tears feel like new ones. I don’t think I could ever deliver a performance like this, perhaps that’s even part of why it moves me so.
It’s the same thing that moves me about Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Buckley or Joni Mitchell. There is no distinction between them and their instrument, and here Nina’s instrument is her piano, her vocal delivery, her storytelling. Her gift to build and express, well, feelings.
The band support her not by guiding or taming this wild flame they find themselves dancing with, instead just offering the gentlest of accompaniments as she sets her own time, launches into piano solos or interrupts herself to speak with the audience.
She lets the lyrics drip off her lips so conversationally, it’s as if she were just coming up with them. She plays so candidly as if she hardly cares to be there, and yet when her voice cracks she so clearly does, and deeply.
When she almost screams ‘I wish I’d never lived this long’, it’s so real it shakes me. When she yearns ‘feed me, feed me’ as the audience whisper-sings the final chorus back to her, the words take this maternal feel to them that I can never put my finger on.
The epilogue is this cinematic collage of the last fifteen minutes, I feel almost no doubt it was completely improvised. But maybe it wasn’t, and that’s part of her gift, I don’t know.
She just sounds so human, and I think that’s actually a really hard thing to do. A touch that is more and more rare. As she says towards the end: ‘so embarrassingly soft’.
Puma Blue – anitchamber is out now
The Predatory Wasp 