Post-Cowboy Indian Bear, Marty Hillard grows into his voice with Ebony Tusks

November 18, 2015

Natalie Gallagher,

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After Lawrence’s lauded Cowboy Indian Bear called it quits in 2014, co-frontman and guitarist Marty Hillard refocused his creative energy. Ebony Tusks, Hillard’s socially conscious hip-hop group that started as a side project in 2010, moved to the foreground.

Over the past year, rapper Hillard has pushed Ebony Tusks further than he imagined possible with more shows, including a summer tour that found him spreading his gospel across the Midwest. His group, which includes hype man Nathan Giesecke and DJ Daniel B. Smith, has become the go-to local opener for national acts: Shabazz Palaces (at the Riot Room in June), Talib Kweli (at the Granada in July) and Vince Staples (at Liberty Hall in September). They’ve managed all of this with little more than a handful of songs on a SoundCloud page.

With only a few weeks left in 2015, I called Hillard at his Topeka home to talk about his future plans for Ebony Tusks.

The Pitch: Tell me what the end of Cowboy Indian Bear meant for Ebony Tusks.

Hilliard: With the end of Cowboy Indian Bear, there was a little more of an opportunity to focus on Ebony Tusks. The catalyst for a lot of what we’ve done over the last year stemmed from getting to support Clipping last September at the Replay. It was cool because of all the national acts that we had opened up for prior to them. It was great to meet one that was so down-to-earth and positive. They really encouraged us to go and tour, and that was the furthest thing from my mind at the time. I’d just found out that my girlfriend was pregnant with our first child, so I wasn’t thinking about it. But we just kind of plotted things from there. Once we confirmed some of those shows [for a summer 2015 tour], that’s when we really started looking forward to what the possibilities were.

Tell me about that tour. It was your first with Ebony Tusks, right?

Yeah. It wasn’t like we did seven weeks of straight touring. It was intermittent, doing a weekend here and there every couple weeks. For us, that was a more suitable pace. … But we enjoyed the time that we spent traveling to these Midwest communities and performing for people who had no idea what we were about. It keeps us sharp. And the response was really gratifying.

Your daughter, your first child, just turned eight months old. What have you had to adjust in your life to make room for her?

I was already headed in that direction before I knew I was going to have a child. It’s something that we — me and my girlfriend of eight years — spent a lot of time talking about. For me, it’s about enjoying a quality of life that I wasn’t able to when I was performing more and writing more music. I’ve grown accustomed to it [having less creative output]. It means making the music count when it does happen.

More than anything, I’m grateful for a place to call home and a partner and a child to enjoy it with, and the responsibilities that come with that. There’s something to be said for having stability. It’s also afforded me the presence of mind to be able to be creative in different ways. And, slowly but surely, we’ve been writing some new material. All three of us produce now, which is three times as challenging for us because all three of us work full time in different cities. It’s not always easy to carve out the time. Which is something I felt toward the end of Cowboy Indian Bear — it was really hard to get to Lawrence for practice and contribute creatively to the music.

That hasn’t changed much, honestly, but we’re still able to find ways to keep ourselves engaged in what’s going on. We’ve got opportunities now that we wouldn’t have anticipated a year ago. We’ve opened for some incredible people. We’ve managed that largely by our reputation as live performers. At some point, we’ll have to reconcile that with the other side, with writing and recording, but right now we’ve been able to enjoy what it is.

So there is no plan for an album?

We’ve been talking about it for the better part of the year, what we want to do. There just seems to be a lot of pressure around releasing a full-length project, and that’s something that we’ve talked about wanting to subvert. We’re really committed to doing things that feel good and resonate with us, and that’s something that you almost feel obliged to do because it’s what people expect. I think that’s the goal, eventually, but we haven’t put a ton of pressure on it because not having one hasn’t hindered us from doing anything we’ve wanted to do. I’m grateful that people seem to care and are interested in us putting something like that together, and we are, too, but not if it doesn’t feel right.

A lot of your lyrics are charged with social commentary, mixed with a lot of personal experiences. You bring attention to racial and class conflicts. But that also seems like a lot of brutal honesty you’re imparting about yourself, sometimes to an audience of strangers.

I find it to be really cathartic to express myself in this way. I think the challenge, now that I’ve been doing this for a while, is how to push that further and how to go deeper into those places. But once you open that door, it’s really hard to close it. I do find myself, as I’m writing newer stuff, trying to figure out if this is a part of me that I’m willing to expose. Am I willing to go deeper and bare more of myself?

But it’s been so nice that time and time again, as we’ve gone into different communities, that having a willingness to be vulnerable with an audience really opens up a lot of opportunities for there to be a deeper connection. I think the challenge is that as long as you’re willing to bare a portion of who you are, that that’s going to open up the door to all kinds of energy that people aren’t really expecting to tap into, and that’s a really beautiful thing. As long as we’re willing to take that first step and open up the dialogue, it feels really good for us.

Categories: Music