Rocker Buddy Red pushes boundaries on the Bad News EP

Buddy Red. // image courtesy the artist

Buddy Red has a Bad News EP release show at the Boone Theater on Friday, November 21, with openers The Phantastics, Noah Francis, and Jolsen and The Fear of Snakes. Details and tickets for that show here.

When we attended the Folk Alliance International conference in New Orleans back in January, one of the artists who caught our attention was Atlanta blues rocker Buddy Red.  New to the scene, and with only a handful of singles to his name, we had no idea what to expect other than the fact that Red had come highly recommended from someone we knew, who said he “oozes with charisma and swagger and an amazing guitarist too,” and damn if she wasn’t 100% on target with her statement.

Seeing Red on stage in the hotel’s ballroom felt like catching Lenny Kravitz when he was on the come up, just a young and hungry musician out there to show off what he can do with his voice and guitar. Since then, Buddy Red played Stubb’s during SXSW, with a recording of that show now streaming everywhere, and has his debut EP, Bad News, due out Friday, November 20.

To celebrate, Buddy Red has an EP release show at the newly reopened Boone Theater in Kansas City on Friday, November 21, with openers The Phantastics, Noah Francis, and Jolsen and The Fear of Snakes. Ahead of Bad News‘ release and the show, we hopped on Zoom with Buddy Red to discuss his career thus far. We began by asking Red how he came to start making music on his own, given that he came from a musical family.

“Yeah, I was kinda raised on music,” Red says, not much of a surprise given that his father is rapper T.I. “Naturally, I started appreciating rap and R&B and stuff pretty early on in my life, but it wasn’t until maybe around seven or eight years old when YouTube was first exposed to me.”

It was a rickroll which expanded Buddy Red’s musical horizons, believe it or not. While he didn’t get the point of what a rickroll was, he certainly responded to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

“I was like, ‘What is this song? I like this song,’” recalls Red, and once he dove more deeply into Astley’s music, that’s when he realized, “Okay, I like music that my parents don’t necessarily listen to. That’s when I became interested in different kinds of music.”

When Red was 16, he started producing his own music, with the hopes of getting one of his beats to the likes of Kendrick Lamar or J. Cole. While that dream eventually went by the wayside, a couple years later, he saw Bohemian Rhapsody in a movie theater at the age of 18, and that’s when the live music bug was planted.

Trying to produce K.Dot beats, discovering Rick Astley, seeing what Queen could do on stage–it all makes sense once you put ears to Bad News. There are songs like “Sweet Little Mammas” and “Questions (NO!)” which sound like they came from the Die Slaughterhouse/Douchemaster era of mid-aughts Atlanta garage rock, a reggae blues number in “Sold His Soul,” and the title track features Lil Wayne. Underneath it all, Buddy Red sounds like he’s having fun no matter what style of music he’s playing, and it’s held together by his swaggering vocals and grooving guitar work.

“Whenever I’m creating music, I try to use it as an opportunity to learn a little something about myself, and learning about myself is fun,” Red explains. “It’s exciting, learning that I can make a punk rock kinda song, and it may not sound like the Ramones or it may not sound exactly like The Stooges or Nirvana, but it sounds close enough to be reminiscent of them, but also something completely new.”

Red gets to the heart of it by continuing on to say, “It’s a whole bunch of me in it and my experiences in it.”

It’s all the more impressive once you realize that Red didn’t even think of picking up a guitar until that screening of Bohemian Rhapsody.

“Before the movie even ended, before the credits rolled, I was already asking myself, ‘All right–I know I wanna be a live musician. I know I wanna be on a stage playing an instrument, but what do I wanna play?’” he remembers thinking to himself. The first thing he thought was piano because Freddie Mercury was on screen playing piano, but that felt too safe. The bass guitar felt too boring, Rick James notwithstanding, because all of the bassists he knew did their thing off to the side.

“Then I thought, ‘Can I be a singer like Freddie Mercury?’ And I thought about it, and I said, ‘Nah. Maybe later. Maybe later,’ ’cause I was thinking about something that I wanted to do as soon as possible,” Red says of his next thought. The drums sounded exciting and new, but when the musician thought about the guitar, he said to himself, “I can’t see myself playing the guitar.”

Red was very familiar with that voice in his head. That voice is usually the voice that says, “Nah, you can’t do that. You can’t see yourself doing it, so don’t do it,” he says, but something told him that the fact that he was already trying to talk himself out of doing it was the reason to go for it.

“I’m pretty sure that same week I went out and bought my first guitar before I even knew how to properly hold it,” Red continues. Since then, it’s just been about pushing the limits of what he can do. “I try to make things exciting on the stage and in the studio for myself.”

All the guitar tricks, like playing the guitar behind his head and moving around on stage is all part of Red pushing his boundaries. Even being on stage and playing in front of a live audience is part of that because, he says, because, “Once upon a time, the thought of doing that would’ve been so embarrassing and mortifying. I would’ve just said, ‘No, I would never do that.’”

Now, though, Red tells those voices in his head to shut up and just goes out there and does it, and that includes the tour which brings him to Kansas City later this month.

“Man, it feels like a dream, honestly,” Red reflects. “Sometimes I get a sense of normality here at home. Sometimes I forget there’s a whole world out there to experience and to be turned on by.”

Red says he’s reminded of that every time he gets on a plane or on the road and goes to a city that he’s never been to with people he’s never met.

“They give me fresh reactions, and it rejuvenates me a little bit,” Red enthuses. “’Okay, I am pretty cool, man. This thing might work, man.’”

Ahead of his stop in Kansas City, Red says, he’s just looking forward to audiences digging him and what he does.

“Not to sound cocky, but I haven’t been I haven’t been chased out of any cities yet,” laughs Red as we wrap up.

Buddy Red has a Bad News EP release show at the Boone Theater on Friday, November 21, with openers The Phantastics, Noah Francis, and Jolsen and The Fear of Snakes. Details and tickets for that show here.