LOCAL
“PLAYING HANK SR. TO A MARILYN MANSON CROWD, IT DOESN’T GET ANY BALLSIER THAN THAT.”
BEAT
{BY ALEX GORDON}
EYES ON THE PRIZE
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Dollar and a Dream is due out in September on RBC/E1. “Get Rich” is available now. See www.facebook.com/ eddie.barnz for more information.
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w. Go to ww com aper. pghcityp ERICKS V for a MA nd read Ta PLAYLIS Raul Malo m more fro onesty on the h ing of record in mono
Eddie Barnz {PHOTO COURTESY OF XAVIER RODGERS}
“Get Rich,” the new single from Eddie Barnz, is not the big-money celebration you might expect from its name. The song is a slow, catchy, minor-chorded single, but far from a party song. Sure, Barnz name-drops Gucci, and money is mentioned more than once. But overall, the song feels closer to a call to action, more about the struggle and process of “getting rich” than the wealth itself. “You may be homeless today, but a month or a year down the line, you might be rich,” says Barnz, who himself spent part of 2007 homeless, sleeping on friends’ couches. “This is more the song to motivate people.” Last month, Barnz’s motivation paid off, as he signed a distribution deal with RBC Records/ eOne Music, whose roster includes artists like Tech N9ne and E-40. Under RBC, Barnz is set to release his debut full-length, Dollar and a Dream, this September, with “Get Rich” as its lead single. Barnz has been rapping since he was a kid. Growing up in the Hill District, he learned hip hop from his older brother, who introduced him to Big Daddy Kane and NWA, and his father, who showed him how to make beats on an old Boss Beat Machine. When he started listening to Nas rap about his neighborhood in Queens, or Biggie rapping about Brooklyn, Barnz was inspired to bring his neighborhood into his music in a similar way. “Chauncey Drive on the Hill District is like its own world, even though we’re in the Hill District. It’s totally different from other parts of the Hill [in] how we talk, the slang, how we was dressing,” says Barnz. “So I wanted to tell the story from my neighborhood to the whole world.” With major-label support and a lead single in the books, Barnz is feeling motivated. Ask him what he sees for his future and his answer is fittingly ambitious: a perfume line, a video game, movies, fast-food franchises, a documentary about his career. But that’s down the line, long-term. For now, Barnz is focused on “Get Rich.”
The Mavericks: Eddie Perez, Paul Deakins, Jerry Dale McFadden and Raul Malo
MUSICAL MAVERICKS {BY CHARLIE DEITCH}
A
SK ANYONE familiar with the band what kind of music The Mavericks play and you’ll likely hear one word: country. And when the band started out playing shows in South Florida 25 years ago, that label certainly fit. In fact, at a time when country music was starting to morph into the nondescript, industry-tainted, popsounding, bro-rock mess that we now associate with the word, the Mavericks were playing traditional country songs. But spend just 10 minutes listening to Mono, and you won’t call it country. Recorded completely in mono, there’s a blues number, a ska tune, songs with the group’s driving Latin rhythms, a country shuffle and even a cover of Doug Sahm tune with that distinctive Southwestern feel. Without question, it’s like nothing this band — or likely any other — has done before, and for lead singer Raul Malo, that’s the whole point. “At this stage of the game, you can become a nostalgia act where you play nothing but your old stuff, but that’s not the
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 04.22/04.29.2015
case. People love the new stuff and there’s an energy there to the music, and I think it’s translating not only for ourselves, but to the audience as well. I think it’s catching everyone like a windstorm,” Malo tells City Paper. “I’ve been in the music business for 25 years, and I think there’s a little bit of an unwritten seniority rule where it’s like, ‘I’m fifty-fucking-years-old, I can do whatever the hell I want from this point on.’ So there’s definitely a little bit of that going on. “We have nothing to lose and nothing to prove anymore.”
THE MAVERICKS 8 p.m. Sat., April 25. Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall, 510 E. 10th Ave., Munhall. $45-70. www.librarymusichall.com
Malo says the new record comes from the natural evolution of the band that includes original drummer Paul Deakin and long-time guitarist Eddie Perez and keyboardist Jerry Dale McFadden. And if you look back at the band’s history, it
almost seems impossible that it could create any other record except for the eclectic Mono. When the band began playing shows in Miami in the early 1990s, the decidedly country band often found itself playing a lot of punk and alternative shows. At one point, the Mavericks were sharing a bill with goth-rocker Marilyn Manson, who at the time was huge in South Florida and about to break out nationally. “It’s the exact type of experience that makes you stronger,” Malo recalls with a chuckle. “I mean, you talk about laying it on the line. When you’re playing Hank Sr. to a Marilyn Manson crowd, it doesn’t get any ballsier than that.” Before Lady Gaga called her fans “little monsters,” Malo says, that’s what Manson called his fans. “And it’s true, they were like these little monsters,” Malo says, the laughs becoming louder. “They all had this jet-black hair and really pale faces, and I remember, for some reason, they all carried these lunchboxes, that was the big deal. I remember thinking,