![]() On Friday night, X Ambassadors and Robert Randolph & The Family Band open up for “Tejas” trio ZZ Top, 5 p.m., $35. Thursday night, things kick off with a concert from San Francisco’s Train, the pop rockers responsible for earworms like “Hey, Soul Sister” and “Drops of Jupiter,” and Natasha Bedingfield (Remember “Pocketful of Sunshine?” Yes, you do.), 8 p.m., $35. To launch the downtown revitalization and to acquaint arts patrons with the new facilities, MAD (Murphy Arts District) is hosting a four-day kickoff in the heart of the oil boomtown’s new digs. In part because it’s home to three New York Stock Exchange-listed companies - Murphy USA, Murphy Oil Corp., and Deltic Timber Corporation - the south Arkansas town of El Dorado is undergoing a $100 million makeover that includes an outdoor ampitheater, a kids’ playscape, a 2,000-seat music hall, a farm-to-table restaurant and a future cinema house and art gallery. Murphy Arts District, downtown El Dorado. How have you liked it so far?ĭC: What have been your favorite artists to see? Local artist Ronnie Gierhart decided to forge his own path when he left electro-pop group Neon Indian to start a solo funk career under the name “Ronnie Heart.” At Fortress Festival, The Daily Campus had the opportunity to talk with him at the Modern Art Museum about his music, influences and the art of smoothie making.ĭaily Campus: We know you’ve been at the festival even though you got canceled.Various times. RH: I would say the Flying Lotus performance was really good. I kind of didn’t get to see many people yesterday. I came here, since I didn’t have to perform, I went straight to the Green Room and took pictures with the photographer upstairs and ate a bunch, you know I kinda stayed up there accidentally for a long time. I think Flying Lotus was pretty much the only person I saw.ĭC: It is a pretty cool performance. So what made you want to start getting into music? RH: I was dancing when I was younger and I never ever thought of music. I don’t have family who are musicians so I grew up in Houston loving dancing and that’s what I wanted to professionally be. So, I was 16 and I’ve been playing guitar ever since, so little by little accumulating other skills.ĭC: What made you take the leap from Neon Indian to what you do now? Up until moving to Colorado when I was 16, where there weren’t a lot of, or any music schools in public Colorado and I guess instead I started something else up that wasn’t a sport and ended up being just playing guitar. ![]() I wanted to be a singer.ĭC: So why the change in genres? What made you want to get into the funk genre that you do now? RH: I guess there was a point in time where I had vigor to create my own music. Whatever the album sounds like, however I preform, it’s very inspired by that era of music.ĭC: What are some of your biggest inspirations? I listen to a lot of funk and disco inspired stuff. RH: I would just say just to keep it general. I’ve been listening to hip hop a lot, I think because of the dancing. But my Latin roots – my dad’s from Columbia and my mom’s from El Salvador – and all the Latin music, all the Latino music I listen to at home definitely has something to do with it. ![]() I keep the live performance in mind while creating songs.ĭC: When you are performing live, do you incorporate some sort of dance? I think dancing in general has something to do with why and how I make music. So if you haven’t seen me play live, I’m basically moving the entire time. ![]() So, you know, here and there learning how to control when I should be moving or when it’s more, I guess not necessarily appropriate, because you don’t wanna see someone being all over the place the entire time. RH: No, I think from just seeing videos of the performances. It just has the anticipation and the build up.ĭC: So you play more in the DFW area, what is the funk scene there like? And sometimes it feels awkward to be dancing super hard and then realizing, okay, I could save this, I could have a more dramatic, still, statuesque kind of feel to the whole performance and all of a sudden burst into something. RH: I don’t know if there’s too much of it. I know Quaker City Night Hawks are sort of the southern blues-y rock band. ![]() There’s a lot of that which, let’s say the guitarist who play in the classic popular funk groups definitely have blues and some kind of jazz influence in their playing. So I think that that’s been incorporated into the whole thing for years since the genre came to be. RH: Yeah I live, here we’re at the Modern Art Museum, I live 10 minutes away at most from here.īut Fort Worth, and I live here in Fort Worth, seems to have not too many.ĭC: So you’re stationed here in Fort Worth? I would say there’s a lot of R&B acts in Dallas. ![]()
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