A queer child of Appalachia, Adeem the Artist chronicles the American South in vivid truth

At its core, the American South is a place − a shadow on a map. And whether left behind by loafers or Adeem Bingham's emerald boots, the physical footprints of pastors and poets are absorbed by Southern soil all the same.

Bingham, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, recalls making a promise to God before they could speak. From conservative Christian to pansexual player of Southern truths, the Knoxville, Tennessee, musician − now widely known as Adeem the Artist − has a burlap sack full of life experiences fermenting as songwriting wisdom.

But not all Southern stories pair Dixie with delight. Some see the South with such bright eyes they tend to overlook its blemishes.

The things Adeem the Artist hasn't experienced, they have delicately observed in the struggles of strangers and friends during their 34 years, culminating in 11 sung stories of "White Trash Revelry" released on Dec. 2.

Perhaps, you have seen the album on "best-of" lists by Rolling Stone and Billboard or heard their music praised by Brandi Carlile, a queer country artist in her own right − and a Grammy-winning one, at that.

Conversations surrounding Southern music and culture are changing, and Adeem the Artist is an emerging flagbearer for that movement, which has seen Confederate imagery banned and LGBTQ voices explicitly welcomed at major country music events.

But if you ask Adeem, they're just calling life as they see it.

From the shadows of the Smoky Mountains, here's the USA TODAY Network conversation with Adeem the Artist, available in its entirety (with musical performances) via the audio and YouTube versions of this week's "The Scruffy Stuff" podcast.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

USA TODAY Network: It seemed that around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was when your music really started taking off an resonating with people. Can you talk about the complexity of that timing?

Adeem: My wife, Hannah – High Five Hannie – she's an artist in town. And we’re both just scrappy artist types. That’s why we came to Knoxville. It was cheap living. When you have a creative mind and clinical depression, which are a couple things we have, then day jobs aren't always the best situation to be in. The entire atmosphere was not great for us in any of the work environments that we were in. So, we were kind of used to, ‘I can’t work here anymore, so we’re going to rough it for a while.’ ... So, I think the pandemic was – we had been practicing for that for years, you know. … It’s time to get whimsical and figure out how we’re gonna survive this thing from a financial standpoint. From a health standpoint, we were bleaching our groceries.

Q: There's this belief that Knoxville musicians are better off moving to Nashville to make it, but you made it happen here. What are your thoughts on this belief?

Adeem: I don’t give a lot of credence to the, ‘You-have-to-move-to-Nashville-to-succeed’ thing. But it is true there are a lot of natural obstacles, I think, to do music in Knoxville. We are a football town. We are a sports-oriented community. The music scene is vibrant. There are a lot of great players here. There are a lot of great listeners here. But socially, I think the community of listeners and Knoxville is built around social events with music as a background. That’s how I made most of my money here before the pandemic was being the “Brown Eyed Girl” player at the brewery.

Q: You just played "Carolina," which I told you a couple years ago was one of my absolute favorite songs. And I was surprised when I listened to "White Trash Revelry" to hear a new version as the opener. How much of the album was already brewing before you went into the writing and recording process?

Adeem: This was the album I’d been working on for a while – before the pandemic happened, for sure. I think probably a little over half the record was written at that point. And I really didn't believe that I had what I needed to actualize it in the way that it needed it to be actualized. I imagined what I wanted the record to be, and I knew that I couldn’t do it independently because I do a lot of my own recording. So, (2021 album) “Cast-Iron Pansexual” was an absolute surprise success to me. I had no ambition. I wasn’t even going to release it until a couple weeks before it came out.

Q: Why not?

Adeem: It was for Patreon supporters. It was like a special thing for people who followed me on there. And so, I was just gonna give it to them. And then I gave it to a few of them, and they were like: “This is really good. You should put it out.” So, I released it.

And then, we got lucky. Toby Keith did something dumb. He got some kind of medal from the president that a lot of people didn’t like, and so it became a good time to release the Toby Keith song just by accident. And then, BJ Barham from American Aquarium heard that, so things started kind of moving as far as tour dates and stuff for me, and that was nice.

There’s this artist. Her name’s Karen Pittelman. She’s got a band called Karen & the Sorrows. It's incredible. Really, really lovely. And she’s written a series of essays, but there’s one in particular about the culture of country music that really, really moved me where she talked a lot about the stories that get told, the stories that don’t get told, the narratives that are perpetuated, what it says about the culture. A lot of people who don’t live in and of the American South – it’s very easy to distill it to a very myopic view of the type of person that lives here. But we’re actually a very vibrant and culturally diverse collective of folks. And so, I really wanted to spend time on music that unpacked some of the things that brought me to where I am. And so, I took some of those songs ... largely about deconstructing my childhood, my Southern identity, the ways it affected me for the positive and the negative. And then, I kind of had these topics I wanted to cover that just rolled out. I think we had 13 songs for the record and whittled it down to 11.

Q: You’ve been a singer-songwriter for 20 years now. Why was 2022 the year that led to so much recognition?

Adeem: I got really lucky, man. I joke and say I finally did a good one. But there’s some truth in that too. It’s an album that took me probably six or seven years to write, altogether. … There were probably like 50 decisions that I made for this album, and I could go through them. But the truth is, with anything that you do, it’s always a little bit of a crapshoot. ... You’re at the mercy of so many different factors. I think in a lot of ways, it’s a moment where there’s a lot of work that needs to be done within the culture of country music that a lot of people are paying attention to for the first time. And I’m addressing a lot of those issues and addressing a lot of that work, I would say, in a way that is not patronizing. I didn’t make a record to paint myself as one of the woke whites who’s gonna save the country or anything like that. I made a record to try and, as compassionately as possible, really reflect on, "Where have I come from?" … To find out about layers and layers of injustice that happened it the world, it can be overwhelming. It paralyzed me for years. I felt so overwhelmed by the direness of it. … The only way that we get to move forward is to … integrate what you’ve learned and try to do a little bit wherever you can to make it better. And I don’t always do that, but I’m trying.

Q: Do you actively put messages of race and gender in your songs to get that point across? Or do those messages naturally find their way into songs through your storytelling?

Adeem: I’m not a guitarist. I’m sort of a makeshift anthropologist, and that’s what a lot of storytellers are. We study human beings. We study people and try to understand them. The stuff that makes me mad is what you’re talking about here. It's when people on the right or the left, whatever their political affiliation is, try to ham-fistedly shove a political message into a song. I don’t want to be preached at. I don’t want to be told what to believe or what’s right or what’s wrong. I have plenty of family members that I can hang out with on the holidays on both sides of the aisle that can tell me what to think about things.

So, for me, if I feel drawn to talk about racism like I did with this song “Heritage of Arrogance" − that song is not talking about racism. That song is talking about my life. I grew up on a street lined with confederate flags. That is where I grew up. I went to a church full of all white people. There was not a person in my church that wasn’t white. These are just facts. That's just my life. So, the fact that those images play into this greater narrative of exposing racism in the sort of nefarious ways that it becomes sewn into our culture is really just storytelling. … None of this is about telling people what to do or how to live. It’s about giving people the freedom to make the choices that they need to make to pursue their highest self.

Q: You have publicly shared through social media and music about being non-binary and pansexual. But the music you write is synonymous with the South, which has a stereotypical reputation for not always being accepting of things like gender. What was the experience of coming out like for you?

Adeem: I came out during the pandemic. It was easier that way, I think, to be in that position. … I think a lot of people felt like this: You step away from the office and you can take off this mask that you have to wear to the office every day. ... I think having that space to not have to perform in any way really helped me to step back and really analyze the way gender informed the way that I communicated with people. I got a lot of really supportive messages. A lot of folks in town were really, really kind to me. A lot of folks went out of their way, people in the scene here, to write me – that didn’t have to – to tell me that they supported me and appreciated me and stood behind me. It meant a lot.

Online, there’s been just casual bigotry lobbed my way, but most of it’s by anonymous strangers. It doesn’t mean anything. They just see what they’ve prescribed as a man in lipstick, and they know how to respond to that, and that's all that is. …

I want to say this because it’s really important. Rolling Stone called my album one of the best albums of the year. My actualization is totally unimpeded by people’s thoughts about my gender. I don’t care. It does not matter to me. I spent my months sending over 400 records out from my home office. I feel fine. I’m not gonna hear people disparage me. I’m not gonna hear people disparage my gender. I’m not gonna hear people disparage any of the facets of my identity. But these kids who, like me, don’t have language for their own identity, for their own sexuality, for their own gender but are feeling estranged from the gender or sexuality they’ve been socialized to inhabit are going to hear that stuff. And it’s the kind of stuff that − you can lose your relationships with your kids. And that’s it. That’s what we got. That’s our legacy. That’s how we affect the future. It’s that relationship with our kids. … I think that learning how to occupy shared space in ways that honors each other is really, really important if we’re going to survive all these disparate realities.

Q: You mentioned the Rolling Stone recognition for the most recent album. There also was a feature in The New York Times and recognition from Billboard. Brandi Carlile has spoken kindly of you as an artist, which has to be huge. How much has life changed since this recognition, and are any of these particularly special to you?

Adeem: It’s tough. The Brandi Carlile one came before any of the other ones I think. I got a notification on the social media that she had added me to something. I thought it was a playlist or something. I was like, “Oh, cool, this is awesome.” And so, I went to look for it, couldn’t find it. And then I logged on Instagram and saw there was an XM radio show. And so, I went and got a subscription to XM radio and pulled it up as quickly as I could. And I pulled it up just in time to hear Brandi’s wife say, “Adeem the Artist.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s exciting.” And then I listened for about a few minutes while I did the dishes, and then she said, “This next artist we want to talk about.” And she said her quotes about me, and I screamed. Like, that can’t be real. “Honey, get in here. We’ve got something weird going on.” That was really a big moment. It’s been wild. … We didn’t think we’re gonna get any best-year-end lists. The album came out Dec. 2. It was like, maybe we’ll get an honorable mention on stuff next year or whatever. So, the first one of those was Billboard. It was a week after the record came out. … By the end of the month, we all became numb to it. Everybody on the team was just like, “Oh, looks like the Grammys mentioned us.”

Q: But as far as day-to-day life changes? I imagine you’re doing a lot more of these (interviews).

Adeem: DMs are full. Social media got ruined for me a little bit. It’s a bummer.

Q: Here's the obligatory question: What’s next? I saw you were added to the 2023 Big Ears Festival lineup, which takes place here in Knoxville and also features The Mountain Goats. I understand they are bringing you on tour, right?

Adeem: I’ve got about three records cooking up. I don’t know if they’ll make it to public or if they’ll be Patreon things. Right now, it’s riding the wave of the record, trying to get people to listen to it still. I’ve been doing stuff like this and talking to people and radio and, to be honest with you, my pace of life – part of it’s just the timing. Everything in the world shuts down Dec. 20 and then it just opened up (in early January), right? Some people haven't even been in the office. So, it’s tough to say how much my life has really changed because I’ve been taking it pretty easy. I got told that I had to come here today and I was like, “I have to leave the house today?” But also, just today, we announced WayneStock 2023. We haven't done it in a couple years.

Q: Well, we appreciate you coming. And you mentioned trying to get people to listen to the album – if people want to listen or generally keep up with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Adeem: Yeah, I’m on adeemtheartist.com and @adeemtheartist on all my social media stuff. That was a joke. I’m really glad to be here. I’m thankful you asked me. I appreciate the opportunity and getting to chat with you.

Ryan Wilusz, downtown reporter and urban explorer for Knox News, can be reached at 865-317-5138 or by email at ryan.wilusz@knoxnews.com. Follow Ryan's work on Instagram @KnoxScruff, and sign up for the free, weekly Urban Knoxville newsletter. Unlock premium perks and support strong local journalism at knoxnews.com/subscribe.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Adeem the Artist sings 'White Trash Revelry' back home in Knoxville