Pierce Freelon: City Council Member, Musician and Producer

Creatives in Conversation: I believe that we can learn so much from each other and I am fascinated by the ways in which artists of all mediums move through the creative process. Each interview features a different local artist as we discuss the challenges and joys that come from accessing and living with their creativity.

Durham City Council Member and GRAMMY nominee Pierce Freelon is an accomplished musician, producer, and educator from Durham, North Carolina who has been featured on the TODAY Show, and at NPR and MSNBC. Pierce has traveled the world teaching hip hop and music production to youth as co-creator of Beat Making Lab, an Emmy Award-winning PBS web-series. He has taught in the Department of Music and the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the writer, composer and co-director of the animated series History of White People in America, an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival. Pierce is also the founder of Blackspace, a digital maker space where he mentors youth and teaches digital storytelling in Durham. His critically acclaimed children’s music has been featured in Billboard, Rolling Stone, Now This, Parents Magazine and more. In 2022, Little, Brown will release his debut children’s book Daddy Daughter Day (based on his song of the same title). He is the son of famed Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon and the late preeminent architect of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Phil Freelon. Pierce lives in Durham with his wife and their two young children.

You have a lot of talent in a lot of different arenas. You sing, you direct, you write. How do all of these different ways of being creative interact with each other?

Well first of all, thank you for the kind words. We tend to think of creativity as these things that exist in certain arenas or genres like singing or painting. But I think that the same part of my brain that lights up when I'm writing a song or conceiving of a story, is the same part of my brain that is active during parenting when I'm coming up with the bedtime story for the kids or opening the fridge to figure out what the snack is about to be, to take a look at what's in there and just improvise. And so too with relationships, [my wife] Katie is such a wonderful creative partner in this in life and over the course of the 13 years we've been married, we've learned a lot. We've had to improvise. We've had to think on our toes. We've had tense times and challenges to overcome and knots to untie and then this ability and capacity to grow and think and build together.

I often tell my creative collaborators, "we're married" (laughs). In The Beast, my hip hop and jazz band, we all played different roles. Some folks were good with money. This guy was good at composing. I've got my roles in the education space. And in addition to the instruments that we play, if at any point somebody wasn't kinda stepping up, we had to have that same kind of heart-to-heart that you have with a partner where you're like, "babe, stop doing this” or “do more of that." I have my biological children, but then I have my creative children.

From Daddy Daughter Day. Photo Credit: Shoot With Bliss

Even campaigns for office, there are creative tethers ingrained in those processes. Preparing for a debate is not so different from rehearsing for a concert. So that's just a framework for how I view life. To answer the question, which is, what connects them for me, I think an increasingly deep sense of community, of vulnerability, of truth – those things have, I think, defined how I parent, my marriage and also my art.

Sometimes you have to look back at your compass to make sure you're not veering off path. And those are the gravitational forces that direct the flow, the energy that I try to put out in the world and the universe.

You're so present in the North Carolina community. What do you think the role of the artist is within their community?

Toni Cade Bambara said, "the job of the writer is to make the revolution irresistible." That quote really resonates with me because we need creatives to be able to create the world. If you think about some of the things that are wrong with the world – whether that's poverty or patriarchy, racism, these big structures – they're all things that people came up with. It's like the evil genius thing from Disney. There's a lot of creativity and genius that came into creating race and the system of racism. There's this project I'm a part of called “The History of White People in America,” which talks about how race came to be. The first time the word “white” appeared in a legal document it was during Bacon's Rebellion. These British colonizers in the new world – they saw that African – well, they were not known as African at the time, it was whatever region they came from, so maybe Gold Coast or Zulu folks. [Those] were teaming up with poor Irish and Scottish sharecroppers and they banded together and they burned down the capital in Jamestown because the British were being stingy with money. [It was an instance of] poor people [coming] together and [saying], “we've had enough.”

[The British] said, “well, how do we keep these poor people from ganging up on us? How do we prevent revolts like Bacon's Rebellion from happening?” And they got creative. They said, “what if we keep them from being able to intermarry?” And that was the first time the word white appeared in a legal document in America – it was pre-America [because it was still] the colonies – it was to prevent white and black people from intermarrying. And from there you have the slave codes and a distinction between the races, which didn't exist [previously].

Intermarrying was very common early in the colonies. There was not this attachment to eternal servitude of slavery that had to do with skin color; that was created because British people wanted to figure out a way to keep poor Irish and Scottish and African folks from seeing each other as allies, as friends and as a common enemy to the British. As insidious as that idea was, it's a creative idea and it worked and we're still living with the legacy of that idea. It meant that the existing couples were broken apart, the families of interracial children were separated. Then the religious institutions started saying, “these people are the cursed sons of Ham.” And then the scientists jumped in and said, “actually African brains are smaller. They're less intelligent. They're actually not fully human.” So that's just an example of how a creative idea can shape half a millennia of someone's lived reality.

But likewise, a different set of ideas can create a different reality. The idea, for example, that a woman is not the property of her husband or that she should be able to vote. The March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, [his speech] "I have a dream." That dream was a creative idea that existed apart from the paradigm of the time, [which was] separation of the races. But it took someone to be able to look at that situation and envision something different. And not everyone has that capacity, that visionary capacity to think something else into existence and to articulate it clearly. And for that idea to spread like wildfire and become reality, that is the daily practice of any art.

[Artists] think of lyrics, songs, recipes, from nothing. And that capacity to create an idea and to articulate it and to share it and spread it, that is the daily domain of artists. And I think that our role in society is to do that, and to do it at such a scale and fueled by kind of righteousness and peace and respect and love, as opposed to division. Sometimes creativity is fueled by division or power and things that have a negative impact on society or certain groups within society. The role of the artist is to be visionary and change the world for the better.

What is your biggest creative challenge? And do you have a way that you move through it or are you still figuring out how?

The first thing that came to my mind was time. I have more ideas in my head than there are hours in the day to execute all of them. But I think a sub-genre of time as a broader challenge is discipline. And with discipline, it's really about time management and making sure that you have time to pour into the things that you want to be creating.

“[An artist has a] visionary capacity to think something else into existence and to articulate it clearly. ”

— Pierce Freelon

I've been very privileged to have more time than most people because some of my basic needs are taken care of, which is great. When I travel around the world and see other places where, for example, you have to walk three or four hours a day just to get fresh water ... that's six hours of your day that is just spent figuring out how you're going to drink.

I'd love to learn a new instrument. I'd love to learn a new language. But I have to weigh those disciplines against spending time with my family, or against pursuing things that I'm already good at and have already invested a lot of time and energy into, as opposed to embarking on a brand new path. Those are the wagers that we make on a daily basis. And the less privilege you have, the more types of decisions like that will infringe upon your time. I'm just sitting in gratitude for the privilege that I have had to grow up in the family that I did and the time and the era that we live in, in the country that I was born into and a body that carries a lot of privilege and in many ways.

Who, or what, are some creative influences of yours?

My parents are a big influence. My wife, my children, my family. Listening to music, also life experience and spending time with folks who care about experiencing life and loss and love with members of my beloved community.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to be more creative or have more creativity in their day to day?

I would advise them to realize that creativity is already there in some of the ways that I've shared. Every time we have a conversation it's improvised; we're not reading from a script, we're creating language daily. That requires creative thought. Raising kids and being in partnership with others – not even romantic partnership, it could be work partnership – those things require creativity.

This interview has been edited and condensed.