M U SIC
TRE. CHARLES |
Artsplosure in Raleigh | Saturday, May 20, 11 a.m. | raleighartsfestival.com
Singer-songwriter Tre. Charles PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA
Awake at the Wheel Tre. Charles speeds into the music industry with a haunting sound and a mindful message about slowing down. BY BRIAN HOWE music@indyweek.com
I
like Tre. Charles’s music all the time, but there’s a special way it hits early in the morning. When emails, songs, and pitches are swarming around me with stressful speed, new Tre. is about the only thing that will drown it all out for a few minutes, laying me back in my chair to breathe. Drawing on an itinerant 32-year life’s worth of influences—emotional ’90s rock and ’00s hip-hop, neo-soul and alternative R&B, choral music and canons—the Durham resident, whose given name is Trey Charles Horton, has arrived at a style I think of as ambient soul. His songs come in clouds of trappings: skating drum machines and hovering plug-in strings, stretched and shifted vocal harmonies, and long-tailed reverbs and delays that hum like cathedrals. This labyrinth of sound, blurred at the edges yet sharply etched in the middle, is where we find his just-woke-up voice and glinting guitar, his fingers tweezing jazzy splinters from thick barre chords. 14
May 10, 2023
INDYweek.com
The overall effect is calming, but in a transfixing, time-halting way, like dancing candlelight. “I used to get so annoyed when people would tell me, ‘Your music is so relaxing,’” he says. “I guess that’s just the natural way I play. I love the big, lush reverb sound. I love the space, the scope, all that room to feel the song.” He’s a big guy, with a deep, inquisitive voice and soft, open features. He has a background in modeling; you could easily picture him wearing a big quilted coat and small smile in an Urban Outfitters ad. We spoke over several convivial meetings at Durham spots like Queeny’s and Corpse Reviver. “I used to love singing in big parking garages and churches because I loved how big my voice could be,” he goes on, “and there were so many people telling me, ‘You shouldn’t do this; you’re not that good at it; you should probably stick to something else.’ They wanted to put me in a box, and I
let them for a long time.” One wall of that box was being a Black man plastered with stereotypes of aggression that were at odds with his inner wells of feelings. “Now I’m like, naw, this is who I am currently,” he says. “It might not be who I am tomorrow, but it’s who I am now.” Currently. is the four-song EP that Tre. Charles has been working on and releasing bits of since 2019, when a neardeath experience got him started on his music career, making videos and playing more than 300 brewery, venue, and festival gigs. His music’s invitation to slow down is made plain in soft, measured, taut laments about life in the toofast lane like “Lately.” and “Stressin.” The EP is a concise gem, never doing any more or less than needed musically. But it does raise a question: Can you pursue vulnerability and mindfulness in an industry that runs on hardness and hustle?
T
re. Charles lived in Syracuse, New York, until age 10, when his family started moving around a lot for his father’s work as a civil engineer. In North Carolina, home was mainly the Concord area. He sang baritone in his high school chorus, a role he didn’t like. He could sing low, so it’s what he was assigned. Now he sings in a hushed, expressive tenor that fits just inside the pocket of his quietly booming arrangements. “Moving around a lot, music was one of the things I could have as a constant,” he says. “And I was always picking up new music in different areas I would go to.” He got into skate and surf stuff in Florida and California, ’90s R&B like Boyz II Men and Jodeci and contemporary tastemakers like Frank Ocean and Sampha, the golden age of DatPiff and Dipset mixtapes, all kinds of things. But when he started college at UNC Pembroke, he says, “I played some cowboy chords, and that was it. C, G—I couldn’t play an A because I didn’t know how to get the three fingers right there.” He was then pursuing modeling and acting. He got a county tourism commercial here, a community college bill-