New Orleans Musician Boyfriend’s ‘In the Garden’ Bears Fruit

An apple tree takes seven to 10 years to produce its fist, edible fruit — which is about how long New Orleans singer-songwriter and performance artist Boyfriend has been cultivating In the Garden — a concept album that reimagines the infamous Adam and Eve origin tale from the Book of Genesis through a queer, feminist lens. And the sweetness of the forbidden fruit was all worth the wait.

The album, which drops on May 9th (via Big Freedia’s Queen Diva label), with a handful of live performances in New Orleans and Brooklyn, is loaded with cheeky humor and social commentary. In the Garden takes us back to The Beginning from the vantage point of Eve (played, and sung, by Boyfriend), with a cast of collaborators, including Big Freedia as God, Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears as Adam, and Peaches as the split-tongued Serpent.

As the soundtrack segues between the booming happy-house intro song “Creation” to the slinky, electro-pop “Eve” to the acoustic-guitar-kissed, clubby synth-pop tune “Bite,” the once-familiar Old Testament tale is turned upside its head: The listener is challenged to rethink everything they once believed like, say, the idea that Adam, God’s first man, is heterosexual.

“I love the idea of casting Adam as a gay man to suggest that, like, maybe this thing was neutered from the start, and there was never supposed to be a penis going into a vagina,” Boyfriend explains.

We recently caught up with Boyfriend, known for her rap cabaret aesthetic, collaborations like “Dance With the Devil” (with Pussy Riot), and fun-yet-radical performances, to talk about all the things, from eco-friendly “throws” from her very own Mardi Gras float to the day-to-day grind of being a tortured artist who relishes the privilege of self-expression without consequences.

Rockmommy: Hi Boyfriend! How was Mardi Gras? When I lived in New Orleans in the late 1900s it didn’t occur to me that the beads were a climate change disaster. You threw out eco-conscious goodies from your float!

Boyfriend: It’s definitely gotten worse since when you were here. I think particularly post [Hurricane] Katrina is when the beads became, like, more insidious. The sheer amount of quantity is out of control. So, yeah, I have this float … and for me, climate crisis is, like, the top cause or priority that I care about. I really strongly feel that like service needs to be part of your life, so it’s ironic that my version of it is, like, this giant party, but here we are, and we’ve been making great strides, and I’m hoping for next year to even be further, like, banning the beads was a huge first step for our crew. But, yeah, we’re just going to keep pushing it further and hope that the culture follows suit.

Rockmommy: A few years ago, you put out Sugar & Spice. That was your first full length album, right?

Boyfriend: Yeah, it was the other project before had just been EPs. And the ‘Love Your Boyfriend’ project could have been an album, but I broke it up into two EPs instead, because I was trying to build … unfortunately, the almighty algorithm Gods want to see more regular posting … but, I’m an album person, like, I want to hear something from top to bottom.

Like, if I hear a couple songs that I like from somebody, I go back to their very first release, and then I just work my way forward. So I hope that some people out there consume my work in the same way. And, you know, Sugar & Spice was the first full-length album … I am really proud of it, of how it it really says the things that I had said so far over the course of singles and EPs in a really, like, concise, interesting way.

Rockmommy: It’s definitely a storyline [and] I think there’s a reason that you ordered songs in a specific way.

Boyfriend: Oh, yeah, certainly. And all my shows are, at least, abstractly narrative … I think that storytelling is always what I’m interested in, is what I’m interested in consuming, and so it’s what I try to make.

Rockmommy: I want to talk about your album In the Garden and your new live show. When did you first encounter the story of Adam and Eve? Can you tell me about that? Do you remember?

Boyfriend: Well, I have still my little beginner Children’s Bible. It has illustrations, basically for all the different stories, and they’re like, burned in my memory … as soon as I can remember, I guess, or even before I can remember, I guess, there that story was getting infiltrated into my brain stem.

Adam and Eve has been represented culturally time and time and time again … it exists in cultural zeitgeist in a way that most Bible stories don’t … and it exists in a more playful way. That already makes it more interesting.

Rockmommy: When did it occur to you to reimagine the Origin story, like “there’s a story I want to tell in my own Boyfriend way?” Can you take me back to kind of that moment?  

Boyfriend: 2015 – that’s how long I’ve been working on this! I finally understand the whole tortured artist thing. I never understood that before. I would just, like, cough and, like, “there is a completed song,” and now it’s like, “Oh God!” I was so tortured by this project. I would set it aside for, like, eight months, you know, like not even look at it for almost a whole year. And then I’d engage with it for two hours and be like,” I can’t” and then, like, put it aside again.

Rockmommy: So how do you decide it’s ready? What kind of propelled it forward to now?

Boyfriend: I had my management team set a date that I had to meet. I think that the first thing was the show that I’m doing at Esplanade Studios [in New Orleans, on April 26], they’re like, ‘we booked the venue.’ And then the Joe’s Pub date [in Brooklyn, on May 6th]. So all right, it’s happening, you know? It’s like, ‘OK, well, now I gotta finish it’ because that’s what had to happen. This was supposed to be my debut album. That was always the plan. And up until [my management team booked the show] I hadn’t had professional accountability. It was just our own sort of arbitrary deadlines of like, ‘okay, it has to be done on May 1.’

Rockmommy: You have some big musical collaborators. Your your best bud, Big Freedia, is on the album. When did you start recording the music?

Boyfriend: I probably did the first recording in, like, 2017, I would say, like, 2017 ish, and then, like, I got in with Freedia. We were doing a lot of stuff during COVID. Like we were a pod basically, yeah, we were working on Freedia’s Christmas album that came out that year. And so we tracked some “Eve” stuff then. In fact, the vocals that became the final vocals for one of the songs were tracked then. So it’s been very piecemeal … pulling it all together. I’m actually proud of it. I’ve kind of hated it for 10 years, because it was like, I’m in this abusive relationship with this concept, with this idea, and now I’m finally on the other side, where I’m like, ‘this is really good’ and it feels good to be able to say that.

Rockmommy: In addition to Big Freedia, In the Garden, has some amazing collaborations — Peaches, Billy Porter, Jake Shears. How did you find these people? Are any of them in the live show too?

Boyfriend: I can’t get all of these people on the same stage and do a tour, you know, and so when we’re depicting it live, well, it will still be the album, so you’ll still hear those recorded voices of the various characters, but it’s going to be acted out by different actors in these Greek-chorus-style masks, because I decided to set the Garden of Eden on stage, like in the world of the theater, which is why the album cover is the big, gorgeous velvet curtains.

For instance, our serpent is going to be made of that that red velvet stanchion rope, you know, that’s like alongside an aisle. Basically, the aesthetics of the theater itself are what the garden is made of. Because I’m trying to invite people into this realm of storytelling. That’s what we’re doing here. Like this is myth making. This is world building.

Rockmommy: Can we talk about so Peaches [as the serpent]? How did that happen?

Boyfriend: We reached out. You know, I knew that her voice was perfect for the serpent, and I knew I wanted the serpent to also be like a female voice, or at least, you know vaguely, In the abstract concepts of the of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are two humans, and I think it’s important that they represent traditional heterosexual gender [norms]. Yes, it’s the birth of the patriarchy story, but in terms of, like, God and the serpent, I’m like, ‘well, these are more abstract concepts … I need to think about who’s portraying them in terms of how their actual voice sounds and the texture of their voice.’ And I also love that there’s something, you know, not radically, but at least subtly … rebellious about having Big Freedia as God and a woman as the serpent.

Rockmommy: And then Jake Shears, Billy Porter, are on this too.

Boyfriend: Yeah, Jake is the perfect Adam! My interpretation of Adam is as this, like, sexy, golden retriever … sort of like Rocky from Rocky Horror. He’s just been created, and is instantly just this, like, punky man that’s kind of innocent. You don’t hate him, but he also is just, like, totally down to accept the status quo. Jake’s got this incredible falsetto that keeps it in this space. Also, he’s a gay man. He’s a gay icon. So I also love the idea of casting Adam as a gay man to suggest that, like, maybe this thing was neutered from the start, and like, was never supposed to be a penis going into a vagina.

Rockmommy: Right before your album comes out, you’re playing Jazz Fest again. Can you tell us about this year’s show? Are you playing with your dad Monty [Powell]?

Boyfriend: I’m not playing with him this year, for a couple of reasons.. The band I play with as my backing band is The Revivalists, and their set overlaps with mine. So it’s, like, literally not possible. But also, we wanted to do a track show so that we could showcase these “Eve” songs,

Rockmommy: How does a collaboration work with you? Do you just, like, get in a room and just figure it out?

Boyfriend: it’s like that. I know how the song needs to feel in terms of its narrative function. And so I can, like, give insights there, and then, in the room, we can pick a chord structure, and if that feels right, go with it. If it doesn’t feel right, change something. And then from there, go into the actual production realm of, ‘okay, no, this sound, this high-hat sound, is wrong, but we know we need a high hat. Let’s pick a different sound.’ Or, ‘the structure is wrong. Let’s put a bridge here. Let’s move eight bars of space.’ I’m producing in, like, the old-fashioned sense of producing. And our executive producer on this was Alex Crispin, who’s so incredibly talented, and I love working with him so much. He really saved the day, because he had to pull together all these different voices from all these different producers and make it cohesive.

Rockmommy: I do want to talk about the timing of this release. Art is under attack right now.

Boyfriend: I’m just, like, hoping that I can keep doing what I’m trying to do, but I honestly don’t know if I will be able to, and I’m trying to just think about, like, the next five days or the next five weeks … I work, you know, really closely with [artists like] Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova … they have had friends murdered. it’s like, literally, life and death.

She has said to me, ‘people will be like, ‘Oh, what’s it like to be from such a conservative place?’ ‘And she’s like, ‘actually, Russia is less conservative than the United States. We are just under a particular regime.’ And I think that that’s like, a crucial thing to remember .. she’s like, “that’s not what the world was like when I was growing up, even when I was in high school.’ It changed in her lifetime. It’s not like she was born into the landscape that Russia looks like now — it can change that quickly. And it can change in the conscious life of someone who is under 40, you know, that has her entire formative memories in a world, a landscape that look different than the one that she’s in now.

Rockmommy: Yeah, that’s right, she was post Gorbachev.

Boyfriend: Yeah, so it’s, like, terrifying, honestly. And I think that the way things have been going here is, like, death by 1000 paper cuts. You know, we love her so much in America, and, like, talk about how she’s such a badass, while I don’t think any of us really have what it takes to do what she did. And maybe why we think she’s such a badass is because we know that she’s brave in a way that we might not be. Like performance that she did [in Moscow’s Red Square]. She wasn’t famous when she did that.

Rockmommy: Yeah, no, it’s scary because, like, I’m thinking about it now, and the lot and in the US, anybody with a green card going to a college that protests is now being arrested, and I feel like art is like our therapy. It’s our it’s our expression, it’s the way we relate to each other … but it’s easy to take for granted how easy it’s been for U.S. artists to just express themselves freely with no consequences, right?

Boyfriend: Yeah. I mean, it’s like, I don’t feel like what I’m doing is as important as what a lot of other people are doing. You know, I have friends here who, every single day make sure that unhoused people get breakfast and get clothes, like, clean clothes on their back. And their entire life is making that happen.

I have a lot of friends that do really impressive things in the sustainability space. And so I sometimes feel like what I’m doing is so narcissistic and selfish to be like, ‘I want to make my album.’ Well, you know, there’s people that are more tangibly immediately trying to reduce suffering, and so a constant battle for me is trying to honor my eternal yearning, which is about creation, creating things, creating art, creating works, while also keeping a foot firmly in the reality of making sure that I’m not putting myself into some sort of weird echo chamber where only, like, my problems matter.