PawPaw Rod

Anyone close to me knows that my sense of humor can best be described with the facepalm emoji. My friends tolerate this sense of humor – but my closest friends share this sense of humor. For example, my bandmates and I once made the local news with the headline: Plays serious music, tells bad dad jokes.

One time I met PawPaw Rod, an artist in the era of Meta-Genre who has made a name for himself by effortlessly blending 60s and 70s soul, hip hop, and house. We hopped on a video chat on a sunny Monday, and I asked him how his weekend was.

He told me it was unbelievable. Incredible. A dream come true. One of the best experiences of his life.

“Why was it so great?” I asked. “Did you, like, finally get a weekend off or something? Just at home on the couch watching TV?”

Straight faced, without missing a beat, Rod replied: “Yeah, you know. Just eating Doritos. Just on YouTube and shit.”

There was a moment of silent tension while we sized each other up.

Then we busted up laughing. We both knew he just played the T-Mobile Stage at Lollapalooza. It was in that moment I knew I liked PawPaw Rod. He’s my kind of guy.

When I told him I wasn’t cool enough to attend the 200,000 person festival in Chicago, he immediately asked how the Hulu broadcast was without any apparent judgment. “Man, how was the stream? I'm sad that there's not something I can pull up and re-watch, you know? I would have loved to check it out.”

I told him I was blown away by Conan Gray’s set, and he proceeded to tell me about the time he was an extra in a Conan Gray music video and fell in love with a girl he met on set. They dated for a good bit afterward. This was long before his debut single “HIT EM WHERE IT HURTS” blew up and launched him to where he is today – playing Lollapalooza alongside not just Conan Gray, but other major artists like SZA, Stray Kids, The Killers, Metro Boomin, Megan Thee Stallion, and more.

“Foreshadowing,” he laughed. “Bro, it’s crazy.”

Crazy is right. Four years ago, Rod was in LA working at Ross, working UberEats, and falling in love in Conan Gray music videos. Now, he’s in the middle of a sprawling, 27-date national tour and playing some of the biggest festivals in the country.

Despite how busy it’s been, Rod has kept his sense of humor intact. I’ve always loved the way he names his records. A PawPaw Rod EP dropped in 2021. It was followed by Another PawPaw Rod EP in 2022. And This Must Be A PawPaw Rod EP dropped last year. His brand is quirky. It’s distinct. It’s consistent. It’s fun.

“I'm, like, paying homage to different eras,” he told me. “It's not just through the music. It's style. I feel like that's very 70s comedy vinyl or some shit. It reminds me of that – almost dad joke-esque. Things a PawPaw would say – or grandfather, you know what I'm saying? It’s cheesy in a fly way. I feel like it’s dope when you know you got some shit that's heat, you know? And then doing something cheesy on top of it almost adds, like, this little extra bit of swagger.”

“I just want to continue to have fun with it, man,” he said. “And just be able to laugh with it. Be able to still treat it like a playground as much as I can because it does get more serious over time, you know what I'm saying? That’s where I think longevity comes from.”

His latest EP, Doobie Mouth (An EP From PawPaw Rod), dropped on August 9, 2024. This record finds Rod expanding his sound. The opening track, for instance, incorporates intense auxiliary percussion and some of the lushest vocal harmonies on any PawPaw Rod track to date.

Other tracks like “Shadow” feature psychedelic guitar tones over dancy beats, vocoder, and sexy synths. It feels funk adjacent, but doesn’t feel like a 70s retread. Rather, Rod’s genre-blending composition style somehow transcends funk and elevates it to something that feels distinctly 2024.

But does placing the “PawPaw Rod EP” joke in parenthesis at the end of the album’s title somehow mean this album is more serious? Less fun? Darker?

When I asked Rod, he said, “Well, okay. Think about a smoke session, right? When you have a doobie with your homies, a bunch of things can happen. It could be real lighthearted, and you could be laughing and jamming and grooving and being silly. But a smoke session could also be a time where you're being very honest. It could be a fucking confessional. Like, ‘Yo, bro, let me smoke with you. I got to tell you about this girl that I'm head over heels for.’ Or, like, ‘Man, let's smoke real quick. I got these dreams that I ain't really told nobody about.’”

He laughed and clarified that he doesn’t expect that the people who come to shows have to smoke. But the metaphor was illustrative.

“A smoke session could be anything, but what a smoke session always is supposed to be is welcoming, you know what I'm saying? It’s a safe space for you to clear your mind and not be judged and think of things in different ways. That's what this album is.”

Lyrically, the album’s closer “Lifeline” is right in line with this description. A breezy, upbeat, acoustic-driven number, it’s all about needing someone in your corner and the reciprocal desire to be there for someone in return. It’s a blend of sadness, gratitude, selfless love, and joy.

“The music can be what people need it to be,” Rod said, explaining how it’s both spiritual and utilitarian – cathartic and celebratory. “It's useful, but it's also useful for the soul. I know that to be true, because I use this shit. I don't really make music for nobody other than me. When I make a song, I'm writing it as a mantra for myself to be confident.”

Rod has always liked to write. He moved around a lot as a kid, and whenever he rolled into a new town, it always took him a bit to find where he fit in. But writing was the one constant, dependable thing for him.

“It's a space that I cultivated out of solitude,” he said. “I scribe my way out of darkness into light. So while it's a plus that people are hearing my writing now, it isn't what drove me to do it.”

I hope it’s apparent that Rod is incredibly thoughtful in addition to being undeniably fun. Throughout our conversation, we oscillated pretty consistently between jokes and deep hypotheticals. Rod is well-read. He cited no less than four different books in our short conversation. From what I could gather, he was in the middle of learning about philosophy, business, behavioral science and fitness, and music.

“There's this book I read called The Listening Book, and in it, it just talks about, like, really paying attention to the natural rhythm of life,” he told me. “The birds are in rhythm – it's like music. It's a song. When you listen to the cars going past or footsteps or something, it's not off beat. It's in sync. The more you listen, there's always music. So when I'm on stage, it all feels like a perfect alignment. I feel like when you're honest with yourself about something, and you put it in the form of music, it's gonna have this echo or vibration that others can feel.”

After a pause he said, “I don’t even know how I got up on this shit.”

That’s Rod. Dropping deep thoughts but always a stone’s throw away from humor.

For example, we got off on a tangent about how your relative perception of time depends on the amount of time you’ve experienced. Crickets only live around 3 months, so every second to them feels longer than a second does to us – and they likely hear themselves differently than we hear them. We talked briefly about how differently crickets sound when slowed way, way down so we can hear them closer to how they hear themselves.

But we also talked about how Raven-Symoné was Rod’s first concert and how she totally rocked his world. He also distinctly remembered how his sister didn’t want to wash her hand after she touched Raven’s. As funny as that story was, it left a deep impression on Rod, who wants to give his audience that same kind of experience.

He spent a lot of time preparing for the Doobie Mouth Tour not just as a musician, but as a person. “I dedicated time to getting prepared,” he said. “Making sure my cardio is good, reading good books, and spending time being present with people outside of music. Knowing that I’m gonna be around people that are spending their hard-earned money to see me play music, and I could be someone’s first concert ever, I want to be as pure as I can be when I’m in these spaces.”