Stew

 

L.A.-based, award-winning singer/songwriter Mark Stewart, who performs as "Stew," is, to me, the most enigmatic entertainer since Andy Warhol.

However, unlike Warhol, the gifted Stew doesn't seem to want to be famous, despite having amassed a respectable amount of celebrity in the alternative music sphere through his solo work, his incendiary chamber pop project "The Negro Problem," and on the stage.

Stew's solo recordings were named Album of the Year in 2000 and 2002 by Entertainment Weekly, and his semi-autobiographical 2008 rock musical Passing Strange, which he created with longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, won Drama Desk and Tony awards and was captured on film by Spike Lee.

Stew, a portly 61-year-old with a gray-flecked Van Dyke, writes thoroughgoing songs packed with catchy hooks and choruses and political and cultural allusion. His favorite topics are racial and sexual relations (the thread running through the episodic Passing Strange) and identity (both philosophical and political). His 2016 "concert novel" Notes of a Native Song, based on the life and writings of James Baldwin, was well-received and praised for its genre-busting innovation. When he tours, quite often with bassist Rodewald, Stew plays small venues where, one could well imagine, he is indeed the "smartest guy in the room."

I own most of the dozen or so recordings in Stew's catalogue, which he guards obsessively, refusing to publish his music or words. I love the post-modern "wokeness" of the man's vision, his audacity and the lyrical beauty in his best compositions -- many of which are hidden tracks on his albums.

Stew seems to practice the polar opposite of sound branding strategy -- daring the public to categorize his persona or attach themselves to him, much like the forlorn and elusive lovers that appear so frequently in his work.

On second thought, maybe the mystery IS his brand.