Fusilier’s soulful, dance party about self-actualization

The Atlanta native thinks we should stop thinking and start dancing.

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Blake Fusilier, Atlanta native, ditched his first name to make funky guitar-driven pop music in Brooklyn as simply Fusilier. As he preps for the release of his debut EP as a new signee to Brassland Records, the lyric video for single “The Moment” trots along just in time for a CL premier. The track is “about us all finding ourselves and each other, or at the very least finding a point where we can all just let go and dance for 3 1/2 minutes without being too embarrassed,” he explains in a press release.

Surely that resonates for folks both within and far outside Fusilier’s hometown coordinates. He says growing up in Atlanta’s deep LaFace and So So Def heyday he felt a lot of pressure to conform to an R&B or hip-hop aesthetic. Instead of forcing a mean beatbox game, Fusilier turned energy and focus to honing a violin prowess, later going on to guitar and then filling in bass duties with Boston-based rock outfit RIBS. He says at a peak in RIBS’ popularity he was asked at a party “the half-loaded question about being black and gay.” Add to that his Southern upbringing and failing to mold to ATL’s rap wheelhouse, and one may begin to understand some of the adversity Fusilier faced when cultivating his identity as both a musician as well as a human being. 

“I realized how tired I was of running away from the world’s biased perceptions,” he says. “I rested for years and moved to Crown Heights — marinating in my own baggage, and with everything that ‘was wrong with me’. In the end, I found some beauty in that flawed barbarity. That question-statement ceased to have power and its answer is now irrelevant.”

Sounds like as good a reason as ever to just dance.