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After they threw caution to the wind with the release of last year’s “Cast-Iron Pansexual,” Adeem Maria decided to turn up the burner on the long-simmering pot of their musical career.

Last December, Maria — who performs as Adeem the Artist and will headline Saturday’s Blount Pride festival in downtown Maryville — unveiled an advent calendar, of sorts, to crowdfund a new record. Within a few short weeks, fans had helped them raise more than $15,000, and with the help of several talented friends, they made a record that dynamites the mold of contemporary country music and takes an unflinching look at class, politics and race in the rural South.

With a ringer in the can, they turned to Twitter, they told The Daily Times recently.

“I didn’t know how we were going to release it, and I just kind of wrote to David (Macias, president of the boutique label Thirty Tigers) on Twitter and said something like, ‘What’s up, buddy? Wanna hang out?’” Maria said. “It turns out all of these guys don’t necessarily live in Nashville, but the next time he came to town, we went and got breakfast, and I had sent him the record beforehand, so he was prepared to talk about it.

“And he liked it. B.J. (Barham, frontman and founder of the band American Aquarium) had talked me up to him, and David and I had a bunch of mutual friends who were on the record, and he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s release it.’ I did not think that he would sign me, so it was a really shocking thing. I had a list of labels I was going to pitch it to, but (Thirty Tigers) was the dream label, so I didn’t end up pitching it to anybody else.”

And so Adeem the Artist is now a labelmate to such luminaries as Rodney Crowell, Steve Winwood, Blackberry Smoke, Ray Wylie Hubbard and — in an ironic twist of fate, due to a clapback song on “Pansexual” that targeted his jingoism — country artist Toby Keith. Maria is in something of a holding pattern for the moment, as Thirty Tigers prepares to release the new album later this year, but they’ve recently signed with two agencies to help with the soon-to-ramp-up career that’s part and parcel of a level of professional music life they never imagined was possible, they said.

“I’m a nobody, and I’ve never done anything of any importance,” they said. “I’ve been putting records out since 2006, and there’s been some coverage — The Daily Times has covered me — but a lot of major press has not taken note of my music over the years. I never pitched to any labels, never reached out, because to me, that just seemed to be beyond my scope.”

Maria’s willingness to follow their muse, however, has often produced unexpected but positive results. A native of North Carolina, they moved to New York as a pre-teen, found work as a cruise ship entertainer in their early 20s and fell in love with a woman to whom they’re now married. Eventually landing in Tennessee, they’ve long wrestled with identity, however, eventually settling on the Adeem the Artist moniker and coming to terms with both their sexuality (pansexual) and gender identity (nonbinary). Long regarded as one of East Tennessee’s most heartfelt, soulful and poignantly poetic songwriters, they explored those topics in ways that were witty, honest and heartbreaking on “Cast-Iron Pansexual.”

That authenticity made waves outside of East Tennessee, and suddenly Maria found themselves being mentioned in such publications as American Songwriter and Rolling Stone. It was something of a double-edged sword, however, in that their identity as a non-binary queer artist came with something of a mantle that’s been difficult to separate from the art they make.

The new record — the title and release date of which are being kept under wraps for the time being — doesn’t ignore those themes, but Maria found himself casting their gaze outward, to the South that’s played such an integral part of their upbringing and spiritual journey.

“I grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina. My dad ran a lathe, and mom worked at Roses (Discount Store), and then she was a stay-at-home mom,” they said. “This record is a little bit about queerness, because I feel like I sort of stumbled onto a mantle I have to keep up with, but largely, there’s just this really fractured sense of identity in the zeitgeist right now, and I wanted to try to write a collection of songs that interfaced with that that made me feel a little less hopeless about it.

“There’s a little tongue-in-cheek about my own identity — or finding sympathy in characters I normally would have no interest in finding sympathy for — but it’s a different sort of record. I tried to include traditional characters left out of country music, but I didn’t really want to participate in the culture war, or the idea of a culture war, that exists in country music. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have Toby Keiths, or that we should only have Black women making country music. I’m saying there should be space for all of us. That’s not a contradiction.”

In a sense, Maria is part of a wave of new country artists who are insistently banging on the door of tradition: not to change it, but to ask for a seat at the table. Country, Maria believes, doesn’t have to mean the same thing to every listener, and artists don’t have to be pigeonholed as conservative or liberal. In fact, the idea of making music strictly for one political class or another isn’t their cup of tea, they added.

“I’m not crazy about country music for liberals. I don’t like it as a concept, and I don’t love it in practice,” the said. There are a lot of people doing it that I respect a lot and have a lot of love for, but it’s important to me that I not become known as just a queer country artist.”

That mindset makes Maria the ideal headliner for Blount Pride, a festival that organizers have worked diligently to appeal to a broad cross-section of local residents, regardless of sexual orientation. Given that Maria’s embrace of their own identity is a relative recent turn of events, being asked to play any Pride event is an honor, they said. And to do so in Blount County, where they’ve cultivated something of a following and enjoy spending time, is even more special, they added.

“Blount County has been really kind to me, and I’m dear friends with Lisa (Misosky, owner of The Bird and the Book, where Maria has performed several times over the past year),” they said. “It’s always a great turnout, which was really surprising at first, because I wouldn’t have expected it in that area. But there are a bunch of kids who live up on the mountain who always come out, just a bunch of queers and weirdos, and that’s been awesome getting to meet some of them.

“On top of that, we go up to Cades Cove all the time and hike around Townsend. That area is where we go when we’ve got things to process and stuff to sort through and just need to get away from the drudgery of day-to-day life. There’s something special about getting to be in that area.”

Steve Wildsmith has worked as a writer, editor and freelance journalist for The Daily Times for more than two decades. In addition to coverage of entertainment, he also serves as the social media specialist for Maryville College. Contact him at stevedailytimes@gmail.com.

Adeem the Artist online: www.adeemtheartist.com

Award-winning freelance columnist and entertainment writer Steve Wildsmith is the former Weekend editor at The Daily Times.

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