Together with Charlie Rogers and Manny Ward, Barton is making dance music with an intellectual and emotional asthetic. Not just mindless DJ records, but real songs with real meanings. With three club hits, watch out for a Barton album in the near future.
DJ Ron Slomowicz: That accent I hear on you, where is that from?
Barton: I lived in England for about ten years and I'm one of those people who just kind of picks up speech patterns. I'm originally from Atlanta, Georgia, and I never really had a southern accent.
RS: So Barton, is that you, your name, or is that the three of you?
Barton: The Barton that's in all caps is the three of us. It's kind of like Goldfrapp, where Alison Goldfrapp is part of the group
Goldfrapp.
RS: How did you meet up with the two – Charlie and Manny?
Barton: Charlie and I met four years ago when we started communicating online and I sent him a CD. He moved to San Francisco
and we always just had this really great communication and he had a degree in writing. When he moved here we started, I invited him over
and we started writing songs together immediately. I noticed a real difference in the way things were coming out because I was
collaborating with somebody else, which I hadn't really done before. I had been writing my own stuff for ten years and somehow working with
Charlie opened up this doorway with him suggesting that I tried things that I would never have tried before.
RS: How did Manny enter the equation?
Barton: Charlie and I put Tonight together with three mixes and we took them to our friend Victor who runs BPM Records here in San
Francisco. He gave a copy to Manny and Manny really, really liked it. Manny remembered me from the Sound Factory and started coming over.
The three of us started working together and from my perspective it was this really great balance. I'm influenced by New Order, Depeche
Mode, and Eurythmics; Manny's influenced by David Morales, Mariah Carey, Chaka Khan, and Patti LaBelle and Charlie has an even darker
asthetic - he's into Nine Inch Nails. It was very interesting to me to have this collaboration between people that had these very
different asthetics and to see what we could create that was different out of that, but still having some cohesion to it.
