In Tex Patrello we trust

Tex Patrello is not afraid to die. She never says this outright, but it’s an observation about her that crosses my mind repeatedly during our two-hour conversation. Few people come across as genuinely fearless as Tex does. She speaks with a certainty that would come off as either delusional or terrifying if her easy confidence was less convincing—and if she didn’t have the talent to back it up. Her criminally slept-on 2024 debut album—the trippy, psychosexual suburban Greek tragedy art-popera Minotaur—arrived fully formed and seemingly out of nowhere. Vulgar, sweet, devastating, and gut-bustingly funny all at once, Minotaur sprung forth from seven years of solo songwriting, arranging, recording, and producing in Patrello’s childhood home. 

Two years later, Minotaur is still a whirlwind of gauzy synths, digitally distorted bagpipes, religious delirium, innuendo, and Americana kitsch. I recommend it to anyone who’ll listen, usually with the insufficient but convenient elevator pitch of “the dirtbag daughter of Vespertine-era Bjӧrk and early Lana Del Rey.” “Art pop,” “baroque,” and sometimes “indietronica” are terms that I’d use as shorthand, but Minotaur slithers out of my grasp every time I try to label its sound. When I invite Patrello to take a crack at it, she admits that she doesn’t speak “genre.” “It’s not a language I’m fluent in. No shade to those who do speak in that language; it is a good way to categorize things, but I prefer to write outside of that.”

Almost everything she tells me during our conversation simultaneously makes Minotaur more puzzling and contextualizes it with such specificity that even the oddest pieces of Tex Patrello trivia feel inevitable. Seeing a kid from her hometown play Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas score at a holiday pageant made her want to learn piano. She wrote her first song at age ten and named it “Sunkist” because she loved Sunkist soda. Patrello says she’s “so obsessed” with viral singers like Baby Ariel and Mike Barlow, and she speaks matter-of-factly about the latter: “He has this aesthetic that sort of paints him as this player, but I don’t think he’s a sexual person in general. His music is funny, but I take it seriously as well.” She’s a Directioner—at first Niall was her favorite, but then she became a Louis girl because she “always liked being an outsider… but secretly, I thought Harry was the cutest.” Patrello once played Ophelia in a Dallas production of Hamlet. When she needs a quick dose of inspiration, she covers “Heaven” by Bryan Adams. Speaking of covers, she recently shared a vampy piano mashup of Rihanna’s “S&M” and Elliott Smith’s “Roman Candle,” which I’ve listened to every day since. Her natural speaking cadence at times recalls both “I don’t know her” Mariah Carey and “Ride” monologue Lana, and all of it comes across one hundred percent earnest. I think Tex Patrello might be insane, but I know she’s a genius. 

I meet up with Patrello at Lucinda’s. After chatting for a few minutes, we realize it’s too loud to carry on a conversation (let alone get a decent recording of one), so we stroll a little farther down Avenue A, settling into a scratched-up booth at Doc Holliday’s with our vodka sodas. Patrello has been in New York for a few months, subletting in North Brooklyn when she’s not on the road with her keyboard and a suitcase full of big shirts and boots. Today, she’s paired these wardrobe staples with black lace tights, a black miniskirt, shoulder-dusting silver hoops, and a purple faux fur coat in the same shade as her massive tinted sunglasses.

Contrary to what I suspected, Tex Patrello is not a stage name but a legal one. She hails from Texas, specifically McKinney, a suburb about forty minutes outside Dallas. “The main highway is 75,” she explains. “On one side of the highway is all suburbs, and on the other side of the highway is The Square. That’s more artsy and cute, and that’s where I would do theater. My mom has art that was displayed in the studio there.” Patrello loves her hometown but always feels a pull toward big coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Before pursuing music, she was primarily an actress in the Dallas theater scene. Sondheim and Webber are two of her biggest inspirations, especially since the next album she’s writing is a musical. “I want it to be a movie,” she tells me. “It’ll be an album first.” When I ask if there’ll be other people singing songs in the musical she’s writing, she quips, “Oh, bitch, no! It’s all me.” She laughs and amends this: “If I’m adapting it to the stage, I’ll have other people. We can tame my ego. If it’s a movie, I’ve thought about whether or not I’d need to play all the roles, but on the album at least, it’ll always be one hundred percent me. I’ll be singing the male parts as well with some effects on them, which I’ve done on Minotaur.” 

Patrello has played lots of male roles in stage productions before, including Jack in Into the Woods, which served as a gateway to the dual-voiced pair of romantic leads she embodies throughout Minotaur. “I love juxtaposition in anything I do. I love taking on a masculine role because I’m such a feminine person,” she says before confessing that she doesn’t know the first thing about making a movie. “But there was a point where I didn’t know how to make an album.” And she taught herself to do that on her own, in her bedroom. “I think it’ll forever be that way. I don’t want anyone else touching my music.” One notable exception to this rule is her older brother Boone Patrello, who co-leads the band Teethe and played drums on the Minotaur song “Eat It,” which Patrello then “abused” with “like eighty plugins.” 

She spent her adolescence in McKinney obsessing over singer-songwriters like Frankie Cosmos, Emily Yacina, and Alex G—artists whose intimate, homespun influence can be heard all over Patrello’s 2017 bedroom pop  EP, Yellow Curse. She switched from public school to online school after seventh grade and finished high school a year early at a nearby community college. “I was never bullied, [but] I feel like I should’ve been,” she laughs. “I just hated school so much. I thought everyone was beneath me.” 

A week after our conversation, Patrello played a show at Union Pool with Natalia Catalan and Grumpy. She used every inch of the stage to glide through Minotaur highlights, perching on the edge of a chair and draping herself forlornly over its back. During “Wichita Falls,” she curled up in the fetal position on the floor and didn’t stand until it was time to sing “Anything Goes,” a dreampop shaker about the promise of a young Saturday night. Patrello was in her own little world, jazz-handsing and grapevining across the stage during the bridge. According to her, this goes beyond just her concerts. “I’ve spent most of my life in my room and in my head. I feel like I live in my own country, on my own planet.”

The Patrello family has a rich onstage lineage. On her dad’s side, it’s vaudeville. On her mom’s, it’s opera. She’s the grandchild of Sam Patrello, a performer best known for his work as a Jerry Lewis impersonator, which the real Jerry Lewis did not appreciate. “He was offended and upset, and I think my grandpa got a cease and desist at some point,” Patrello recalls. “I’m gonna learn more about it this fall, because they’re supposedly putting out a biography. So we’ll see what the tea is.” Meanwhile, she’s working on a book of her own: an autobiography about the first twenty-five years of her life, though she’s not sure she trusts her memory enough to adequately narrativize all of it. I do, however, think Patrello deserves a book deal based on the working title alone: Tex Education. 

But no matter what she’s working on, Patrello hates to rush, refusing to set deadlines and preferring “something to manifest in full when it wants to.” It’s part of why she loves recording at home and working at her own pace, and it’s why Minotaur took seven years to make: that’s how long it needed. I could see Patrello having an incredibly fascinating and consistent career arc: taking the Joanna Newsom/Fiona Apple route, maintaining cult-hero status, and prioritizing quality over quantity. She might only drop an album per decade, but it’s always going to be a great one. But then Patrello muses aloud about doing the exact opposite: “Part of me would love to sell out and just be pumping it out. I think I could pull it off. Maybe Columbia could come to me with a deal, or Atlantic, and be like, ‘Hey, we want you to put out an album every year and you’re gonna be a pop sensation.’ I’d be like, ‘Perfect!’ and just give myself a different name.” It’s hard to tell how much she’s taking the piss.

Patrello’s favorite lyrics come to her while she’s messing around on the piano, and her favorite thing to write about is romance of the doomed or unrequited kind. She erupts into giggles while telling me about a page in one of her old journals that she came across shortly before leaving Texas. “I had this drawing of a woman in a white gown bleeding out in her lover’s arms underneath the night sky in a big field, and it was some poem about her being stabbed, and the ending of it was ‘Thus, I die.’” She says her favorite song off Minotaur is “Wichita Falls” because it’s the most romantic one. Only Tex Patrello could make a lyric like “I blow a wish into your ballsack” sound so sweet, or pair it with a couplet as heartbreaking as “You picked me a lily, the prettiest one / I did not ask for it, it’s all I could want.” Romance bubbles up and melts in a hot car, swirling with the “spit in the Sprite.” 

Minotaur’s recurring love interest, Rick, is a football-playing, bull-headed, all-American heartthrob, named after teen idol Ricky Nelson. Patrello first encountered the singer via his character in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet—or, more specifically, through David Rabe’s satirical play, Sticks and Bones, which parodies the sitcom family. “I started watching videos of [Ricky Nelson] late at night in my room. I was obsessed with the video of him performing ‘Travelin’ Man’ on the Ozzie and Harriet show.” Patrello occasionally sings as Rick, her voice manipulated to bassy depths on tracks like the crunchy, bagpipe-assisted “Panda Express” and the flickery, chiming “Long Lost Pimp.” Minotaur’s Rick is a composite character made up of Ricky Nelson and a string of Patrello’s past crushes. Both in real life and songwriting, she’s drawn to romantic male leads who are, in her own words, “apathetic and shitty.”

“When I’m at a bar and I’m scoping it out, I always go for the fratty type or the finance lawyer type,” she admits, describing an interaction she recently had with one of these men. “He was this thirty-five-year-old guy who was like, ‘I’m advanced. I have an advanced mind.’ I was like, ‘Sure.’ Everyone thinks they have an advanced mind. Everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. I mean, I think that instinctually and naturally, but I know that it can’t be true. I’m very stupid sometimes.” Patrello’s warts-and-all love songs offer a profoundly thorough and humanizing take on the ways smart, curious women can be drawn to callous men, and how lusting after them can feel almost anthropological. There are strains of cruelty that demand to be dissected. You want to be the girl who fixes him, or the girl who wins him over, or the girl who cracks his mind open to understand why he does what he does. Patrello acknowledges this. “I’m very fascinated by arrogant men. I love the dynamic of a man who thinks he’s a genius and a woman who knows better.” 

It’s a torch she’s picked up from perhaps her most obvious predecessor, Tori Amos. The two share not just an impulse for incendiary piano ballads but a flair for the dramatic and profane. “She’s definitely someone I relate to and look up to,” Patrello says of Amos. “On ‘Precious Things,’ she’s singing about her bullies, but like, there’s sex in the mix as well. If I had a bully, it would definitely be a boy.” Like Amos, Patrello’s songs are dotted with Gods and guns and boys who love both of these things more than they could ever love the girls who tear into them with hell-bright lust, violent fury, and excoriating wit. 

“I think my art comes out of struggle and tension,” Patrello admits. “Just like hair.” Her own hair is dyed an Amos shade of dark red. “If you’re doing hair, you need to have tension with the brush for it to take form,” she clarifies, informing me that she teases her hair every day, and that when she’s not on tour, she works at a makeup counter in department stores selling “Clinique to old women and little girls.” It’s the type of gig she’s going to look for next month when she holes up in Los Angeles for an unspecified amount of time. “I’m gonna get an Airbnb for like a month, and then we’ll see what happens. Ideally, I’ll get a boyfriend who has money and I’ll just stay at his place for six months. Maybe we’ll get married in Vegas. My dream is to have three husbands, two divorces. Husband three, he stays. Maybe he dies after like twenty years.”

Tex Patrello might end up staying in Hollywood long-term. If it ends up not being for her, she’ll just come back to New York. Or she’ll keep touring, staying in motion until whatever’s supposed to happen next happens. She’s used to playing these things by ear. “It always works out for me. I’m waiting for it to not work out and I’ll learn my lesson. But so far, it’s been perfect.”

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.

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