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The Star of the Show, The Butt of the Joke. Rodeo Clown out now....
Obed Padilla’s latest EP, asks more questions than it answers. But when your identity is shaped by contradiction––
being the rebellious son of a pastor father, a Chicano raised in the States, a relationship nomad in pursuit of true
love––the act of questioning itself can be a more honest answer.
The vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist grew up watching his father plant churches. Plant churches, that’s how he says it, from his house in Oceanside, California. He calls himself a homebody. It wasn’t always like this.
Growing up, his parents moved to North Carolina, then to Denver, and eventually settled in Oceanside. From
his father and mother, he grew up hearing the kind of stories from Costa Rica and Mexico, respectively—of
migration, of exile, of addiction, of fear—that so many of us know we’ll never experience quite the same way.
He grew up playing music in the church—“Southern Baptist,” but not exactly denominational—with protective parents, and outside, was shaped by a San Diego County of “white girls, Marines, skaters, surfer culture…everything kind of melted into one place.” And gangs.
“I had my own dirt that I did,” he says. “Never that.” After struggling to find purpose in his early twenties, Padilla responded to a Craigslist ad looking for a guitar player to join the band at a youth summer camp near Big Bear in 2015. “It was exactly what I needed for that period of my life—to be loved unconditionally,” he says. It would turn him into a different kind of itinerant preacher. The following year, he started producing locally in Oceanside. And in April 2023, he went into the studio with Mikky Ekko and Afterhrs, and Julian Bunetta signed him to Big Family. In Los Angeles, city of transplants, Padilla emphasizes the importance of working with protectors—people you could have gone to high school with. On “50K” with Niko Rubio, the chorus asks: “Don’t you wish you could go back to who you were before?” There was a time before the brutal breakup, the alienating overnight virality, the world getting bigger than his pocket of Southern California. Would Obed go
Back? “Damn, it kind of would be nice to have the white picket fence and work at UPS. It’s a nice thought, but
I would be miserable,” he says. “I would die for this shit.” And while in some very different contexts than his
family, it turns out making music is just another kind of sermonizing. “I feel like God does certain things
and places certain things in order that you can’t really explain,” Padilla says. “Telling my 16 or 18-year-old
self, like, yo, you’re not gonna believe some of the shit that happens.”
