While talking about Refueled magazine during an interview today with a top branding/lifestyle blog, I answered a question that has been posed to me a number of times since the release of the new 2010 Spring/Summer issue - “Why is this issue striking a cord with people more than any other?”. After building the Refueled brand for over three years now, you’d think I’d have an answer, but all I have is my gut and my own opinions. From the start, the new issue was very focused, very personal in a way. I wanted to capture a feeling that I felt would resonate with a lot of the readers. Myself and the Refueled crew, photographer Gustav Schmiege and videographer Lan Freedman hit the open road to gather inspiration, interviews and create a vibe, which eventually spread to the other contributors in the issue. It’s all about a feeling with me, a vibe I want to bring. I think it boiled down to the right people and the right time.
It’s always hard for me to describe Refueled, because I am too close to it. So when putting together the new website to accompany the new issue, I asked an outsider to give their take. Writer/artist/musician David Butler wrote:
“Refueled deftly walks the line between Chris Brown's personal quest for inspiration and pure artistic expression. It is beautiful, but the beauty is not a veneer for journalistic laziness. There is meat on these bones. In the current internet climate, with immediacy and overload of sometimes mundane and intimate nothings, Chris is providing us not only a window into great culture, but a peek into one man's personal quest to make media itself an art form full of texture, presence, romance, cool, and calm. Each story and video is a soothing drop into the subject, not a passing glance or a footnote, but a tour of the very textures and personalities inherent in style, music and life.
It's Americana in all its tattooed dusty glamour. It's a motorbike and a dirt road and a soundtrack, written down, and sketched on a tattered piece of parchment. You can taste it. Fashion that comes from a sexy grit, a rough hewn romance, and honor to roots. Music of the same integrity - with glamorous vintage dirty prayers, lovely songbirds, painful honest poets and honorable degenerates. Beautiful song craft and sweet mad characters. There's the rolling wave and the riders, bikes and boards and artistic adventures in nature. Urban decay and suburban lost horizons and roads that go on forever. The quest to find not the end of the road, but all the beauty along the way.”
The 2010 Fall/Winter issue is in the works. I think you’re going to dig it. Stay tuned.
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