Kendall Burke a.k.a. Warm Advice
Kendall Burke is an extraordinarily can-do human. In the two weeks we were in touch for this article, she drove back and forth from Pensacola to New Orleans five times. She organized and promoted a last-minute show at The Rabbit Hole, took care of her mom, her dogs, her friends, swapped gear with me, took pictures of equipment she had here and there, even landed in the hospital and kept networking while hooked up to IVs. She stopped our recording several times to write down new business ideas, which she was overflowing with. Under the artist moniker Warm Advice, she runs Now That’s What I Call Queer dance parties around town, fronts national events, DJs queer weddings, creates mashups, and composes and records original music. Last year, she was voted Gambit’s #2 local DJ and wept, seeing her name on the same page with artists like DJ Soul Sister and Lil Wayne. Whatever Burke needs to do, wherever she’s got to be, she’ll show up.
Sometimes you go by “Warm Advice,” sometimes you go by “DJ Warm Advice.” How do you make that distinction?
I don’t think everyone necessarily thinks of a DJ as a music producer, so when it’s a dance party, I’m usually DJ Warm Advice, but when I started composing some more advanced things, I realized Warm Advice gave me more options. I DJ now but I started playing piano when I was eight, guitar when I was 11, and have tried to pick up every string instrument since then. I have eight or nine guitars at home, a 1996 [Fender] Telecaster Deluxe that’s my fave, a bass, a [Gretsch] Catalina [Club] Jazz drum set, a Yamaha DTX402K electronic drum set, all the things.
Have you been DJing and playing with decks forever?
No, dude. I started with zero knowledge or experience or skill or idea of what to look for. I googled “Beginner DJ deck.” Even to this day, I don’t know DJing, I just do DJing. I’m not a technical DJ. I also wasn’t a technical guitar player. When I was a kid, I just wanted to learn all the songs I wanted to play, so I learned them one by one and didn’t take the time to learn scales. A few years ago, during the pandemic, I got really into learning scales on my [Novation 49SL] Mkii midi keyboard and that took my guitar playing to another level. I experienced another way to be creative, with the additional technical knowledge. Before I got into DJing, I was going through a drumming phase. At that point, I was in the third or fourth iteration of being a drummer in my life. My playing of music will go through cycles of six months of being super into a new [instrument] and then be like, “Now, on to bass.” When DJing came, having the previous knowledge of drums did make a huge difference because I was paying attention to actual time signatures and beats per minute and things like that. It was easier to understand which songs could make mashups and why some should not.
Did you ever do a mashup and think, “This is cursed?”
I mean, only in personal relationships. [laughs] But, yeah, some things just don’t mix. Moreso in life, like orange juice and chocolate milk, the question is always, “Does it mix?” Harry Styles and Biggie Smalls… doesn’t always mix. You can try really hard but it’s not gonna mix. I like to explore the barriers and mix indie rock with hip-hop, which is fun, but it’s not breaking anything and it’s not cursing the world. Doing Yeah Yeah Yeahs with hip-hop, that’s very fun. Doing Adele with hip-hop, unexpected and fun. But taking, like, Carrie Underwood plus the most explicit rapper you can think of… that would be confusing. I like to push the barriers, but thoughtfully. A Taylor Swift and Kanye mashup? That’s speaking. That’s saying, “We’re looking at this cultural phenomenon and taking Kanye and making him the side piece to Taylor’s song.” Yeah, that’s saying something with a mashup.
I like your willingness to mix songs that you’ve never heard before.
I have to. I take song requests! I have since day one. I also come from a customer experience background. I spent 12 years in the tech industry, working my way up the food chain, to eventually be the manager of customer experience at Squarespace. Of course I’m gonna play what people want to hear! I used to use a texting app and tell people, “Your song is coming up in five songs” to try to set clear expectations, or explain that “I’ve got to work my way back to a dancey beat, so you’re not gonna hear it for a few songs, but it’s coming.” Or I’ll be flat out and say, “I already played that song. Give me another one.” Or, “I’m not playing Chris Brown; he’s an abuser.” I’m all about the communication.
Did you build the requests page? I’m kind of a luddite and I noticed, while dancing, that it was surprisingly user-friendly.
That was a landing page that I built on the website and then built out my own page. I use an app called Zapier to connect the website to a Google Sheet which goes to another table and then I have an interface in front of me, with a button I can push that will clear it from the list… I love techy things. DJing is the amalgamation of music and technology, which is why it’s so fuckin’ fun, and also, kind of math. With the customer experience side and the music side and the tech side and the events side, it all comes together. I didn’t get a college degree. I’m not an expert in any particular field, but I’m adequate at a ton of shit and I can make a lot of things work and it leads to being able to do things differently, creatively, outside of the box.
What was that beginner deck you ended up buying after the Google search?
It was a Hercules [DJControl Inpulse] 300 [MK2]. It was $299 on Amazon. It plugged right into my computer. Within a couple days, I was learning it. I DJed my first dance party three weeks later and just figured it out as I went. My friend Bridgett, who goes by Goldie Cox, actually has it right now, ‘cause she’ll stand in for me sometimes, at Twelve Mile Limit. She’s an environmental lawyer, so it’s fun for her to have that creative outlet.
What’s your current setup?
I had a [Pioneer DJ] DDJ-FLX6 but my car was stolen with all of my DJ gear in it, including speakers, so much shit. So I got really lucky and found another one in a pawn shop one day. It’s not my old board—I had the gray, graphite colored one, but I wanted the white one anyway. When I found this, it came in a hard case, which, by itself, was around $400 and I got it for $350 total, so it was a deal. I’m still working on replacing other aspects of what I lost. I had Harbingers VARI [V]2312 [2000W Powered Speakers], the most recent model with Bluetooth, that worked really great for filling a room. There is some sadness to buying equipment in pawn shops, because you never know why people are getting rid of it, but I was grateful to find this deck and be able to walk out of the store with it in a hard case, and an older model of Harbinger speakers.
Photo by Kendall Burke
So, back to the fact that you were performing in less than a month after learning?
I was! I tell people all the time to just do it. You can put a lot of pressure on yourself and try to learn everything, or you can just fucking do it. As a college dropout, I just like to do things. I don’t think you need to have a degree or you need to have experience or you need to have anything. I got my old job just by being personable and showing what I could contribute and it created a trajectory that I couldn’t have imagined. I just showed up and tried! I’ll try anything but I’m also an enabler. I love giving people opportunities. This whole time I’ve been doing events, when I started introducing burlesque I said, “Yes! Give me the new performers. Give me the people who don’t have names. Give me the people who are awkward and don’t know what they’re doing.” My thing is all about going for it. I’m so proud when people put themselves out of their comfort zones and try something new. Even when I have events with vendors, I want vendors who are brand new. The established ones have a network already. I want to be your first. It might change the trajectory of your existence and mine. Maybe it’s a weird ego thing that I need to dig into with my therapist but I love that shit. Being centered on self-success is lonely.
How did you start Now That’s What I Call Queer?
I was still pretty new to New Orleans, a few years in, when things started coming back after the pandemic. Whenever I searched for queer events, I wasn’t really finding anything that appealed to me. There’s the gay boy bars in the Quarter and very specific femme events and burlesque and all these things, and they’re all great—burlesque is brilliant performance art—but I don’t often go to burlesque ‘cause I’m awkward and I don’t know where to look and I’m so afraid that someone might interact with me and what do I do? I get scared. In Chicago there was a queer dance party called Slo ‘Mo that I used to love going to on a monthly basis. Me and all my weird friends, we would show up, and it was just a bunch of people of all types and every gender and I realized we don’t really have that in New Orleans and I’d like to see it, and I thought, “Maybe I can make it happen?” ‘Cause if it’s within the realm of possibility I will absolutely try to make anything happen. I sent a cold email to Twelve Mile Limit and their response was, “Hey, that sounds cool. Let’s meet up and schedule it.” And that was over two years ago and now it still happens every month and is part of the regular programming.
Even though Now That’s What I Call Queer has become synonymous with you, you DJ under Warm Advice. Are they almost different “characters?”
I wear so many different hats. Being Warm Advice led me to working with a company called What The Dance. They do a bunch of cool parties and they’re a team of professionals who produce events across the nation. With them, I’ve done shows in New Orleans, Birmingham, Nashville, Reno… They’re doing events every weekend in multiple cities. Working with them allows me to expand and do Club XCX, Indie Sleaze. I’m obviously a very queer, alt DJ—there’s no question when you see me. But I still need to be my own personality outside of the queer dance party scene.
I got to catch you performing in January in New York. It feels like 2025 has been a busy year for you, so far.
In January and February, there was a show in Chicago, there were two in New York, and then there was one in Spokane, which I ended up not being able to go to because my dad had just passed away. But when I reached out to the venue—shout out to The Chameleon in Spokane, they were so kind—they said, “We’ve had a lot of interest, a lot of tickets are sold, can we connect you with some local queer DJs who we think would fit the bill and we’ll just keep the event going?” And they did and that event still happened. There were over 160 tickets sold. It was a huge fucking success. I still got a payout. Not even being there, it still happened. The venue had so much faith in the event and wanted it to continue and seized the need for that. And despite how awful everything is in the world right now and how difficult it is to be queer and run a queer business, that was so cool and we’re gonna do it again on July 11. That felt like a huge win. We’ve got events coming up in Memphis, Nashville, hopefully something for DC, Oklahoma City in late June. We’re basically playing a different city every week of Pride month. I don’t want to become a nationwide production company that’s doing this constantly, though. I want to focus on places where it feels like there’s a need for that space. I realized, really early on when going to different cities, that it’s not just about showing up and throwing a party, it’s about being involved with the community, whether that’s connecting with local businesses to do a giveaway or finding local artists to vend and pop up. It’s built-in promotion for the event from local places that have their own following but, more importantly, it’s not making money on the queer scene there and leaving, it’s being involved. My goal is to have an event, have it go really well, and meet people who I can work with in the future. It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to create these safe spaces and it’s my duty to make sure that these safe spaces are actually safe. I don’t want to be a part of a profit margin or an apology. I want to see a drag show or queer bingo and be a part of growing something.
You can catch Now That’s What I Call Queer monthly on every first Saturday (“usually”) at Twelve Mile Limit. For more info on Warm Advice, check out warmadvice.com, soundcloud.com/warm-advice, and @warm.advice on Instagram.
Top photo by Sabrina Stone
Bottom photo by Kendall Burke
