PHOTOGRAPHY BY GUSTAV SCHMIEGE

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.

Publisher and Creative Director Chris Brown says this: "I started Refueled as a way to introduce others to the things and people I dig. The magazine has almost become like a personal journal for me. The people, discoveries, and the journeys that surround my life." We're glad he opens his journal to us with such honesty and grace. Our inspirations Refueled.

- David Butler