For some musicians, the pandemic was an opportunity to focus and create.
One such musician was Brandon Roberts, a junior at Knox College.
Roberts started releasing music as The BDR Project in mid-2020.
His style of music can be hard to pin down.
“It sort of sounds like if you put all of Peach Pit through an acoustic guitar,” he said. “It almost sounds like if The Front Bottoms wrote more poems.”
Music has been a part of Roberts’ life for years.
In middle school and high school, he performed in concert and jazz bands.
Halfway through high school, he began songwriting.
It wasn’t until early in the quarantine of 2020 that Roberts had the time and energy to write and record five songs. That was during his last semester of high school and the summer before starting college.
He released The BDR Project’s first EP, “Crash and Burn,” in June of that year. His five-song EP, and the other singles he has released, are available on most music platforms.
Roberts considers himself more of a jazz musician and music theorist than a singer/songwriter.
“That’s kind of why I love theory, is that you get to the end of it and realize that it’s all—there’s no floor,” he said. “You dig down and you dig down and there’s no floor. And so then you can just, once you’re at the bottom you can explore: how do I break every single rule in a way that’s interesting and creative and beautiful?”
Since those early days of the pandemic, Roberts has released two more songs.
He hopes to release more.
But he said his writing process can be slow-going.
“It is an act of sporadic inspiration, it is spontaneous and not systematic, I will write a song in an hour and not write again for six months,” he said.
His most recent release was a single, “The Bees”, in 2022.
It’s more stripped down than his earlier work, and takes lyrics from a poem written by his girlfriend.
Like all of his songs, it has a personal touch.
“I find my music really hard to perform,” Roberts said in regard to how personal his work is. “In part because it is, sort of, overly earnest and a little overly exposing, you know even though I am writing about sometimes other people, sometimes myself, I feel like there is a part of it that is—I’ve left too much out, there’s too much on the table now that you can just grab and access whenever you want and I don’t get to control how you do that.”
Roberts has performed as The BDR Project a number of times. In late February, he opened for the band Terror Pigeon at Knox.
“I don’t write the songs to record them, I record them because I already have them and might as well. I really write to perform, and I write to perform live in front of at least a couple people. And that is a deeply, deeply joyful experience for me. I can get it no other way,” he said.
Outside of The BDR project, Roberts does a lot on the Knox campus.
He is double majoring in History and Secondary Education. He’s heavily involved in the music department, both as a performer and a tutor.
He plays guitar every Thursday at the Galesburg Community Art Center for the Cherry Street Combo, and he plays bass for the Knox College Jazz Ensemble.
Roberts hopes to do music for as long as he can.
But like the subject of his song “Parachute,” who knows where he will end up?
I think he’s somewhere deep in the Rockies, hitched a ride on his way out the Valley, where you starting the search if it’s up to you?
I know he’s out there somewhere, it’s only a matter of time. I will go anywhere the truth will take me, I guess I’ve lost my mind.
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