By It’s not that D.C.’s BRNDA are non-committal—it’s that they’re hungry for life, dude.
“I don’t think you’re totally wrong in either calling it a concept album or saying maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to even call it a concept album,” said guitarist-singer Dave Lesser during a recent call. “Because I think it’s a bit of both. I don’t think we started out the record with an idea, so it didn’t begin as a concept album. I think maybe it speaks to BRNDA as a concept band.”
The album in question is 2021’s excellent DO YOU LIKE SALT? With song titles like “Beverage of Choice” and “George the Lobster,” the specific concept in mind may already be clear. Still, be sure to dig a little deeper into this XL family meal.
“If you even just count the songs based on their titles, there’s really just five songs that are food-related, and one is about beverages,” Lesser said. “Is that even food? Is a smoothie food? But we weren’t too afraid to let it take its course and be seen as, ‘Hey, we made a concept album.’ We are trying to say something about our relationship with food.”
It worked out perfectly (but perhaps never any less tragically) that SALT dropped just a year or so into COVID. While Lesser notes that many of the 10 album tracks were completed some time before, SALT’s core concept gained greater significance in this context. Call it another perk of simply going with the creative flow.
“But you’re right: When COVID hit, I think a lot of people’s relationship with everyday items changed,” Lesser said. “I mean, toilet paper and other things we took for granted. I think there was a reevaluation and a refocusing happening. We were lucky to have a concept album. We were lucky that it was visceral and sensual in that sense that, ‘These things that we put in our body, but we’ve got to think about them now.’”
Still, it’s less about, say, GMOs and seed oils. Rather, food across SALT is code for big ideas within life, but told in a way where people’s interactions and innate tension speak to something significant. It’s basically dialogues filtered through the lens of, like, fast casual Mexican food.
“Most of our songs are about something societal,” Lesser said. “There’s not a lot of navel-gazing going on.”
The end result is a space where BRNDA get to do their most favorite thing ever: non-commit their way into truly brilliant art-rock that eschews boundaries and boxes for something fun, compelling, and worthy of your earnest dissection.
“You’ve got a concept album, which is serious, but that allows you to also dabble in comedy and other things,” Lesser said. “Again, we definitely ran with some of those ideas, especially on song ‘The Avocado.’”
But if BRNDA are trying to fully chart some larger, vaguely nebulous aspect of the human experience, life goes beyond a great meal. Lesser admits that writing about food is, “a comfortable place for me…and it’s not as challenging; it’s really my niche.” Ultimately, if BRNDA wanted to do something significant, they’d have to smash these barriers. Perhaps they’d even have to embrace things they wouldn’t have otherwise.
“But to go back to this idea that there’s something trying to be expressed,” Lesser said. “I think that was, again, purposeful. I think we wanted to not just do a rehash and just sing about all the same things again. And a certain amount of navel-gazing and corniness is fine.”
The end result is TOTAL PAIN, a 12-track LP that “explores the juxtaposition between pain and pleasure, between life’s debits and credits.” It’s a byproduct not just of BRNDA being more open to life’s many paths, but finding new ways to structure that process into the band’s day-to-day. And, album title aside, it’s surprisingly energetic and affirming.
“It’s definitely more lighthearted than this current record, that’s for sure,” said singer-multi-instrumentalist Leah Gage in the same call. “It’s probably a product, at least in part, of the way our lives were. A lot of us in the band were living together at that point, and now we don’t live together.”
That level of interaction-collaboration certainly informs the scope and swing of TOTAL PAIN. To highlight Gage’s point, the band acquired “The Shack,” a garage for their rehearsals. That space offered creative freedom to approach their music in new, interesting ways.
“But I would say also that we were disembarking from an earlier songwriting and structuring style,” Lesser said. “We were using less guitars, and we were not afraid to write shorter songs. We were also playing with different people at that point. And so our whole outlook was changing, and we were allowing ourselves to get in and get out of songs quicker. And I think that overall gives the album a much more light, zany feel.” Lesser said living together also meant rehearsing looked more like impromptu jam sessions.
But, as Gage also mentioned, the coalescence didn’t last (likely another side effect of COVID). Yet rather than feel the blow of losing their proximity, BRNDA embraced it as a chance to further hone their sound and the resulting new creative avenues they’d explore.
“Things were just different. Life was getting more challenging for everyone,” Lesser said. “Families were growing. Priorities were changing. We were just getting older. And so I think a lot of the songs reflect that. They reflect a lot of the stuff that might be going on around us. And I think the lyrics reveal that. The tone of some of the songs definitely reveal that.”
What it truly reveals, though, is BRNDA moving beyond the exterior (as represented by food) and instead diving even deeper into life as it is in the here and now.
“Calling the album TOTAL PAIN is another call to action, if you will,” Lesser said. “SALT was, ‘Let’s think about our relationship with food and the environment.’ TOTAL PAIN is maybe more, ‘Let’s think about people’s internal selves and not just our internal selves and our own pain.’”
At the same time, BRNDA don’t just want this to be another “COVID record.” To an extent, the record is a stark reaction to certain feelings percolating during that life-altering pandemic.
“This current lineup came together during the depths of [COVID],” Gage said. “Some of those feelings…that’s why a song like ‘Zebra’ emerged. That’s much more guitar-driven. It’s louder. It’s not as short. I tend to think that was a bit of a release or a reaction to being cooped up.”
And not just a reaction to feelings, but the LP also comments on sentiments that have arisen as the world sorted out its “new normal” in recent years.
“You’re really hitting the nail with this idea that a lot of artists are putting forward stuff like, ‘Life is total pain, and everything we’ve seen for the last four years is just terrible and crappy,'” Lesser said. “Everyone’s life is falling apart, and a lot of times what you see is people comparing this. Like, they’ll stack up all of their pain and be like, ‘Well, I have more pain than you and my life’s worse.’ That’s somehow a badge of honor or something. I’ve never gotten that aspect of existence. Calling it TOTAL PAIN was also a bit of a smack in the face to that ethos.”
Perhaps as an extension of those very ideas, TOTAL PAIN isn’t about one person specifically. Rather, BRNDA assumed a broad approach so that there’s less room for suffering on an individual level and more of a focus on how this affects the human animal at large.
“There’s also some character things happening in—like playing characters. That’s a way I like to express myself when I’m vocalizing in music,” Gage said. “I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed that it comes naturally to me and it’s part of the process. And so it’s definitely performative in that way. It’s not something, truthfully, that I think was intentional. But in a way, it comes through because… multiple people wrote lyrics and multiple people are singing. Some people are singing lyrics that someone else wrote.”
It’s one of the more robust carryovers from SALT—the band enjoys fostering some ambiguous but potent interplay of human relationships.
“There’s ‘Wrong Taco,’ with Leah being the disgruntled customer,” Lesser said. “Then you’ve got ‘Diner,’ with this narrator that’s speaking to someone; it’s unclear, but we wrote it that way on purpose. Then you’ve got ‘The Avocado,’ where the dialogue that’s back and forth is also ambiguous.”
It’s a tactic for de-emphasizing the personal (only to an extent, of course), and instead letting the band come together to inform something utterly human but also approachable in a different kind of way.
“I really like this idea you have of a central character, and maybe these are all little vignettes that are pouring out of this person’s mind,” Lesser said. “I just like this idea that we’ve created a persona that is playing these songs for the audience. It’s like an Economist article: no one gets a headline, and each article has the same kind of flair.”
Now, that’s not to say the record doesn’t resonate on some deeper, hugely personal level. It’s just about our species and not the many multifaceted members that comprise it. And it’s about finding those singular moments and extrapolating them onward and upward.
“One of the things that I think draws a line through all these songs, and this record, is another corny idea—when you have so much, you have that much more to lose,” Gage said. “This record was the first record made where I have a child, and so that’s entering into the feelings and emotions. I’m embracing corny as well.”
Take, for instance, a wonderfully cheesy track like “Cool Night.” For Gage, the song is decidedly sentimental bordering on the saccharine. Yet that is something we can and should all be able to share in, and doing so can prove transcendent.
“I was thinking about that song as one of the vignettes and thinking about, how does that fit?’ And it’s definitely a story,” Gage said. “It comes from an actual night spent going to a show and really just the corny idea, but the constantly true idea at the same time, that the world is really so small and it’s crazy how you just continue to bump into people who know each other. Just how special that is, and what a reminder of the bigger purpose of all this when you’re going out to shows or going to band practice or on the road touring.”
And through that process—being open, yes, but then using that to engage with people more meaningfully—has had a real impact on the members of BRNDA. Even if that’s just in the tools they have at their collective disposal.
“There was a time where I would have been like, ‘No, we can’t do that; I want people to hear what is on the album,” Lesser said. “But times change, and people change. We took advantage of happenstance.”
Gage readily agreed: Things can be different and new and certainly scary, and that’s really cool.
“We’re less afraid to have things on the record that wouldn’t necessarily be able to be performed live,” Gage said. “And so, then, I think with this record, we leaned into that even more. And we’re just a lot less afraid to do that. The songs will be performed differently live. They’ll sound different live, and it’ll be a different thing.”
A lot of this gets at the idea of trust—in yourself always, but more so the world and even bigger, often nebulous ideas about art and creativity. And when BRNDA’s members let themselves be more welcoming to whatever may come, there were some exciting consequences. For instance, TOTAL PAIN features flutist Mike Gillispie on two tracks, “Everyone Chicago” and “A Little Balloon.” It’s a small but mighty touch that exemplifies how and why BRNDA gave themselves to the weird, wild universe.
“We just heard this guy playing flute in his backyard one Saturday morning; our bandmate Mark [McInerney, guitarist] is his neighbor,” Lesser said. “He brought over a six-pack and we just played the songs for him. He went wild. We’re not as afraid to explore beyond our comfort zones to try to make it more collaborative and bring outside voices and instruments.”
Even the album art is not just a collaborative experience, but something that speaks to the power of inviting in the new and strange. The piece (a man and a chimp staring at a serene lake) was created by Gage’s niece, artist Maddie Gage, and was an opportunity for BRNDA to “relinquish” more control as a means of growth/evolution.
“It was really fun to get to ask her to do this,” Gage said. “I love being able to come up with an idea of something and then give it to someone and say, ‘Can you do this?’ And when you’re painting something, you can’t change things. It’s not like graphic design; it’s more permanent and it’s harder. And also it means that whatever the painter does, it’s going to be in their image. As much as you can give them to describe what you want to see, they will be the ones painting it.”
Between their work with Gillispie and Maddie Gage, BRNDA aren’t just being better team players or learning to find creativity in new arenas. It’s a process that gets at questions that are absolutely central to TOTAL PAIN, no matter how bizarre it all might seem.
“Why are they sitting together?” Lesser said of the album cover. “Why are they just sitting looking at some water and some trees? I would assume there’s some kind of dialogue that might have just happened or is happening or is about to happen between these two characters. Why is there any dialogue happening between a monkey and a human?”
So, is TOTAL PAIN then about, like, people-chimp relations? Well, no. (Maybe?) It is, as Lesser said, that TOTAL PAIN is, “Anyone’s take on life at any minute.” No one undergoes the same journey, but if we can find spaces to share, then something magical can take root.
“Someone might be experiencing something that you aren’t, and maybe we should think about that,” Lesser said. “That doesn’t just stop with us; it extends beyond human life. There’s pain you might find elsewhere in the world and other animals and other things that we wouldn’t usually think of as demanding our attention.” Lesser added that several songs have “the right level of absurdity, but emotion… that allows for all of these things that you’ve just talked about for the last hour to happen… crazy, surreal, and serious.”
Photo by Micah E Wood
You might not understand or even appreciate all of it, but you can still find something of value in the tasty chaos of our modern world.
“We’re all in this life together, and we’ve got to get through it somehow, and sometimes it does feel like you’re just getting through it,” Lesser said. “You’ve got all of it going on: pain, fun, and experimentation. Hopefully when people hear it, they can grab one, two, three, or four of those strands and it makes them feel something.”
Still, fret not SALT fans—there’s still songs about food on TOTAL PAIN. They’re just different, is all.
“There’s a song called ‘Go for Gold.’ It’s got a ton of food references in it, but the song isn’t necessarily about food,” Lesser said. “I don’t need to make it about food, but I use food references to construct my worldview in that song. And talking about eggs or fish or whatever—it’s the food as a material, not on the marquee.”
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked both Lesser and Gage if, given all the growth and development happening across TOTAL PAIN, if they see it as a fork in the road. A moment, if you will, that will mark a great change for these daring and inventive art-rockers.
“I really want to insist to myself at least, and to my bandmates, that the point that we’ve reached is not a wall,” Lesser said. “It’s not the end. It’s not our final offering to the world. Whether it’s a turning point, I’m not certain.”
Perhaps even with all the creative and personal shifts across the LP, the concept album “method” still speaks to BRNDA. It’s less about reinventing the wheel and trying to refine the opportunities afforded by this specific kind of musical storytelling.
“If we do come up with another concept album, it would hopefully be in the vein of these last two and not something that’s just knocking you over the head and just so heavy,” Lesser said. “Something that isn’t afraid to make fun of itself or to stray from the concept here. Because that’s what any story does, and that’s what life does. Your talk about this central narrator, central persona is also grabbing me right now.”
It’s just more proof that BRNDA remain committed to nothing beyond where the next song might take them as a collective. That, and that just as life is meant to be enjoyed but also perhaps appropriately feared, so too are BRNDA having their cake and eating it, too.
But TOTAL PAIN demonstrates that through this process, the members are making something important—music that is very much about the many, many sides of pain. Like how it can suck to leave your bubble, but through that struggle comes new truths and fresh perspectives. That life is always going to hurt, and maybe that’s a good thing because otherwise we’d never have a reason to evolve.
OK, fine, if it really helps: Here’s one last food-centric metaphor to grasp the sweet, sweet existential magic of TOTAL PAIN. Basically, wear stretchy pants for this one.
“It’d be family style; it’d be enjoyed together,” Lesser said when I asked to describe the LP in terms of a meal. “It’d be home-cooked, and it would have taken four or five hours to get everything together. And there would have been many interruptions throughout. I think it would be heavy. There’d be a lot of carbohydrates. I think it would be… pierogies, sauerkraut, and a chilled dill potato soup. I think the next day, you would feel that meal.”
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