Bandits on the Run – well, what is going on here? The modern folk trio we’ve come to know as Bonanza Jellyfish, Roy Dodger and Clarissa are now openly going by their real names of Adrian Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, and Regina Strayhorn. Has….has….has the quirkiness gone? Say it isn’t so.
It isn’t so.
Sydney Shepherd has told all about the origin of new song ‘Radio’ and what it represents: “‘Radio’ was written at a time when I felt like I was living in a funhouse mirror, I was dealing with intense feelings of anxiety, dissociation, and dread about the state of the world and the state of my place in it. Many songwriters talk about songwriting as therapy, and I suppose that’s true in this case, though it felt a bit more like expelling demons — and does simultaneously revelling and revolting in your own inner world of absurdity count as a coping mechanism? Who’s to say? I do know the bones of this song poured out of me all at once, and afterward, I felt lighter, freer. I shared it with Adrian and Regina the very day it was born, and their brilliant care and thoughts and arrangements crafted it into the beautiful wild entity it is today. We’ve performed this song out many times (after I got over the weirdness of singing a Bandits song without a cello in my hand), and many folks have come up to us after shows and expressed a kinship with this song, and gratitude for giving a safe space to work out some darkness and dance with their own skeletons.”
We had a special dispensation from the Video Editor to run this song on the grounds that it is too narrow to be a video. It certainly is confined, constrained and put under pressure. It was filmed with director/actor Josh Gelb at Theater in Quarantine, a theatrical space created in Gelb’s closet during the height of the pandemic. Gelb shot and edited the video and is also the man inside the monster suit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loWOCZmqceo
