Brandon Rhodes (AKA DD Island) is a Nashville based indie-garage artist! Find him on Instagram @dd.island and find him on Spotify here
Mikko: Introduce yourself and what us a little about what you do:
Brandon: My name is Brandon, Brandon Rhodes, and I make music under the name D.D. Island and I’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, two or three years, but taking it more seriously in the last year. Ive been playing- when I graduated highschool I moved down to Nashville, I’ve been playing for other people and I’ve been like gigging with folks. I got the opportunity to tour on bass for Darwin Deez, I got to play for Declan McKenna one time when he came to town, I just went on tour with Indigo De Souza playing guitar for her…
Mikko: No way!
Emily: Wait did you play the Che Cafe in San Diego?
Brandon: Yeah totally were you at that show?
Emily: No I wanted to go but it sold out
Brandon: Yeah, no we did, we did. Yeah that's dope that place is awesome.
Emily: Yeah we go there a lot.
Brandon: Oh hell yeah, they have really good food they fed us really well there was like free food for all the bands. It was awesome Yeah. I’ve kinda been doing shit like that and obviously like with the Indigo gig I’m like still doing stuff like that to - as like a career, more like a job you know, but when it comes down to my life and like what I’m doing with my life, it’s D.D. So it’s kinda like the direction I’m heading in and I don’t know, Corona’s given me an interesting opportunity to really like space myself from all the gigging cause it can be almost addictive like oh like I get paid to go play guitar like that’s awesome but it can be really beneficial and it can make you a lot of connections but it can also keep you from your work, you know. So yeah I’m kinda just shifting gears and full force on my own shit you know. So yeah I would say that’s what I do.
Emily: How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard it before
Brandon: I would say particular to this EP, it sounds like how it feels to break your wrist and like be manic in the summertime on like cold brew and just having kinda like a quarter life crisis. And overall I think that my music, and the reason it’s called D.D. Island like that’s a place that me and my sister would go to as kids. Like it was this little island on the creek behind our house where we grew up and me and my sister would go swim around. So I feel like the objective with my music is to like touch that sorta like childlike wondrous state and kinda just swimming in a creek with your sister when you’re five.
Mikko: What made you want to start making music/be in the music industry
Brandon: I don’t think I did want to be in the music industry, like obviously I am now and something made me start. I just really wanted to play music always like theres videos of me before like I could barely walk like strumming on guitars and stuff and they were always around. No one in my family was particularly musical but there was enough like uncles and cousins and just weird stuff that like our house kinda collected musical instruments so I definitely gravitated toward music at a really young age. And then the music business stuff that’s, I mean, that’s really been in the last two years I would say. Like when I got the opportunity to tour with Darwin Deez is probably like the first time I was around someone doing this, doing music as a career, doing it professionally. And it was just kinda a learning experience to kina sit back and soak it all up and be like okay “how’d you get here?” Like you're ten years older than me and you’ve been doing this for a while like “How’d you get here?’ And yeah I think experiences gigging for people really opened my eyes to how to industry works and made me suck up a lot of things that I thought I hated like (deeper mocking vioce) “Ugh this is stupid I just wanna play music” and like I definitely, I had that pretty ignorant attitude towards it and I quickly realized like I’m- I’ll be lpaying at Betty’s Bar and Grill in Nashville till the day I die unless I decide to take an active approach towards the business end of things. And so I think that’s what made me decide that I wanted to be interested in [business] I don't wanna be playing bars till the day I die. I care about my music, I mean I care about my livelihood and ultimately if I combine the two and base my livelihood, you know my income, and just, off of the thing I believe in most in my life, I think that seems like the right thing to do for me. I don’t think a lot of people have to opportunity to do that so I would, I feel like I would be foolish not to try, you know not to go for it.
Emily: Your EP’s out, wait, tomorrow, that’s really cool
Brandon: Oh, oh it’s not, it’s not anymore. With everything that’s going on I changed the release date. It just didn’t feel appropriate to put out music in the current state of the world. So tentatively pushed back a month but I’m really gonna wait for things to die down to even re-announce it. So for now postponed indefinitely but I’m sure it’ll still come out at some point this summer.
Emily: Okay well your EP is coming out at some point,
Brandon: Haha yeah exactly
Emily: What was the process of creating that like for you?
Brandon: It was definitely different than anything I’d done. I record everything myself and I recorded all the tape so I think that really changes the way that I make music. I’m a drummer before I’m anything else, like that’s like the first instrument I learned, I generally, especially with songs like these that are coming out that are very drum heavy we’ll like, lay down the drums first, and I was living in the DIY space in Nashville, and, I guess, so I recorded the drums there. And then I guess I went on tour, and while I was on tour I got notified that the house I was living in was going to get like demolished in 70 days. So I, I had time to like go back and get my stuff and everything. SO basically I started everything there, tracked drums there, went on tour for a month, came back, got my stuff, and then I was kinda like, I was just kinda floating for a month or two. I moved in with my girlfriend at the time, and I was just kinda crashing with her and just kinda set my stuff up, like in a corner like on the floor, in the basement of her house and yeah. I guess I tracked like the majority of everything else there. Just like on the mattress topper on the basement floor in my girlfriend’s house. Mainly using this one really shitty, old, funny looking, red microphone that I got from a buddy that was like a school PA microphone in like the fifties or something. Like youd be like “ah Denis please come to the office”. That definitely influences the sound of everything going on on this EP. It’s just that, most things are being ran through that microphone, and then through a petal board and then through like a guitar amp. But yeah it was kinda a scattered creation process, I was just getting knocked around from house to house and Like recording what I could when I could inbetween like, tours and moving. It was a weird way to make a record for sure.
Emily: It turned out really cool though,
Mikko: Yeah it’s great now
Brandon: Um thanks, thanks I appreciate that
Mikko: Where does the inspiration for your songs come from, most of the time?
Brandon: Uhhhh, that’s an interesting question. I feel like inspiration for songs comes from like music itself. I’ve been talking about this with a friend lately and it’s, the idea of like being like unoriginal I think that a lot of artists struggle with that and like “Oh I’m copying someone else”. But I really think that if we gravate towards a perticular artist, I don’t know like Pavement, or like Duster, or like, anyone and we really love this music then we like see part of ourselves in this music, you know. And so I think that my music comes from like, all the music that I listen to and the things that I’m-- (silence for 10 seconds)
I take away from that
Emily: Wait all the audio cut out
Brandon: Oh, me being philosophical and lopsy, basically yeah I really like music and that’s what inspired me to start making it in the first place. So yeah as far as the material for the songs, this is maybe more the answer that you want, it’s from a very interesting time in my life where I was working at a coffee shop and I was heavily addicted to caffeine and I was pretty manic. I was pretty much living off of M&M cookies and cold brew from my work and skating when I could. And getting really revved up for tours and stuff. And basically I was supposed to go on my first tour for this project and the week before I left I like went to the skate park. Skated my entire life and never broke a bone, but I was just getting so like caught up in my head and like weirded out and just thinking way too much about stuff, I like fell and I broke my wrist like right before I was supposed to go on tour. And I feel like these songs all come from like around that time. A lot of these songs were written with my left hand in like a cast, with like my freaking wrist. Also during a time when I was doing my one man band set up with like a kick drum and a high hat and just kinda like screaming a lot. Just kinda have like a lot of aggression, you know, like pent up. So, and then obviously like girl stuff too, you know, I feel like that's pretty classic. It’s classic.
Emily: Honestly that's really impressive to be able to like, produce a whole EP with one hand
Brandon: I think by the time I was tracking it I think my wrist had healed, but a lot of material definitely came from the time either leading up to or after breaking my wrist. That’s the dedication of the album title being “scaphoid” is the bone, the bone that I broke.
Emily: What you do think sets you apart from other artists?
Brandon: Thats a- That’s a challenging question, I feel like that’s a question no one wants to answer. But I just don’t, I don’t feel afraid to make music. I feel like a lot of people try to make music that they want, that like other people want to hear. And, I mean, that’s kinda on a gradient scale, you have like your worst low-fi sounding local artist with thirty plays on bandcamp and that's like “the truest dude”. And then you have like pop music right, and like pop music is music being produced because people want it. It’s a product people want to hear. And then the dude on bandcamp that like no one goes to his shows is like, he’s doing it for the “truth” for the art. And I don’t feel like I’m either one, I feel like I lie somewhere in the middle. But I feel like I- I don’t feel afraid to do either one. I don’t feel afraid that makes something that sounds like not what anyone wants to hear and I also don’t feel afraid to lean into that and realize that there's an advantage to making music that falls into a category to like catch a listener's ear and to like build a fanbase. So I think about that and I think it’s good that I do think about it. I think it helps me make music, helps my creative process.
Mikko: Cool, okay next is how has covid changed your experience being in music?
Brandon: Haha that’s really funny. It’s given me the opportunity to write about two records so that’s cool. I’ve written- I wrote over an hour of music. I was trapped at my mom’s house for the first month of it and when I left her house I left with like over and hours worth of demos. I was like oh that’s sick, I’m doing okay. Yeah ruling out touring that’s huge. Cause that’s like, touring consumes like fifty percent of my thoughts, like most of the time I’m thinking about like “when, how, with who, where” it’s just like a constant thing that you're thinking of. So to have that eliminated is- frees up a lot of space in your head to like just, just focus on creating a read harry potter when I can, and when my ears hurt. It’s encouraging to slow down, that’s what a lot of people have been saying. And it’s good, it’s been really good, it’s been really healthy for me in a cool way. It’s definitely helped my relationships, I feel like that’s a really cool thing. It’s like, it feels like everyone is like, getting closer to each other. And getting closer to some people I didn’t think I would, or otherwise.
Emily: If you could only listen to one more artist for the rest of your life, who would you pick and why
Brandon: Pavement. Pavement dude, they're the fucking shit, theyre so good. Hahaha I’ve been like throughly obsessed I think that they’re one of those bands that is like really popular right now theres like a resugence of them, and like I’m absolultily like, falling into the hand of that movement. And it’s really cool, it’s just really cool. It’s beautiful songwriting, beautiful production, the way that they jam together on the recordings is just such an energy to either performances. Yeah I’ve been absolutely obsessed with them.
Mikko: Can’t argue with that
Brandon: Yeah, the easy answer
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