Brandon Hardesty is doing it all wrong.

Suggested Listening: Brandon Hardesty - Neurodivergent

I met Brandon Hardesty, the singer of Bumpin Uglies, when our bands were both on tour with the Expendables in March of 2020. We only got four shows in before a global catastrophic health event sent us all home with way too much merch and broken dreams of making it big on what was, at that point, the biggest tour either of our bands had been a part of.

One of our last shows was at Paper Tiger in San Antonio. I distinctly remember sitting out back doing the sort of fumbled conversation bands do when they’re sizing each other up and trying to figure out who everybody is.

After a handful of shows I’d noticed Brandon had this habit of grabbing his acoustic guitar after the set and playing for fans as they filtered out of the venue. Were there songs they wanted to hear that Bumpin Uglies hadn’t gotten to in their opening slot? Brandon was happy to oblige, sitting on a curb, bashing away at an acoustic guitar and somehow getting more volume out of his bare lungs than I can with a microphone and a full sound system.

Who the fuck is this guy? Doesn’t he know we’re supposed to be playing it cool? He’s just out here giving all his mystique away for free.

At the time, I genuinely thought Brandon was doing all of this wrong.

Turns out I didn’t know shit about Brandon Hardesty.

Somewhere along the line Brandon started to come into view for me. A lot of performers have a stage version of themselves and then a regular-guy-walking-around version of themselves. Brandon doesn’t seem to have much of a divide between the two. He’s barefoot walking around the festival, then barefoot walking around on stage. He’s posting about being a dad. He’s showing the unglamorous parts of touring. He’s answering DMs, hanging around after the show, playing songs on a curb for people who weren’t ready to go home yet.

His fans don’t treat him like some mysterious rock star because he’s never really asked them to.

When I first saw it in action, I didn’t realize what I was looking at.

I thought he was giving away the surprise.

Turns out that was the surprise.

That night at Paper Tiger he started to come into focus even more. Some of my first real conversations with him sounded a lot like the ones we still have today: frank, honest, pretty self-aware. He told me about meeting his wife, Sophia. About relentlessly pursuing her. About the ways she’d helped him grow up and take music more seriously. He talked about getting sober, which I think was still fairly new at the time.

He wasn’t doing the whole “guy in the bigger band” thing—pretending he had no home life and cashing in his career experience as conversation currency with the only girl backstage. It was surprising. And refreshing. He was just a guy who genuinely loved making music and being in a band. He wasn’t there for girls or glory. He just really, really loves making music and really loves being in a band.

Not long after that we were all home, creatively withering away during the pandemic. My manager told me, “You should start writing with new people. Reach out to artists you respect.”

Brandon was fresh on my mind.

Watching those few shows, I’d realized I loved the storytelling in his songs. Brandon wasn’t just singing about good vibes and the tide going in and out (respectfully). He was writing about his actual experiences. Heartbreak. Regret. Unapologetic overindulging. His own flaws.

So I texted him and asked if he wanted to write over Zoom or FaceTime or whatever the fuck we were all using for sanitized communication at the time.

Together we wrote “Cops and Robbers.” Later he asked me to sing on “Too Stoned,” a song that has fortunately locked me into guest appearances at Bumpin Uglies shows anywhere I’m within about a hundred-mile radius.

Somewhere along the way Brandon and I became actual friends.

Not the kind of friends who dap each other up backstage and frantically try to remember one personal detail about the other’s life to prove we’ve interacted before. Real friends.

I’m ashamed to admit I’m an absolute glutton for gossip, and Brandon is usually the first person I text when I’ve got some.

His wife and I bully him in a group chat while admiring their daughter’s increasingly impeccable fashion sense. He and TJ are social security blankets for me whenever I spot them across a festival full of people I only sort of know. We send each other new music. Brandon at a pace I honestly can’t keep up with.

The guy is always making something.

New mixes. New collaborators. New producers. Flyer concepts. Fucking T-shirt cannons. And of course, lyrics over everything.

His level of output honestly makes me question whether I’m even an artist sometimes. I can’t begin to contend with the relentless momentum of this guy. Every time I think he’s finally going to slow down, he sends me another demo.

A few nights ago Brandon texted me that the collection of demos, revised mixes, artwork, and album titles he’d been stewing over for the better part of a year had finally solidified into an actual record—and that he was going to quietly dump the whole thing onto the internet in a few hours.

That felt very Brandon.

No big rollout. No countdown clock. No six weeks of cryptic social media posts with blurry photos of his elbow. Just, “Hey, I finished this thing.”

A few hours later, there it was.

As much as he’s downplaying it, I actually think it’s the purest distillation of who he is as an artist that he’s ever released. He’s been geeking out over these string arrangements for months. Maybe a year. Time isn’t really something I have a tight grasp of yet.

What you’re hearing on this record is Brandon getting to indulge every weird little obsession he’s accumulated over years of making music.

These days it’s getting rarer to stumble across art that exists simply because somebody wanted to make it. Algorithms get a vote. Commerce gets a vote. Attention spans get a vote. Budgets get a vote.

This record feels like Brandon ignored the meeting and made it anyway.

And now we all just get to hear it.

(I should probably interrupt myself here because this has become way more complimentary than Brandon would ever be comfortable with. Let me balance things out by reminding everyone that he has the grossest toes you’ve ever had the misfortune of imagining, has, on more than one occasion, pooped on the side of the road, thankfully never while I’ve been present, and once spent a portion of his adult life gluten free because it made his throat tickle. So let’s all settle down. He’s still gross and soft like the rest of us.)

Sometimes after an Uglies show someone will come up and tell me they love “Too Stoned,” or that they love Brandon and my friendship. I usually tell them he’s like a big brother to me.

That’s the shortest honest answer I have.

We start our fall tour together in Greeley, Colorado in two weeks, the first time our bands have toured together since 2021. I’m looking forward to watching their set every night, probably still studying this guy a little the way I did when I first saw him sitting on a curb with an acoustic guitar back in March of 2020.

Congrats on the new record, B Hard.

You done good.