Bandits on the Run, The TVD First Date

“The whole idea for our newest release, “Love in the Underground,” was actually inspired by vinyl.”

“The gist of it was that we wanted to put out a 45 of this track in the style of a throwback single, with an accompanying B-Side that would contrast the mood and tone of the A-Side. Only in our version, the B-Side would be the same song, just played totally differently; where our A-Side of “Love in the Underground” is rhythmic, energetic, and conveyed by a sense of poppy, happy-go-luckiness, the B-Side is moody, melancholy, and meditative, ultimately telling a totally different side of the story with the same words and melody… at least that’s the aim. We’ll find out if it works on May 15th when our “Love in the Underground” 45 hits the shelves and people get to experience the tracks in tactile form.

In a way, that reverence for that old school way of putting out a single ties into our whole ethos: for our whole career as bandits, we’ve been considered a band with a strong throwback vibe (although no one can ever quite say exactly what we’re throwing back to, besides a time where music was more immediate and live and happening right in front of you).

We started out playing in the subways and quickly gained a reputation of serendipity and surprise—a strange little pop up act you would stumble upon on your way to Manhattan that might enliven your night and maybe make you fall back in love with New York again. We seemed to be bringing people back to an older mode of music, one steeped in a feeling of nostalgia that directly contrasted with the digital music playing in the earbuds our commuters would remove to listen to us.

This is Adrian, aka Roy Dodger (guitarist of the Bandits) by the way. My experience with vinyl over the years has given me the strongest relationship with vinyl out of all the bandits. Right next to the piano I first learned to play on, my parents kept a turntable and bunch of old wooden crates stuffed with vinyl, and while she baked pies on weekends my mother would often throw on some of her favorite records from her past—we’re talking Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Talking Heads, Jefferson Airplane.

Eventually, I dug into the collection myself, and I found lots of wax that hadn’t been listened to in years. Some of these become my favorites: The Kinks’ Greatest Hits, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, some extremely love-lorn (read: totally worn out) Beatles records, and yes, even the original Godspell soundtrack. As I got older I started collecting a few of my own—the first vinyl I remember purchasing was Ben Folds’ Songs for Silverman.

I remember inheriting some great golden age jazz records from my grandmother—Dave Brubeck’s Time’s Up, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, and an old Getz/Gilberto record I’d listen to now and then. The Beatles’ Revolver got me through the last of my school years, and I’d spend hours looking at the intricate illustration on the cover. Later, an older friend of mine told me they’d used that same record as a surface to roll joints on in college.

It’s been strange to see vinyl come back into fashion as a mainstream way of listening to music—for me vinyl was always the medium of music from the past, encapsulated by in the palpable hiss of a record that’s been listened to too many times to count—but it’s not all that surprising to me. Music holds our emotional experiences in the same way a tangible physical object can hold a dear memory. A good vinyl does both at once.

In a world where we seem to be moving more and more of our earthly tastes to the digital realm—Spotify, YouTube, TikTok—we seem to be implicitly longing for something we can touch, music that exists in the same analogue space as our bodies, and records bring us a bit closer to that… It’s very similar to what I’ve found with Bandits on the Run, when we first started playing out in the subways, bringing an old, more immediate form of music face to face with everyday commuters, and watching some spark get set in their eyes, awakening some faint evolutionary memory of a troubadour crooning away in the middle of a town square.”
—Roy Dodger