Radio, A Tiny Desk Transmission

We’ve been around as a band long enough that we’ve been able to enter the Tiny Desk Contest every year it’s existed, and it’s been fascinating to look back on each entry as a touchstone for the year, a kind of timeline of our lives in the form of the music we’re making. As bandits, we’ve generally met our obstacles and struggles with a great deal of optimism, gentleness, and good humor, but this year we wanted to show a different side of ourselves– a side that leans into feelings of profound angst and looks existentialism square in the eye and screams into the void– while also keeping a bit of good humor of course. "Radio was written in a time where I felt like I was living in a fun house 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 reveling 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." -Sydney RADIO written and performed by Bandits on the Run Video shot and edited by Paul-Emile Cendron Sound engineered mixed and mastered by Stephen Kurpis of Vitruvian Sound with assistance from Abhirav Joshi Special thanks to Eric Farber, Christine Fischer, and the Penington Friends House, NYC