Exclusive album premiere of the self-titled album by Beekeeper Spaceman, out November 3rd.

Like its sprawling hometown of Dallas, Texas, cinematic indie rock band Beekeeper Spaceman’s self-titled debut album evokes a never-ending collision between bucolic bygones and the urban present.

Born out of an online multimedia project called Fire Bones, the duo—primary songwriter/ singer/guitarist Greg Brownderville and producer/multi-instrumentalist Spencer Kenney—have shared bills with artists like Erykah Badu, Leon Bridges, Shakey Graves and Black Pumas. Brownderville is editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Southwest Review and author of three books of poetry, while Kenney fronts a solo electro-pop project under his own name and is involved with a variety of acts on the Dallas-based Dolfin Records label.

To fully appreciate Beekeeper Spaceman and its music, it’s helpful to understand Fire Bones, a self-described “go-show”—released in 2021 and optimized for mobile devices—that uses poetry, video, podcasts and visual art to tell an epic story about a fictional town in the Arkansas Delta. The band’s name is taken from a key character in the tale, but Brownderville and Kenney didn’t initially set out to make an album, or even to form a musical project together.

“We connected through a mutual friend and I started working on music for Fire Bones,” says Kenney, who is originally from New England but moved to Texas as a kid. “I don’t know how we decided to make an album. I don’t know if we really did. It just kind of started happening.”

When it did, it generally went like this: Brownderville would write a folk song, more or less, and share it with Kenney, who would then sculpt the sound of the song by adding synths and other layers to the arrangement, relying on ideas of his own and input from Brownderville.

Kenney came along at a critical moment in the making of Fire Bones, Brownderville says, and he proved to be an easy communicator, an intuitive collaborator and a breath of fresh air. “We have an unusual affinity, and you can hear it in our songs. He would play parts that were never the same things I would’ve done, but I always loved what he did,” says Brownderville. “We have different sensibilities, but they work really well together. I could see early on that he was making everything better.”

Specifically, “Kenney gave the songs a higher sky,” says Brownderville. When asked to elaborate, Brownderville’s voice noticeably intensifies as he digs into the sonic effects of their shared efforts: “After he’d worked on (a song) for a while, I always had this feeling that it was much more spacious,” says Brownderville. “He would open up air inside the song’s space, and it would go from being two-dimensional to feeling three-dimensional. And I loved that.”

Headline photo: Beekeeper Spaceman | [L-R]: Greg Brownderville, Spencer Kenney | Photo by Kyle Montgomery

Fire Bones Official Website
Beekeeper Spaceman Facebook / Instagram