Oregon’s BendreTheGiant releases a new EP in March

The MusicOregon Echo Fund provides funding to musicians to support career development, allowing artists to fund non-performance projects like recording in a studio or filming a music video.

BendreTheGiant, a Portland-based ensemble, has been working on recording music with help from the fund. The group’s new EP, “Wading In The Deep End” will be released on March 7. BendreTheGiant is also headed on tour with stops in Oregon, California and Washington. The group will play in Eugene at John Henry’s on Feb. 13 and at Alberta Street Pub in Portland on March 1st. They join us for an in-studio performance.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Once upon a time and not that long ago, BendreTheGiant was a name for Ben Estrada’s one-person music project. Bendre would write and produce songs with a computer and a synth, and then put them out into the world. But without a musical community, without collaborators or partners, all of that has changed. Portland-based BendreTheGiant is now a six-person band that moves fluidly through soul, funk, jazz, samba and more. They came to our studios recently for an interview and a performance. They started with their song, “I Probably Shouldn’t Be Here.“

[“I Probably Shouldn’t Be Here” playing, by BendreTheGiant]

Is it unnatural to feel this way

The need to please eats me way

How many pawns do you need to play

How many bad habits fit in a day

I couldn’t wait to see

Sure to find out you told them wait for me

I told them dig a grave for me I’m a little dramatic

Switching lanes but I’m not automatic

Asleep at the wheel feeling problematic

Keep breaking skin so the wound never heals

Pull me away like a chemical peel

I probably shouldn’t be here

You probably shouldn’t be here

We probably shouldn’t be here

But, who told you to be so productive

I sit back and handle the puppets

Pulling strings and they say they love it

Soon enough they’ll be running from it

Why do bad people find me appealing

Shut all the doors they come through the ceiling

Come to the party just to [beep] up the evening

Walked in sober but headed out bleeding

Worst pea in the pod call me Adam Friedland

Do bad things just to fill out the weekend

Monday comes but [beep] that feeling

Tuesday comes but I can’t feel it

Wednesday Thursday time ain’t healing

Time ain’t healing

Time don’t heal [beep]

I probably shouldn’t be here

You probably shouldn’t be here

We probably shouldn’t be here

I probably shouldn’t be here

You probably shouldn’t be here

We probably shouldn’t be here

[Song ends]

Miller: That’s the song “I Probably Shouldn’t Be Here,” by the band BendreTheGiant.

Bendre, please introduce us to your band, if you don’t mind?

Bendre: Yes. My name is BendreTheGiant. We have Luke Turner to my right, on saxophone; Avery Scanlon on guitar; Nate Hansen on drums; Eli Hansen on bass guitar; Delos Erickson on keys and vocals; and Eli Hansen, also on background vocals.

Miller: Some of those lyrics there, “Why do bad people find me appealing, shut all the doors, they come through the ceiling, come to the party just to (I can say) ‘mess’ up the evening, walked in sober but headed out bleeding.” Where did that song come from?

Bendre: Oh, a mix of things. At the time, I was living in Seattle and I really had no musical community. So a lot of that song is just talking about feeling lost or just out of place where you’re at. Specifically, some of those lyrics come from, honestly, memes at the time, like the “come through the ceiling,” is from a video I saw where a guy literally falls through the ceiling and is like, ‘Hi, Dave!’ So, just a general displacement and not feeling like you’re where you should be.

Miller: Have you walked out of a party bleeding, ever?

Bendre: Yeah, probably, yeah. [Laughter]

Miller: But let’s go back in time a little bit, because before you got to Seattle, am I right, you grew up in Gresham, eventually graduated from high school in Redmond?

Bendre: Correct, I went to Gresham, lived in that area. I went to Corbett High School and then moved to Seattle for a little bit, went to Bothell High School for a year. And then eventually moved to Redmond, Oregon, near Bend.

Miller: Were you making music that whole time? When you were a little kid, were you making music?

Bendre: I was definitely singing and playing music. My parents are both musicians. I don’t think I really started making real music until probably senior year of high school. There’s a family story that one of the first songs I made was on a road trip to Seattle, and it’s just me going, [singing] “We’re going to Seattle, yes we are.” So, we’ve always been a musical family, just got a little bit better at writing.

Miller: How did your parents feel about you following their footsteps?

Bendre: A mix. I mean, of course they’re super supportive. I think everybody nowadays is like, “You gotta have a real job, but follow your dreams.” So a little bit of both.

Miller: What were your influences, musically?

Bendre: It’s a good question. Definitely Thundercat, Flying Lotus, are big inspirations from when I was younger. Earth, Wind & Fire, Chicago, all over the place … Michael Jackson when I was a kid, that was a big one.

Miller: We’re gonna hear another song now, “Nobody Knows.” What should we know about it before we hear it?

Bendre: This song has a similar vibe of displacement. That’s what a lot of my songs have to do with, and just being in the wrong place, but this one’s a little more vibey.

Miller: All right, “Nobody Knows.”

[“Nobody Knows” playing, by BendreTheGiant]

Miller: That’s “Nobody Knows” by the band, BendreTheGiant. Their new EP, “Wading in the Deep End,” is going to be released on March 7. The group is about to start a Northwest tour with stops in Washington, Oregon and California. Just a few of those stops: they’re gonna play at John Henry’s in Eugene on February 13, and Alberta Street Pub in Portland on March 1. You can find a link on our website to their full tour schedule.

Bendre, you said that some of these songs were about displacement and came about from your time in Seattle after you graduated from high school. Why did you move to Seattle? What were you expecting or hoping to find?

Bendre: I moved to Seattle for a mix of reasons, mainly to help support my dad at the time, who was dealing with a work injury. And then also just to find work and hopefully do some musical stuff. I kind of had an ignorant point of view of just being, like, “I wanna move to a big city and do music,” without necessarily having a community.

So it went about that way, where I just didn’t have a community and started working on music. When I was making this song in particular, I was living next to Lake Washington and I would often take walks to that lake and write lyrics. I wrote this song while doing that. But a lot of it’s about displacement and just not feeling like you have a home or you’re where you should be, and that’s since changed. That’s a lot of where that inspiration came from.

Miller: When did you realize you had to get out of there?

Bendre: November of ‘23 was when I finally decided to leave. Just over a year ago, I ended up moving with Delos in Eugene, Oregon.

Miller: Why? Delos, who we just heard through that massive solo on keyboards … I wish folks could have seen your face. It is what our engineer, who’s seen a lot of bands, calls a “stinky cheese face” when things get funky.

Delos Erickson: I’m prone to stinky cheese faces.

Miller: Delos, what do you remember from Bendre, from that time before he moved down to Eugene to make music with you and to change states?

Erickson: Yeah, well, it was perfect timing. Ben and I kind of grew up together earlier in our life when we were teenagers in high school. I had just gone through a life change, got a free room in Eugene. He’s going through a life change. He would always send me his demos throughout the year-and-a-half to two years that he was making them. And I’ve just always wanted to make that music with him.

So, around that time I just remember this abundance of creativity. We got everyone here involved. We all went to school together at U of O, excluding Bendre because he was in Seattle at the time. And we just started tackling this music, which has been super fun to dive into his catalog and we each arrange it out. He arranges new versions of his songs as well, and we bring it to the band.

Miller: So you’re saying that earlier, before that, he would send you a demo or sort of a one-person version of a song, and you would actually think, “I wish I could work on this”?

Erickson: Totally, yeah, he would send me his published demos, because he would release them beforehand under BendreTheGiant or another alias, just his own little project that he was doing. And then he would send me that. The “Hollow Head Demos,” is something that’s on our streaming platform. He sent me those and I just remember thinking, “Wow, these would be so awesome, fleshed out. I hear what he’s going for. I hear where we could take it, what could happen with them.” So yeah, and he would just be like, “Hey, check this out, listen to it,” type thing.

Miller: Well, let’s listen to one of those demos. Bendre, it sounds like a whole band is playing here, but this is just you and some computers and a keyboard. We’re going to hear “Missing You.” What should we listen for, first in the demo, before we hear the six of you play it live?

Bendre: There’s a lot of things in this that are built on the fact that it was kind of … I only had my mom’s laptop at the time, a hand-me-down, and the tiny, little MIDI keyboard. I still only have Ableton [Live] Lite, so I can only have 8-tracks. So everything you hear on this was taken from those 8-tracks, duplicated onto another tape. So it’s like doing it old-style, where you’re taking seven tapes, then putting them on another 8-track and kind of like layering it that way. So it’s all layered vocals, keyboards, drums, all that stuff.

Miller: Bedroom music.

Bendre: Yeah.

Miller: All right, let’s have a listen. This is your demo version of the song “Msn U” … a little bit of this and then we can hear your live version.

[“Msn U” (demo version) playing, by BendreTheGiant]

Wait for me

Wait for me

Could you wait for me

Waiting on the other side

Take me to the other side

Could you take from me

Take from me

I don’t know where I’m going from here

But I think you’re gonna be near

I don’t know where I’m going from here

But I think you’re gonna be near

[Songs fades out]

Miller: Delos, when you hear a song like this – and I know it’s not just you, but it’s the whole team – how do you turn this into a song for a six-person band?

Erickson: It takes a lot of reimagining and thinking of things that you can hear in it. Like through the pop stuff that’s going on, I was like, “OK, I definitely hear a samba section and we can put that in.” The back half of our version, we have an awesome samba section with horns and an amazing percussionist. But then there’s a second element that our bassist Eli was the main producer on here, which is probably the whole first half of the song. We changed the synths around, maybe you can speak a little bit more to that.

Eli Hansen: Yeah, the first thing that I heard with this was that really kind of ear candy synth at the beginning. And so the first step that I took with arranging this with the loss was just recreating that on this top synthesizer here. And then from there, it was really just trying to figure out how to synthesize that into this ensemble, knowing what voices we have within this group with guitar, a live saxophone, all of our voices and our keyboards, figuring out how to make that demo that you just heard work within the context of this group.

Miller: All right, let’s listen to what you all came up with. This is “Msn U.”

[“Msn U” (full band) playing, by BendreTheGiant]

Wait for me

Wait for me

Could you wait for me

Waiting on the other side

Take me to the other side

Could you take from me

Take from me

I don’t know where I’m going from here

But I think you’re gonna be near

I don’t know where I’m going from here

But I think you’re gonna be near

Wait for me

wait for me

Waiting on the other side

Could you take from me

Take from me

Wake me to the other side

Waiting on the other side

Wait for me

Could you wait for me take from me

Wait for me

Waiting on the other side

Waiting on the other side

Waiting on the other side

Missing you, missing you, missing you

Waiting on the other side

Waiting on the other side

Waiting on the other side

Missing you, Missing you, Missing you

Missing you

Waiting on the other side

[Song ends]

Miller: That was “Msn U” by the band BendreTheGiant. There’s sort of a magic trick about a lot of your music – even when the lyrics are intense, sad or, as you said, about displacement, even when it gets fast, there’s something just soothing about a lot of your songs. I’m not totally sure where it comes from. How intentional is that?

Bendre: It’s definitely intentional. I think a lot of our music is based on a vibe, I guess. I don’t know, a lot of it is negative lyrics, but with a happy sound, so it’s like packaging trauma in a way that’s …

Miller: In a candy wrapper …

Bendre: Yeah, like a candy wrapper.

Miller: … Or like a blanket.

Bendre: Yeah, it’s taking our experience, some good, some bad, and making it in a way that people can dance to.

Erickson: I’d also like to say that, really quick, I think one of the main reasons is because we just really put in all the stuff that we love. We’re talking about how we think of those arrangements earlier. I just would think, “Wow, what would go super cool with this? What is, like, a dream to do?”

For me, it was to write horn parts with my friend Andrew Shoop, and incorporate it, and make it like Earth, Wind & Fire, Chicago-esque type stuff mixed with a samba thing. I know we have all the players for it. So genuinely, for me, I get that feeling of warmth and happiness because I – and I’m pretty sure everyone else – just put in all the elements that they really love about other music into Ben’s music, to put it where it’s at.

Miller: You also, the two of you … I mean, there’s a bunch of college friends here and then the two of you go back even before that, as high school friends. What’s it like, Bendre, to make music now “in community”?

Bendre: It’s great. I mean, it’s a completely different process than I was used to. When I first made all the demos, I was in my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle with my partner at the time, and from 6 p.m. to like 2 a.m. make music. And the next day, show it to them or send it to Delos or something like that, and be like, “what do you think of this?” and “how does this feel?” And then, a lot of it was just by myself. I would just hunker down and work on the music.

Bringing it to a group now is completely expansive and we’re able to take the music, like what you said – do a horn part like Chicago because we’re huge fans, or do this whole samba section because we love samba. And being able to take from all of these guys' experiences and use that in a way that’s completely new with my music that I’ve been working on for three years, it just transforms everything. It’s really cool.

Miller: You guys got a grant from the MusicOregon Echo Fund. What has that meant for you?

Bendre: It’s been really helpful. We’re using that for our upcoming EP, after the one that we’re putting out, of course. But the one we’re working on right now, it’s been great, it makes it so we can record and not have to worry about taking out of our own personal funds and stuff like that. We can save a little bit of our band fund we’ve been saving, and use it for merch and things that help us grow.

Miller: Can you take us out with one more song?

Bendre: Yeah, we’ve got one more song. This is “Homeless.”

Miller: Thanks so much, guys.

[“Homeless” playing by BendreTheGiant]

Miller: That’s the Portland band BendreTheGiant, with band leader Bendre on vocals; Delos Erickson plays keyboards – he is a collaborator and co-producer; Eli Hansen is the other co-producer, on bass; Nate Hansen is on drums; Avery Scanlon on guitar; and Luke Turner on sax.

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