Today we’d like to introduce you to Bee Appleseed.
Hi Bee, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My name is Brian Smith, folks call me Bee, and I create under the name Bee Appleseed. I grew up in a small town outside Portland called Canby, Oregon where my first form of art was skateboarding from the age of five years old. At 14 however, I knocked out my teeth in a way that required some pretty extensive surgeries over the next six years and I sorta stopped skating as a result. After that trauma, I went kinda inward and started making music and so my relationship with music has always been from a place of healing. I had been writing poetry before and ever since and so I started writing songs and recording before knowing much about what I was doing. It was hard to get folks to be in bands with me back then as I never had any opportunity for lessons or anything, but the result was I learned how to record myself and play all the instruments, something I still do today at 31 and around 20 albums later with the skill level I dreamed of when I started. I then graduated Canby High School in 2008 and went to Oregon State University where I finished with Undergraduates in Business Management and Business Administration, finishing school on a study abroad program at the Vienna School Of Economics And Business in Vienna, Austria in 2012.
Rather than returning immediately to The States, I started booking shows as I had up and down the West Coast while in college and continued this trip for three years on a constant international tour, barely making enough to travel sometimes, but managing to perform over 300 shows in 40+ countries through Europe and South America during that time and meeting a lot of people from around the world, hearing their stories, and keeping in touch years later. I then returned to Portland for a couple of years, recorded two albums with my friend River in Olympia, and now I’ve been living in Los Angeles for the past four years where I met my girlfriend Nora Keyes. Together in 2018, we started a small record label and healing arts business; we recently filed the nonprofit paperwork for called Godyssey Music And Healing Arts as well as an improvisational Sound Healing project called Elf Freedom. Nearly 100 shows in Los Angeles, across the USA, and two tours in Europe later including concerts for the Blind at The Braille Institute, concerts for dogs at DEN Urban Dog Daycare, a number of art galleries, free busking concerts at Echo Lake, castles, museums, and a boat in The Czech Republic, and even a concert for exotic birds behind the scenes at The Boston Zoo, quite a few audiences have been hypnotized through the pairing of Nora’s often operatic experimental vocals and my psychedelic folk/rock multi-instrumentalist live songwriting.
Concerts range between more delicate sound bath performances where people lie down on the floor to louder rock performances, occasionally featuring a full band of improvisors of up to eight people. The result has been some pretty cool live recordings we’ve been releasing pretty much every month since the beginning of the pandemic between a number of new solo albums from each of us. We record everything, which makes for great personalized sound baths where the individuals get to keep the recording for future therapeutic purposes. At the moment with Elf Freedom/Godyssey Healing Arts, we travel to our clients and give personalized sound baths at home, performing for cancer patients, Nora’s mother with Atlzheimer’s, private groups, those experiencing grief and trauma, and are working towards our dream of having a Community Garden and Healing Arts Center as our nonprofit comes to fruition, meanwhile continuing to release new albums and singles constantly. Of course, we play concerts as well, both solo and together, and are always eager to share the music with anyone who might need it.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It definitely has not been a smooth road to say the least and the long road I’ve taken has only been for the most dedicated. Many people go through life without ever knowing who they are while many others suffer greatly and unnecessarily because society does not allow them to be the person they know themself to be in their heart – to ascend to the top of Maslow’s Pyramid without resistance as they get stuck struggling just to meet the most basic human needs at the bottom of the pyramid. I really consider having started my career as an artist at the end of 2012 as I finished school and started organizing my international tour that spanned until July 2015. During that time, I enjoyed a much higher quality of life as an artist in Europe versus in my own country. I had an artist visa in Germany, a student visa in Austria, recorded a few albums and lived for a month in a government-funded cultural center in Sweden, had my own apartment I paid for from my own hard work as an artist and everything. When I came back from that life to move home to Portland however, I had a really hard time readjusting, both the reverse culture shock and no longer being able to survive solely as an artist, to have to work for other people when I knew that wasn’t my purpose in life, but just something I had to do because of how the system is setup. I did all kinds of things, was a financial educator at a nonprofit through AmeriCorps, worked in a juice bar, worked at an açaí place, did coat and bag check, lawn care, event staff, was a receptionist, barista, bartender, a travel coordinator for a dental consulting business, unloaded empty coffins off trucks in a warehouse, collected signatures for petitions, worked on an assembly line making salads, trimmed weed, and did plenty of background acting and catering gigs.
Of course, I learned a lot from these experiences, but none of them were what I was born to do. The unfortunate thing about artists is how our career paths are essentially setup to make us dependent on other people for our success and if you don’t come from money, you end up accumulating PTSD at some point along the way from some traumatic experiences you’re inevitable to have as a result of a society that doesn’t value artists enough to pay them living wages to begin with. I personally had to live out of my car for the first year I was in Los Angeles, then almost got murdered in my own home by someone I didn’t know at the first place I lived before ending up in the quiet apartment where I am now. Flashback to 2013, a German friend told me at a show we played in Luxembourg that the secret to his band’s success is they just kept going while all the others they knew gave up and I think that’s just it. Patience is the name of the game and music is the divine healer to get through our experiences. Music existed long before the music industry and it will exist long after the music industry. Besides, we have always done it for the people – hitchhiking internationally, playing on the street or wherever we could – classic troubadour experiences as folks did for thousands of years before us. I have so many stories to tell and hope to one day be able to tell them in the book I’ve been writing all along called The Gift Of Direction and my book of poetry called Arriving, meanwhile using my experience and education to organize a nonprofit to actually be able to help artists and build community.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I specialize in psychedelic folk and rock and roll music with poetic lyrics. I am a singer, writer, songwriter, music producer, actor, comedian, and merit-based society advocate, advocating for a world where hard work still leads to success.
I’d have to say I’m most proud of how prolific I’ve managed to be through the years both in the number of songs I’ve recorded (somewhere over 500 between all my projects) and all the places I’ve played, over 700 shows in 40+ countries on three continents. During the pandemic alone, I released six albums, two live albums, two EPs, three music videos, eight cover songs, one new single, formed a nonprofit, and rereleased seven albums and 2 EPs with 3 or 4 more albums on the way this year plus a few more rereleases of older stuff, meanwhile working towards completing my masterpiece 30-something song opus I’ve been steadily creating since 2015. I never had a label that organized a tour for me, personally burned all the thousands of CDs I sold off my computer, and probably got about 1-4 shows for every 100 booking emails I sent out, did all the coding and design on my own website, either personally created the artwork or collaborated with some of my favorite artist friends for the designs, collaborated with and met so many great musicians around the world I still keep in touch with and see what is happening in their countries and cities, and in general that I just got to see so much of the world during that unique period of time when the website Couchsurfing was still useful and people still bought CDs, allowing for a musician to travel light. Now it’s just a different world, but I’m grateful for the community I’ve grown through my journey with projects Bee Appleseed, Brian Smith, Elf Freedom, Dirty Whips, Wizard Island, and Biological Lovers and now all these years later, have finally got most all my music on Spotify over the last year.
My goal with my songwriting has always been to be a good enough musician so that the words don’t matter and a good enough lyricist so that the music doesn’t matter and now in my early 30s with so much experience behind me, I feel I’ve finally arrived to that place. I do also have a lifelong dream to perform in every country, so we’ll see how that turns out as I’m about a quarter of the way there already. People have said I’m like a psychedelic Bob Dylan and maybe that’s something close as I’ve always appreciated people with something to say like him, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Woody Guthrie, Bill Callahan, and Patti Smith as well as the dreamy qualities of folks like Pink Floyd, Redding Hunter, George Harrison, and Devendra Banhart, the engineering genius of Lee “Scratch” Perry, and the soul power of Janis Joplin, Melanie Safka, Redbone, Otis Redding, and all the great music to come out of Jamaica in the 70s, while of course being inspired constantly by the art and music of my love Nora Keyes as we’ve lived and created together in Silver Lake over the past three years.
What sets me apart from the others? Well, read the lyrics while listening to the music and maybe you’ll understand. I’ve given everything I have for the music so perhaps there’s something there that speaks to you and since there’s just so much of it, it’s like discovering the full catalogue of an artist from the 60s or something that had a full career and never stopped creating, but I’m still young, did everything I have without fame or money, and still have so much more to look forward to.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I love the nature but am less into all the concrete and the fact that much of Los Angeles’ early indigenous history is underneath that concrete. I love the people and the beauty, the culture and diversity, the food and great entertainment, but not the corruption and systemic failures that created the crisis of homelessness while people with means to fix it drive past in their fancy cars every day. It lowers the consciousness of any society to have such a problem persist, yet the problem here has only gotten worse and become a sorta right of passage for any true artist from my generation to have to experience it at some point. With the understanding of basic math that if we all had the same amount of money, we wouldn’t have rich or poor, but instead we would have equality, it then becomes apparent that for any rich person to simply exist creates poverty as a consequence of distributing society’s resources in such an unequal way.
As a result, these notions of hard work leading to success, the ideals our country was founded upon only become true for certain classes. I’ve personally never seen another city with these inequalities so apparent and extreme and I’ve been to pretty much every major city in the Western World. I do however have a deep love for this city and everything it’s taught me for though I’ve only lived here 4 1/2 years, it’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I moved away from my hometown in Oregon in 2008. And though it’s such a massive city that takes forever and then a little longer to find your own place within when you arrive with nothing and without knowing anyone, I am so dearly grateful for the journey, for the experience that feels like mythology, for these are the stories the city is made from – the collective dreams praying to the City Of Angels, for the gatekeepers to open the gate to allow their dreams to come true too. As a traveler, one of the greatest things about this City Of Angels is that you can travel the world here without ever leaving the city for the cultural diversity is so rich and beautiful and powerful, and no matter how far I travel, I know I’ll always be coming back here for sure.
But my friends,
Let me tell you,
That the greatest distance I ever traveled,
Was simply leaving the house.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: beeappleseed.com
- Instagram: @bee.appleseed
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/officialbeeappleseedhq
- Twitter: twitter.com/BeeAppleseed
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMRIS1YAXbURAyHFWVLKnyg
Image Credits:
Photos in order: 1) photo by Nora Keyes 2) photo by Jackie Ryder at HM157 3) Art by Nora Keyes with photo by Aaron Rodriguez 4) photo by Luca Daniele at Godot Art Bistrot in Avellino, Italy 5) photo by Charmaine Clamour from The Kapayapaan Healing Festival at Filipino American Service Group, Inc 6) photo by James Weigel, Astral Eyes at home with our chihuahuas in Silver Lake 7) photo by Nora Keyes
