Brandon Coleman is a South Central Los Angeles-born and-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, and composer. Coleman’s older brother put him on to Miles Davis at a very early age. “There would be a lot of times kids at school would be singing a popular song and I wouldn’t know it. Instead, I was blasting Kenny Kirkland and Chick Corea and they’d all think I was speaking another language,” Coleman recalls.
When he was 16, Coleman taught himself piano. By the time he turned 17, he landed his first touring gig with Brian McKnight and since then, he has toured with Babyface, Roy Hargrove, Stanley Clarke, Alicia Keys, and Childish Gambino. Coleman has also been a member of the Brainfeeder crew, contributing his talents to albums by Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, and Flying Lotus among others. He also opened for Flying Lotus back in 2019.
Coleman’s sophomore album Interstellar Black Space is slated for a May 20, 2022 release through Brainfeeder. The album features an incredibly talented cast of guests including Kamasi Washington, Patrice Quinn, Ryan Porter, Keyon Harrold, Ben Williams, and Marcus Gilmore. The album’s second and latest single, the slow-burning, classic soul inspired “Be With Me” exemplifies the label’s cosmic approach towards music: violin, cello and sitar are paired with strummed guitar, a sinuous bass line and Coleman’s expressive tenor to create a song that’s trippy yet swooningly earnest.
“There’s a culture of music that I grew up with that I’ve always loved and it’s always spiritually spoken to my soul: the lyrics of The Delfonics, Four Tops, Manhattans… groups like that motivated me to want to write a truly inspired song,” Coleman explains. “I wrote this in 30 minutes. We recorded it in one take. It’s soul music through the mind of synthesizers!”
Directed by Lauren Desberg, the accompanying video for “Be With Me” is split between footage of Coleman in a sparsely set studio, and a story following a madly in love anime couple on an alien planet. After being proposed to, the woman, who’s also a NASA astronaut tearfully returns back to Earth — and the video is in many ways a heartbreaking trip through what was and what would have been.
