This interview series is a summer-long series spotlighting the bands performing at Asbury Jams every Thursday at The Wonder Bar in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Produced by ElmThree – Asbury Jams brings rising local, regional and national touring bands from the jam scene to the City that Bruce Built.
Bandits on the Run is a timeless band. Their brand of DIY folk music and intricate lyricism could find a home outside The Globe Theater during Shakespearean, The City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco during the height of The Beat Movement , or touring around the Northeast in 2025. The trio of actors, playwrights and musicians have found a way to erase the space time continuum with their music, creating an intoxicating sound that feels classic and modern at the same time.
We caught up with all three members of the band — Adrian Blake Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, and Regina Strayhorn — to discuss their new EP The Shakespeare Tapes, writing the music for the What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Musical, the connection between theater and music, their unique folk stylings, and what they love about the band.
Let’s start off with your new collection of songs, The Shakespeare Tapes. It’s pretty wild to take the words of Shakespeare and turn them into an album. What was the inspiration behind this and were there any hurdles?
Sydney Shepherd: We all have a background as actors. We all went to performing arts conservatories and got our BFAs in acting. So we’ve all had experience with Shakespeare before. For this particular project we were actually approached by a director who was doing a production of As You Like It, but was doing it with gender blind casting. He approached us about writing some music for it, and we were really excited by the fact that he had this cast together already, and the voice and types of people were very different from the traditional casting. So that was really inspiring to us and we went from there. It was a cool opportunity to merge our background as actors and people who are used to interpreting text, with like songwriters and people who are used to making our own thing into a cool, hybrid.
Regina Strayhorn: William Shakespeare was very easy to collaborate with. In terms of making the songs we really embraced the spirit that he embraced at the time with taking the prose and messing around with it and being liberal about creating choruses. There were a couple of songs that were from 12th Night that were used in the production of As You Like It and it felt fun. It felt, in the spirit of this kind of very old tradition of fuckery in a way.
You’re also adapting What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, the book and not the Depp/DiCaprio film, into a musical. Was this a difficult process to adapt?
Adrian Blake Enscoe: Actually it has not been difficult at all. We were asked by Peter Hedges, who wrote the book and the screenplay to do this adaptation with him, and our friend Christopher Sears, who is another amazing musician, artist, and actor. Truly it was kind of the easiest thing to take the text from the book which is written largely from Gilbert Grape’s point of view. He’s an unreliable narrator in some ways, because he’s a little bit sardonic. You have to read between the lines to see the love that’s embedded in it.
Peter’s prose in the book is so lyrical that it was actually very easy to break off little segments and be like, ‘That’s a song that is a total song. Let’s make that the chorus. Let’s fill it like this.’ On some of the songs I was able to take a couple moments of the actual text from the book and put it directly into the song. So it was really really fun, and actually kind of similar to what we had done in some ways with the Shakespeare show. If anything, I would say that the challenge was not going too fast because it was so easy to like, ‘Wow! That’s a song that’s a scene that becomes a song.’
Sydney Shepherd: We have about 60 or 70 songs that we all wrote for this musical, and only 30 or so are going to end up in the show. But part of the work that we set out to do for this show was to transform it to not just be from Gilbert’s point of view and not just him as the center, and put so much weight on Gilbert’s worldview. So we’ve really worked on developing Mama’s arc and Arnie’s Arc. Those are texts that don’t exist in the book that we had to create. That was actually, really, really fun and challenging in a cool way. I call it more renovation and revisioning than like an exact replica. We have reimagined so many characters and things, and the way that the form in which we’re doing it is really exciting. We’re all also in it — we’re playing a lot of instruments and multiple characters. It feels like we, the three of us, are certainly a family, and Christopher, our friend, has been our friend almost as long as we’ve been a band, so it feels like a family band writing a story about a family.
When and where will this adaptation of Gilbert Grape take place?
Regina Strayhorn: So eventually it’ll be at the MCC Theater in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. It’s a really amazing off-broadway theater that we’ve been having the absolute pleasure of developing this with. We can’t say we can’t say exactly when it’s gonna be, but things are getting exciting. It’s going to be sooner rather than later. So we’re really, we’re thrilled about it.
Did you involvement in the theater world draw you into folk music since both are involved with storytelling?
Adrian Blake Enscoe: When we started we were all recent grads doing auditions as kind of your life is as an actor. So we started out just busking and that was kind of our way of claiming our own performance space. I think, looking back, it feels like that was some way we could exert control on the kind of performance we were doing. I think our songs just naturally fell into that storytelling style because we wanted to be like a friendly, nice surprise on the way home. But that format also informed the way that we grew as a band.
Regina Strayhorn: We’ve always been angling towards the theater route. Although we do all sorts of things — we’ve scored films, we’ve produced tracks for TV shows and we’ve toured internationally. We try to be as maximalist as possible. In terms of being a folk band, I feel there’s a shared lineage of folk music and theater, both being old art forms where it’s all about being in a room together and sharing stories and having an energy that’s created in person. A lot of the instruments that we use are acoustic and we experiment with a lot of different kinds of sounds.
Fundamentally, we’re interested in the really rough magic of creating something in any kind of space. I feel like that has translated both to our sort of indie folk lives going to music festivals and creating albums, and then also writing for musicals. There’s this unifying thing that can happen when humans are in a room, and they’re vulnerable with each other and they’re saying something that matters. So that’s kind of part of our fluidity. We were very much in the theater world and the music world, but for us we kind of see them a little bit more as one and the same.
Maybe it’s me, but there’s something about Bandits on the Run as a whole that’s just very emblematic of New York. When people think of folk music they have visions of people playing in fields or in the country, but with this band I get the vibes of The Village and the ’50s and the Beat Movement. Then there’s the theater aspect of it, of working on shows off-Broadway, again that’s just so New York to me. Does this make any sense?
Adrian Blake Enscoe: I think we are New York in that we all came to New York with a dream and that kind of hustle is very emblematic of New Yorkers. What’s funny is that as we tour around the country a lot of times, people are like, ‘You’re a lot nicer or you’re more colorful than I thought New Yorkers would be.’ I kind of love that we can represent New York in a way to other people that maybe haven’t been there and that feels it’s more multifarious. We’re just trying to make it work with ourselves which is what the New Yorker feels like.
Regina Strayhorn: It does feel like a diplomatic moment at times because that’s the New York that we experience and that we love. We’re trying to bring it to everybody to be like this is our New York. Our New York has a lot of connections and people helping each other, and not the New York that is reported on on FOX and we see. I think that’s what’s undeniable about New Yorkers and that everyone can agree on — is that we’re scrappy.We come from that, and we carry that with us wherever we go, and we embrace that about New York.
Bandits on the Run is your life’s work. You’re adapting plays and acting, but as we speak you’re on a run that’s taking you from Philly to the Bronx and down to Asbury Park in the span of a few days. Then you’re off to Colorado. That’s a lot of time, travel, and dedication. So, what is it about this band that you love and dedicate so much of your life to because let’s face it, the music industry is not an easy thing.
Regina Strayhorn: I thank you so much for asking that question. Because yes, I think the systems of the music industry are not supportive and are really difficult to operate within. But, I think what I love about the band, and I think I speak for all of us is, the people that we meet along the way, as kind of cheesy as that is. I feel like it’s stereotypical because it’s just like this distilled truth. Everywhere we go, we meet incredible people. Something about the act of playing music opens people up. I feel we have really earnest fun conversations with people wherever we go. We feel invited into a community for a night.
I just think that one of the most delightful things one can do on this planet is just go around and engage in people’s cultures and vibes that they’ve created. We get to share in them and leave a little bit of a mark. We leave a town a little bit different than when we came in, and that kind of constant reassurance, like the goodness of humanity, keeps me going right now. There’s so much out there that you could look to as evidence that humans are just violent and destructive and we’re going South quickly. I think a lot of humans are, but not nearly everybody.
Sydney Shepherd: I want to absolutely echo all of that, and on a simpler note I feel like pretty much every artist I know says ‘I just want to make art with my friends.’ We really get to do that. I feel really lucky becauseI’m married to one of my bandmates, and my other bandmate is my best friend from high school and college. These are the people that I want to celebrate with and struggle with, and all that comes with it.
Adrian Blake Enscoe: I feel there’s something primordially satisfying about being in a group and traveling from place to place with a mission.Our society has evolved in such a way that we are supposed to keep a day job, or do some kind of something very regularly, and that that can be beautiful. But, there’s also something very hunter, gather-y about taking seasons, and having this constant change in adventure and travel. I don’t know even when life is not always secure, but it is always adventuresome, and I really appreciate that about that. That keeps me going.
Finally, what are five things you are excited about for Bandits on the Run in the near future?
Regina Strayhorn: We’re currently recording an album. I’m really excited for the process because we’re collaborating with our dear friend and producer, William Garrett, who we’ve known for a really long time. We made our first record and then a lot of singles with him. It’s been a while since we made a collection of songs with him, and it’s just been already a really wonderful experience recording with him and Carl Bespolka, who’s our engineer as well. That’s one thing I’m looking forward to. I’m really liking our album so far.
Adrian Blake Enscoe: I’m really looking forward to nursing another musical project. It’s an anti-capitalist Gold Rush musical, that takes place in the Yukon Gold Rush at the turn of the 20th century. It’s about a group of black prospectors looking to claim their stake on the American Dream. As you can imagine things might not go exactly as planned. It’s been a wonderful chance to work and write for other voices other than just the three of us and like creating characters alongside a bunch of other people. I feel like it is a really special aspect of banditry that we get to collaborate with a lot of different, beautiful artists and have them inform our sound. So that’s a really special thing that I’m looking forward to in the next year.
Sydney Shepherd: So after our touring we have some other independent things that we’re doing in the acting world. Then we’ll all kind of be back in New York in October. I’m really looking forward to some open space because our schedule, if you look at our Google Calendar, it looks like a Tetris game — it’s wild. I’m just excited to dream up some more songs together, because I feel like our wheels are really turning and give ourselves some time to receive from the music, instead of chasing ourselves all over the country, which is also very fun.
Regina Strayhorn: This is also very kind of short term, but I am really looking forward to our shows in the Bronx and Asbury Park. It’s lovely to travel, but it’s also really great to be kind of back at your home.
