[00:00:00] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Welcome to the Song Saloon. I'm excited to be back for another episode. I'm singer songwriter Jordan Smith Reynolds, and my guest today is Ethan Buckner. I met Ethan at his bring back the music showcases when he was going by the artist's name, the Minnesota Child. These showcases features singer, singer-songwriters in a really great intimate outdoor concert setting.

So let me tell you a little bit about Ethan Buckner from the words in his bio. There was that time he was detained by the Egyptian military accused of being an American spy, or the time he repelled off a massive highway bridge, protesting big oil, or the time he chained himself to the Oakland Police Department headquarters.

After yet another unarmed black man was murdered by cops. Harrowing, true story after story. La Indie folk pop troubadour and activist Ethan Buckner has seen it all. Through trauma and triumph, anxiety, and hope. Ethan has always turned into songwriting to try and make sense of it. His forthcoming debut, LP Treading Water, produced by Grammy nominee Justin Glasgow, weaves between moments, both intimate and anthemic, exploring struggles that are both deeply personal and unavoidably collective.

Welcome, Ethan. 

[00:01:17] Ethan Buckner: Thank you so much for having me on the show. 

[00:01:19] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yes, thanks so much for being here. . I would love to talk about Eyes on the Prize, the song you brought in today. What was the inspiration for the song?

[00:01:28] Ethan Buckner: Eyes on the prize was really a song that came through me in, a moment of turbulence in LA. Was 2020, in the summer and, George Floyd had been murdered in Minneapolis and there were uprisings happening all over country. Another reckoning on racial justice and police violence. And I remember sitting in apartment where I am now and hearing helicopters flying overhead and you know, multiple times over the course of a couple of weeks, like I would just, there would just be a spontaneous protest, like marching right by my apartment and would hear shouting in the street.

There were a few times when my fiance and I would just like, Get out, you know, put our shoes on and go and join whatever was happening and there was just this like about the, about, that, that was alive and that energy was raw and full of indignation and, and anger, but also full of like hope in a sense that there.

Was transformation possible in a short period of time. And I just kind of like feeling into the, that, energy of, of kind of like revolutionary change is what it felt like in the moment. And and this song just kind of came out of me and a lot of the imagery in the song are just sort of like vignettes that try to describe that feeling of being in that whirlwind of a social, social change. 

[00:03:02] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yeah, I noticed in the verses, which we'll get into, but there's, yeah, like you said, vignettes, there's a lot of kind of two word phrases that tend to just bring about different images. So that's, yeah, that's really interesting. Let's go ahead and go straight to the performance and we'll, we'll dive deep into this afterwards.

[00:03:22] Ethan Buckner: Amazing. 

[00:03:22] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Awesome. Thank you so much, (performance) Ethan. 

Yeah, man. I love that guitar riff. That must be so fun to play, 

[00:06:35] Ethan Buckner: It is 

[00:06:37] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yeah. And so great with a full band setting, which you've been able to do a few times, and I was lucky 

to hear you at silver Lake Lounge, 

Recently with that. 

[00:06:45] Ethan Buckner: That was so much fun and it feels really good to finally be playing Eyes on the Prize and all the songs from this record with a band the way that.

it's meant to be played. 

[00:06:55] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yeah. And this song you said it started cooking in 2020. what was the process like? So, yeah. Was it months? were you like fine tuning lyrics and things like that? Or was it kind of like you were feeling it in that moment and wrote the song based on what was going on at that time right then?

[00:07:12] Ethan Buckner: I wrote that song, in one sitting in the moment. And 

I often find with my process that a lot of the 

keepers, this is not always the case, but most of the time are songs that really come through me. coming out of some real intense, emotional, experience that I find a way to translate. And, then come back to it later and you know, we'll fine tune lyrics and, and and really look deeper. And I didn't really edit this song until going into pre production about a year and a half, a little less than a year and a half after I wrote it we were starting to record and then the studio version emerged through that process. 

[00:07:56] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yeah, it's, it is interesting how it's different for every song, whether it takes, you know, many, many months, years even, or comes really fast. I ag I do agree to some extent with if it comes quickly, usually it's one that you're gonna hold onto. Yeah, I've never felt, and I guess the reason for that is I've never felt really inspired, you know, like doing a song that comes really quick or like, I've never felt not inspired and been able to finish a song quickly, , 

you know what I mean? So when the inspiration hits it's, yeah, it, sometimes I will get like a nugget when inspiration, you know, is really striking and you get the verse chorus and then everything else is kind of fuzzy. I will get that. And then, you know, just . Re-attack it for however long it takes until it, until it's feeling really good.

But yeah, whenever a song has 

come quickly, it's only been because it was very inspired. 

[00:08:50] Ethan Buckner: Yeah. And I,

for many years as a songwriter, I would treat songwriting like amateur photography, 

right? Like 

unedited, not revisited. It 

would either come in full in a moment of inspiration or it would sit as a voice memo or a note. Yeah. And I would rarely go back and, and look again and dig deeper and, and rework songs.

And only really since moving to LA and, committing myself more to learning the craft of songwriting and learning for myself how valuable the process of digging in deeper and revisiting songs and, and and doing that sort of more. A surgical work how, how that could be kind of in my own skillset and allow me to say, to, to communicate more what I really want to say through songwriting. 

[00:09:44] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. It doesn't make for as great of a soundbite to be like, and then I spent months working on one line, you know, . But that is the case, at least for me. The song that I have coming out in November is a song that took me like a year to really get right. And it was like, I loved so much of the song, but there was just enough of it to be like to, to not like.

You know, put it out in the world. And then finally I just got that connect, like I got the right bridge that took forever. And then the right verse order and everything. But yeah, it's just funny how, how different those songs are. 

[00:10:21] Ethan Buckner: Absolutely. 

[00:10:22] Jordan Smith Reynolds: and I think it's fitting that this song is very, and it feels like just this huge passionate kind of like you're just in that moment experiencing all of the, the feelings.

So you've had a, a pretty interesting experience with this song in the release schedule too. Let's, let's go into that a little bit.

[00:10:41] Ethan Buckner: Yeah, well, finished recording this whole record. Early 2023, and it was really mixed and mastered by, middle of spring and for much of the past six months, I had been in my head, really probably too much in my head about making all of these little decisions around What song do I want to release first?

How am I going to deal with the album art? am I going to distribute this? Am I going to pitch this to labels before or after I start releasing? I mean, all of these minutiae that independent artists have, we have to make all of these decisions ourselves. And it really slowed me way down. And I had kind of, I finally made the decision, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm just going to start releasing.

And as I got into that process and working with some close friends and trying to dig into the story that I wanted to tell with this record, the first really major thing that happened before I even decided to, that Eyes in the Prize would be the first song was that I had a really profound realization that I needed to drop pseudonym, artist project that I had been using for about a dozen years, the Minnesota Child, and transition towards releasing this new body of work under my own name. And that process, you know, involved a lot of therapy, honestly, and really thinking about what using a pseudonym in an artist project did for me at that particular point in my life and reflecting on how, where I am.

Now that in a way the pseudonym was almost me hiding from who I really am and really bringing my own identity forward, my own stories, my own voice that I, in a lot of ways. And. songwriting, the sound of the, of the record the depth and complexity of the music, all of it felt So substantively different than anything that I had released before that it felt like the right time, start fresh. Yeah. And to

And to use my own name and once I made that decision, it became fairly obvious to me that here I am having spent the past 15 years of my life working full-time And mostly on environmental and climate justice issues, but also kind of with a wide range of social movement activism and this 

professional context and and in 

my own personal volunteer capacity and having this whole identity and then on this other part of myself, that's Not been focused on writing like protest music or it's been more like how I pro songwriting has always been for me, how I just really process what I'm going through emotionally and and try to translate, the depths of myself and

shared and and realize that. Switching my project to releasing music under my own name was about actually trying to bring those worlds together and that I don't need to necessarily live two separate lives, but this is one life. And the music that I'm making is really also reflective of the experiences that I've had and the stories that I have and, and the work that I do, even if it's not so explicit.

So it felt like there was no better way to start releasing this music than to choose a song that actually is the social movement anthem on the record. It's really the only song that is explicit, more or less, even though it's laced with poetry, it's still more or less explicitly about the, the feeling of being a part of transformative change and revolutionary energy.

And that's the type of feeling I've been. Operating in in this other part of my life for a very long time. And so it just so happened that for the past five months for my work, I work full time supporting communities on the front lines of fighting the fossil fuel industry and who are also directly impacted by the climate crisis, mostly in the Gulf South, but in other parts of the country.

And what?

Was deeply involved as a core organizer of mobilization in New York City called the March to End Fossil Fuels. It's the biggest climate change mobilization in over four years in the U. S. And wanted to time the release of this song around this project this movement moment that I was a part of creating.

And just a few days before... This march in New York I had been working on organizing the program for this rally at the end of this March in midtown Manhattan, timed around this UN climate summit that the Biden administration actually was not even invited to because the this administration has been so lackluster in terms of standing up to the fossil fuel industry.

And a, a performance slot at the end of this rally that had been, we'd been saving for a celebrity that never materialized all of a sudden was handed to me about three days before this march 

[00:15:52] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Okay. 

[00:15:52] Ethan Buckner: I kind of switched from being in stage management role on the day of 

to being a performer. My amazing vocalist, keys player, Debbie Nair took a red eye from LA my brother Matt who we've made music together for our whole lives who lives in New York play the drums.

He also plays drums on the record. been a real important part of my own journey is working with him and a couple of friends, Jonah and Dan, who went to, to school for music with my brother in, in Florida. And they also lived in New York. We formed a band. We got a rehearsal space the Sunday morning of this event. And know it turned out that 75, 000 people showed up in New York to to protest fossil fuel industry and call for climate action. It felt like a really pinnacle moment for me of living one life and having my identity as an artist, my identity as an activist really feel fully aligned and in one place.

And I was able to Dedicate the song to a dear friend and indigenous leader who actually led the fight to stop the standing the Dakota Access Pipeline and Standing Rock and who passed away earlier this year. Her family was It's in the front row and stood up and I was able to kind of do a dedication to her and to them and perform the song for the first time with a full band on that stage for tens of thousands of people including in the audience, like hundreds of people I've worked with for many years, many of whom had never seen me play music before.

So the whole thing was a whirlwind and really meaningful. And I couldn't think of a more fitting way to launch the Ethan Buckner era of my music. 

[00:17:29] Jordan Smith Reynolds: I love that story because like, I don't think you could plan. A more like 

exciting grand way to, for like fuse those two things together. 

So.

[00:17:38] Ethan Buckner: I know, and it's funny, I think if I 

had quicker, I don't think I would have changed the name. I don't think this would have happened. I 

[00:17:45] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Hmm. 

[00:17:45] Ethan Buckner: the whole, 

maybe there was a part of my subconscious that knew I needed time to sort through my own story So. that I could represent it. You know, this body of work, this record is.

I am most proud of I've ever created in my life, all of the activism aside, is music has been so dear to me. It's been hundreds and hundreds of hours and it's, it really is something that I'm it feels, yeah, so deeply personal. So I was really grateful for the way that it's, that it's worked out so far and I'm excited For wherever it goes from here.

[00:18:19] Jordan Smith Reynolds: For sure. 

With the performance. So you said you had one rehearsal, is that right? Before . 

[00:18:24] Ethan Buckner: Yeah. Mm hmm. 

[00:18:26] Jordan Smith Reynolds: That's amazing. and what was that like? So you had tens of thousands of people at the thing, and you had, I think you had mentioned to me before that you weren't like, quite sure how, how many people would show up that day. what was that like? 

[00:18:39] Ethan Buckner: A few days before the march, we had been planning on and expecting about 10 people. And, because when you're organizing a mobilization of that scale, you know, can only anticipate so much, you know, we have RSVP forums who do phone baking, do, you know outreach to organizations mailing lists, but New York was also blasted with Subway ads and digital ads and canvassers and like, the word was spreading, but we just didn't know, like, how will this resonate with people for this particular message and this particular time and the response was overwhelming and yeah, we had a turnout about seven or eight times what we had anticipated.

The whole march got incredible media coverage all over the major networks. We had the front page of the New York Times above the fold the next day. I mean, it was kind of by every metric you know, for those of us who work in you know, organizing and movement building, like we just kind of blew it out of the water, which is really special.

And hopefully will lead to substantial change in the near future. 

[00:19:47] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yeah, and I think the song that you chose, eyes on the Prize is such a great A great message for activism. 'cause as, as you are like very well acquainted with it's so slow to make things happen sometimes. And, and politics and everything. It's so, Yeah. What is, why, why Eyes on the Prize? Why is that your, your focus?

To me I think it's important because there's so many distractions for one and two, there's just so many setbacks, like so many people pushing and fighting back against change, that it's, it can feel, it can feel hopeless at times. So keeping your eyes on the 

prize and yeah, I I just love your take on that.

[00:20:35] Ethan Buckner: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the important, some really important context is that Eyes on the Prize is the name of, Really, the, the, the phrase was in my head because I had been in the moment of, these uprisings when I wrote the song, I actually kept thinking about the civil rights movement and the kind of reckoning around racial justice that happened in the 60s and there's an incredible, incredible documentary done by PBS that has dozens of hours of primary footage from the 60s and 70s called Eyes on the Prize which is also the name of a hymn, a civil rights hymn that was adapted in the 50s that is its own amazing part of the rights musical lineage.

And that phrase just sat with me and kept repeating itself in my head. And to me, it's really about, it's sort of a, it kind of captures a duality that in the song, the sort of frenetic energy of the verses and the imagery that is It's really all about those moments where all of a sudden change that otherwise would feel like would take forever becomes, feels like it becomes possible in a very short period of time.

You know, think about throughout the history of, of, of social movements and social change in this country that often it's like a, there's some sort flashpoint moment where you 

know, something happens that reveals the underlying injustice that's existed all along but ignites kind of an uprising of, of indignation and action and and a push for change.

And that's what was happening during those months in 2020. And at the same time, the, arc that bends toward justice. It's a long journey and there are setbacks and and it, these challenges won't be solved in either of our lifetimes but you know, require that depth of persistence and of holding true to the world that we want to create in the future and and want to create while we're living it.

And, and where that phrase, you know, comes in. 

[00:22:50] Jordan Smith Reynolds: and I think those ideas do have a lot of power when you, when you think about that you're not only fighting for the world that we're in, but the world that the next generations will inherit. I do think that that adds a lot of power. 

[00:23:02] Ethan Buckner: Yeah. absolutely.

[00:23:04] Jordan Smith Reynolds: So you mentioned Eyes on the Prize is kind of like the lead single for like and for activism and everything do you feel like activism has a thread throughout the album?

[00:23:15] Ethan Buckner: There is another song on the record called For you which I wrote during fires, one of the fire seasons, also in 2020, about the legacy. I was imagining like a future grandchild and like, what's the world we want to leave behind? And how would I take stock of my life? If I were speaking to that, that person and that song feels kind of very similarly, kind of closely tied to that thread.

I would say a lot of the record is also really about my own inner journey and my own struggles with my mental health, with anxiety. Reflecting on kind of the tumultuous nature of my, of my twenties and the time of my life when I kind of said yes to everything, even at my own peril. and I think?

there's a way in which with a couple of songs, like the next single I'm putting out treading water, which is not at all about activism at all, but what it, It really is, it's about like, how do you stay afloat when you're taking on like kind of living the life that I'm living and kind of being every day with the reality of like crisis in the world like both on the macro, on the micro scale, like how do you stay afloat?

How do you like of, you know, make sense of. life and what's important and like process all of that information without shutting down. A lot of the record really is about my own inner journey. And so it kind of this release cycle very outward. A lot of the songs that will be coming that really look inward.

And I think. also offer people who struggle with, you know, similar and questions to, you know, process and find meaning and solace through these songs. 

[00:25:16] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Sure. I think Just with the titles, thematically, Treading Water and Eyes on the Prize fit very well, kind of with how we've talked in the conversation of how, you know, sometimes there aren't 75, 000 people that show up and sometimes, you know, you take one step forward and three steps back kind of 

thing. But when you have Treading Water in perspective, and you're also, focusing on your mental health, I think that's a huge part of activism actually anyway, right? Is you're expending so much emotional energy in, in what you're trying to accomplish that the only way to keep that fueled is to, to making, to make sure that you're mentally available and able to give.

So I, I at least see a connection through that. With the song. So that's, that's really cool and I am stoked to hear the whole album. So I know that might be a few months down the line from 

now, but I'm very excited for it. 

[00:26:09] Ethan Buckner: Mm hmm. I am excited too. And we'll be putting out song every... Four to six weeks for the next 10 months or so, leading to the release of the full record. 

[00:26:21] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Awesome. And where can we find you online?

[00:26:24] Ethan Buckner: You can find me on Instagram at EthanBucknerMusic. My website is EthanBuckner. com. And those would be the best places to find me. Spotify is just Ethan Buckner. 

[00:26:37] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Great. Do you have any shows coming up in 

LA? Anything to be looking for? 

[00:26:42] Ethan Buckner: I am playing at the November Haze Festival, 

[00:26:47] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Okay. 

[00:26:47] Ethan Buckner: at November 11th at 

Boomtown Brewing. It 

should be an amazing lineup 

of independent artists and bands. It's kind of all afternoon into late into the night. So definitely encourage you to show up for?

that. There'll be so much amazing, amazing talent playing multiple stages there.

 We've taken a little bit of a break from the, bring back the music showcase to give myself little time to get through this March and to get through the start of this release cycle.

And we will be organizing more of those 

shows, 

[00:27:20] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Great. 

[00:27:21] Ethan Buckner: in, in the next few months as well. 

[00:27:23] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Awesome. Yeah. Any LA based folks, definitely check out, bring back the music and I hope you can make it to Ethan's shows as well. Are there any plans for touring with this, with this record coming out, you know, for 

[00:27:34] Ethan Buckner: and

dream. 

[00:27:35] Jordan Smith Reynolds: amazing.

[00:27:36] Ethan Buckner: ultimate goal 

for me right now is to

find someone to take me on tour with them. 

And 

[00:27:41] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Yeah. 

[00:27:42] Ethan Buckner: anyone out, there looking for an 

opener. And in the meantime, we'll also be booking. You know, my own tours, hopefully on the West Coast we're looking at a Midwest run in February, 

[00:27:54] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Very cool. 

[00:27:54] Ethan Buckner: trying to hit South, South by 

Southwest in March, 

And 

potentially a, a bigger sort of Southwest, West Coast tour in the spring. 

[00:28:02] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking some time to chat about your song today. Again, just, yeah, very excited. 

For you and love that story. I'm so glad that all came together. how it 

did. 

[00:28:15] Ethan Buckner: I couldn't have planned it that way but it's, it's beautiful how it works out and just here for the journey. So appreciate you having me. 

[00:28:22] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Awesome. All right. Thanks, Ethan. 

[00:28:24] Ethan Buckner: Thank you so 

[00:28:25] Jordan Smith Reynolds: Right.