In the self-styled “zero-gravity” atmosphere of Ryan Lindsey’s right brain, bits of sounds and songs float like pollen in the breeze. When they come his way, he has one responsibility: show up. “Something comes,” he says, sipping a Tina’s martini. “And I try to make sense of it.”
“Plans never work with me, so it’s better to not have a plan,” the BRONCHO songwriter says. “Whether that’s leaving the bedroom in the middle of the night to not wake anybody up recording a voice memo in the far corner of the house, or just trying to whisper-hum an idea.” He mimes hunching over the edge of a bed. “It might make zero sense later when I listen back to it. That doesn’t matter. The science is out on how anybody comes up with anything.”
Listening to the new BRONCHO album Natural Pleasure evokes that sense of weightlessness. (The cover art is, incidentally, a bee collecting pollen.) The record carries on BRONCHO’s tendency toward songwriting more in feelings than in declarations, erratic guitar tones or driving bass lines filling in the blanks, with rhythmic utterings crystallizing into lyrics only on repeated listens—and even then, only sometimes. Lyrically, he operates in the reverse of saying a word over and over until it sounds like gibberish; the gibberish feels like it’s been a word all along.
“What tends to happen is there's a melody that's just in my mind and it's just consuming me, it’s on a loop, and I'm just thinking about it,” Lindsey says. “Through that I'll start mumbling whatever, and words will kind of appear through that. Sometimes it takes forever because it doesn't become obvious to me.”
Longtime fans will know the “doo doo doo doo doo doo” refrain of “Class Historian” (from 2014’s Just Enough Hip to Be Woman) as maybe the most famous BRONCHO “lyric.” It’s echoed in the “ya ya ya ya” of new single “Funny,” during which Lindsey drags out the “funny / funny / funnaaayyyyyy” with the languidity of someone who has nowhere in particular to be.
And he didn’t, for a while. We haven’t seen much of BRONCHO since 2018’s Bad Behavior, which the band finished touring in early 2020, just ahead of everything else stopping as well. He was celebrating a post-tour birthday on March 11, 2020, the day the NBA called off its regular season, and he remembers the time travel-ish feeling of that abrupt suspension of activity.
“We were on the patio sharing queso; everybody’s hands were in this queso, and then they were like, ‘The NBA is off,’” Lindsey says. It starts as a serious story, and then the impish quality his face takes on when he’s approaching a punchline appears. “The next day, they were like, don’t touch anyone or anything, and I kept picturing the queso and thinking we’re all dead. And now it’s 2025. It was kind of like that.”
In the years since, Lindsey and his partner Jessica became parents twice over, something he predicted while writing “You Got Me”; he was singing ”You got your mom / and you got me,” to himself, in tears, shortly before learning they were about to become parents, proof that his divination method of songwriting can lead to existential truths.
He wrote this and many of the song ideas that would eventually become the new album by scaling BRONCHO down to match the pace of the world—from a literal warehouse space in Tulsa that they got rid of in 2019, to lockdown, alone in his garage.
“I was excited to be off the road, and I was already in that mode. Through that I started working. Songs were just coming into existence, my consciousness,” Lindsey says. “I just was playing in the early, early morning in my garage, and I didn't know how loud I was. I was trying to be quiet, but then I woke up Jessica, who just heard me on repeat saying, ‘imagination…’ just over and over. I was playing ‘Funny’ a lot, ‘You Got Me’ came in right at that same time. I was just living in this pool of things in my garage during COVID. It was almost like being at a [church] lock-in.”
He started writing the oldest song on the album, “Original Guilt,” in 2013 or 2014, but it didn’t find a home until now. It tackles, at arm’s length, what Lindsey calls the “baked-in guilt” of growing up in the Bible belt. He says he’s able to laugh about it more as an adult but still finds it manifesting in his tendency to apologize maybe a little too often. His everyday speech is punctuated with sorrys and thank-yous, a linguistic affliction as regionally prevalent as the Christian guilt that may be behind it. I point out this is also considered a classically feminine trait, the desire to not take up space, and he lit up.
“Yes, definitely me. I am a mama’s boy, and it always made sense to me hanging with older sisters. My mom’s an older sister, Jessica’s an oldest sister … we’re getting into Freudian territory now, but I’ve always felt like the older sisters liked me,” he says. It’s notable that Lindsey, who is 43, is partial to oversized clothing and so perpetually gives off kid brother energy. “Being the youngest, I got to be a clown. I'll always be a clown at heart, and now that I’ve got two kids, I definitely love being a clown for them.”
I ask about the chasm between the gentle clown he is in real life versus the jumpy, abrupt attitude he has onstage in BRONCHO, two personalities that seem entirely unrelated to one another.
“The fun thing about [being onstage] is that there's not anything that I necessarily have to ever say. And so it's all about just making sure I keep moving. My main concern is just keeping up with my aerobics during the show,” Lindsey says, laughing. “Sometimes, a friend will say, ‘Oh, so-and-so asked me if you’re okay.’ That’s when I realize, oh, somebody has another impression of me.”
These misunderstandings are exacerbated by the absence of a third version between the real Ryan Lindsey and BRONCHO’s Ryan Lindsey: He keeps no personal social media. “Can the website ever be wrong?” he sings in “Get Gone,” and in “Surely,” he states, “I’m surely / Not online”—a rule he instituted to avoid misunderstanding.
“I'm bad at returning messages, and when I hear someone convey an emotion of feeling hurt that I didn't write them back, that makes me feel so bad. Maybe not having a way to reach me is the way for me to not feel that,” Lindsey says. “I like to float freely. It just makes more sense to my brain to not even think about it. I also don't want to feel affected by reading something that I might take a wrong way because I might be in a certain mood, when they were just fucking around.”
This disconnect between Lindsey and the Very Online meant he thought National Pleasure, rather than Natural Pleasure, was “the best joke” for a record name until his bandmates—guitarist Ben King, drummer Nathan Price and bassist Penny Pitchlynn—told him it wasn’t, due to the pulse of the country right now. He acknowledges the need for external forces in his life to either distill or expand upon whatever it is he’s trying to convey, whether in cheeky album titles or in song.
“The thing I love most about everybody in the band, and it also includes Chad [Copelin, producer], is that everybody has the ability to interpret whatever I’m coming up with in a way that can make me change direction and be way on board with their version of an idea,” Lindsey says. “Sometimes, it just needs someone else’s or everybody’s direction to see it through.”
Even with that direction, the band’s discography is less linear than it is a multiverse. Lindsey sang “I don’t really wanna be social” as far back as 2011, then wrote Natural Pleasure while on lockdown. “I’ve been thinking about thinking…” goes 2014’s “Highly Unintentional,” paired with 2025’s “I Think I Pass,” where he sings, “I must be thinking / ‘cause I think I pass.” The expansive narcissism of Double Vanity, the tight staccato of Bad Behavior, the atonement of Natural Pleasure: it’s an unsystematic journey. But taken in order, listeners can still eke out an arc of self-actualization.
The current version of BRONCHO sounds like a return to a form BRONCHO never took, something Lindsey—who had a solo singer-songwriter career before forming BRONCHO—suspects could be true. He reiterates that this was never the plan, at any point: he doesn’t make plans. But he pinpoints Natural Pleasure’s final honky tonk-gospel song, “Dreamin’,” as something that could’ve been a Lindsey solo joint in another life, and nothing says finding your way back home for an Oklahoma band like country music and church.
“I always felt like we would get back to where I was when I diverted into BRONCHO, the style, the genre I was swimming in,” Lindsey says. “It seemed impossible at the time because our first song on our first record was called ‘Pick a Fight,’ so to go from that to this record … but I still feel like I did get back to where I left off. This record feels the most like the one I was making before I turned down BRONCHO street.”
There may be no gravity in Lindsey’s approach to making music, but he’s plenty grounded, in touch with what the ether sends him. “I always knew it would come back around somehow,” he said. “I just felt like it would naturally end up back there.”
BRONCHO with Husbands
June 14 at 7pm
Guthrie Green
Free, all ages
