Brandee Younger Finds Room to Wander

Interview, From the Magazine, Brandee Younger

By Stephanie Jones I Sep. 16, 2025

*Gadabout Season* developed over many months of recording sessions in Brandee Younger’s East Harlem living room.
(Photo: Erin Patrice O’Brien)

When she’s on the road, Brandee Younger enters a hybrid state of action and contemplation. Free of daily distractions — of organizing her workspace, of shopping for groceries, of turning over laundry in the basement of her East Harlem apartment — she communes with her focus, and frequently her music. Night after night, as new cities settle around them, she and her fellow artists evolve her repertoire, finding new pathways through the same songs and different directions to take the music.

Like many working artists, the Grammy-nominated harpist, composer and 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award honoree finds herself scheduling a record date, in part, so she can book her next tour. These days, that’s part of the practice. It’s routine, and it’s prescriptive. “A lot of places don’t want to book you unless you have an album,” she said. But in 2024, a series of events scrambled that structure, leading to the creation and June 2025 release of Gadabout Season, Younger’s seventh album as a leader, third for Impulse! Records and first for the newest phase of her artistry.

Once upon a tour date at SFJAZZ, Younger overheard a conversation between her manager, Tinku Bhattacharyya, and her trio-mate and album producer, bassist Rashaan Carter.

“[They were] basically making a whole life plan for me over there,” she said. “They were like, ‘She needs to write some music because we have to do an album.’” Later, the pair approached Younger to ask what she needed to get started. “I just need a little space,” she said. “Like, physically to leave home because when you’re home, you just have all these distractions.”

In May 2024, Younger arrived at her cousin’s home in Athens, New York, where she set up a modest workspace in the cottage behind his house. Her expectations well managed, she set a goal of completing two songs and began to write. Alone with her instrument, she sketched out her anguish and confusion as well as her moments of joy and resolve. She allowed herself to feel whatever she needed to feel and to express those emotional arcs in her music. “I left with almost everything,” she said. “I didn’t expect that, but I guess I had a lot to say.”

And that might have signaled the start-to-end of a familiar story: Artist writes music, band records album, manager books tour. But like its namesake, Gadabout Season needed a little room to wander. Carter and her other working trio mate, drummer Allan Mednard, joined Younger in Athens to play through the music and hash out ideas in the cottage’s living room, with no way to isolate the instruments.

To their own surprise, at the end of the second or third session they agreed to record the album in Younger’s New York apartment. “We’re like, ‘This sounds really good. I think we could do this at home,’” said Younger. And what that decision ultimately gave them was “the gift of time.”

Suddenly the songs had room to breathe and expand. The artists had time to consider sounds and concepts. “We could listen to the music and decide, ‘This is great … Oh, I don’t like this.’ Plenty of room to argue about it,” said Younger. “We did start to play some of the music on the road. And it would start to evolve.” Over many months, the artists, often at Carter’s behest, would return to the East Harlem studio for another session or to rerecord a song they’d already crossed off as complete. “[Rashaan] likes to sit, listen, assess and revisit a lot,” said Younger. “I’m not used to working this way. I almost died. It was horrible, but I’m so thankful now.”

Gadabout Season references a word-of-the-day email she received last year featuring a whimsical term for a pleasure-seeking wanderer. When the word hit her inbox for the second time in a matter of months, she said, “This is a sign.” Younger and her trio mates soon applied gadabout’s connotations to the tour grind, claiming the word as their road mantra. And before long, the expression “gadabout season” became an invitation to make time when seemingly none exists.

“[Touring is] really hard,” said Younger. “After the concert, we pack everything up, get back to the hotel, 4 or 5 a.m. lobby call, get on a train or plane or however we’re traveling to the next place, get in, rush to the venue, sound check, hope we can take a quick shower, maybe have a bite to eat, play the concert and repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s hard. So while we’re out there on the road, we kept having these moments where we’re like, ‘Do we take this moment to nap or do we have this great food in this country?’ You don’t want to pass up these opportunities.”

The force behind any successful gadabout season is intention. And on this release, that force extends beyond schedules and itineraries and engages loss and grieving. The year leading up to her Athens seclusion hadn’t been easy for Younger. The album translates some very personal reflections into 10 compositions — all but three written solo by Younger, who released her first album of originals in 2021. But where albums of her recent past, notably Brand New Life (Impulse!, 2023), mimic a live set, Gadabout Season plays like an audio diary. “It’s about resilience in hard times, period,” she said. “Joy doesn’t just find you … it takes work, and it takes intention. … We’re going to do this one thing to bring us some joy and then continue on with what we’re dealing with.”

To communicate the energy of that intention, the groove-centric artist leans into melody in a way she hasn’t in the past. “Melody has always been my thing, and it’s always been a struggle,” she said, “I’ve always written strong melodies, but I wrote them for horns because harp can’t sustain a melody. So if I want something to be held, I’m going to put it on a saxophone or a flute.”

Gadabout Season breaks that pattern, centering harp as the melody bearer. Playful and syncopated on certain tracks, indulgent on others, the character of Younger’s melodies helps translate her songs from personal accounts to shared narratives. She desired a “bouncy, quirky vibe” when she fleshed out the title track, and initially heard strings on “New Pinnacle” before Carter convinced her to keep the melody line on the harp. “That song leans on the happy side of things — of reaching this new point that you didn’t even know existed,” said Younger. As she and Carter layer the sound, Mednard’s brushwork buoys the song’s momentum. “I wanted it to build up.”

Younger, who has collaborated with Makaya McCraven, Ravi Coltrane, the late Pharoah Sanders, Lauryn Hill, Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, the Roots, Common, John Legend and other icons, convenes a roster of equally melodic guest artists on Gadabout Season, including Shabaka, who plays on the title track and “End Means”; Niia, who sings on “Unswept Corners”; Josh Johnson, who plays on “Discernment”; and Courtney Bryan, who plays in such intimate communion with Younger on “Surrender” that, at times, the boundaries between piano and harp nearly fall away.

“That’s one of the things that makes [Courtney] so special,” said Younger, who routinely resists playing with pianists. “She complemented what I was doing.” The melody itself informed Younger’s textural decisions for the song: “I wanted it to be dry … I wanted the melody to be the main ingredient of that, and the feeling — I didn’t want anything to get in the way. You’ll notice I didn’t even roll the chords. I played them like bling, not blllinnnggg. No romanticism here.”

On “BBL,” Younger approaches melody differently, giving herself “permission to run my mouth nonstop.” Conceived as a full-blown argument with little room to catch breath, that song in particular underwent a transformation on the road. During a train ride through the Swiss countryside, Carter was struck by an Alice Coltrane record — her harp, he remembers, sounding closer to a kalimba. “I took the headphones off and and asked Brandee about Alice’s connection to these instruments,” he said. “And we started to talk about how to approximate that kind of sound.” That conversation would lead to an entirely new arrangement for “BBL” pieced together over time, which the trio rerecorded for the album using Younger’s extended technique to create a xylo effect for the first half of the song — still centering that energetic melody.

Conversely, Younger initially felt dissatisfied with their recording for “Breaking Point,” which she intended to have deliver a claustrophobic feeling of anxiety. She pressed Carter to play a staccato bass line she’d written, but he held fast to a Herbie Hancock reference he’d had in mind. Begrudgingly, she acquiesced. But over time, she found the tour helped break her attachment to a particular sound so she could really observe what was happening with the song, which includes a hyper-responsive interactivity among all three artists. “Somehow it achieved the vibe,” she said. “[Being on the road] gave me the time and the space to really sit with it in a way that I would never ever be able to at home.”

Another hallmark of Gadabout Season — one that can’t help but affect Younger’s treatment of melody throughout the album — is the presence of Alice Coltrane’s harp. In 2024, Younger became custodian of the legacy instrument, newly restored by Chicago-based manufacturer Lyon & Healy, and this release is her first experience playing her own music on it.

“I got to get up every morning and play the instrument, just warm up on it, practice on it … spend enough hours on it until I could find my voice on it,” she said. “It’s one thing to be playing her music on it, which I’ve had the opportunity to do a few times. But moving beyond playing her music, playing my own music, really starting to get the feeling of this being an extension of me and not me just playing on somebody else’s harp — it almost felt like something was handed over to me, like a permission. It’s hard to explain, but it felt like I was given the OK. Like, ‘Now’s the time.’”

That freedom resonates on “Reflection Eternal,” Younger’s brief solo gesture which serves as a pivot point for the album and an earnest reminder for the listener.

“It’s introspective,” she said. “The obvious example is, you’ve had a crazy day, not in a bad way, but a busy day. Maybe you were being a gadabout. And then you get on the subway home and it’s quiet, and you’re just sort of reflecting on everything that happened. So it’s not a bad thing and it’s not a good thing. It’s literally just that — you’re reflecting.”

Continually adding record dates for Gadabout Season allowed the trio to establish routines and rituals. At the end of each apartment session, for example, they would open up and improvise; from those moments of intention emerged compositional seeds for “Reckoning,” “Discernment” and “End Means.” While these individual sessions were integral to creating and recording the music, the album as a whole materialized through time and space — which is all Younger really asked for in the first place.

“When you’re removed from your home and you have nothing but your concerts, the plane ride, the train rides, the car rides, that’s when you can really sit there and focus,” she said. “It’s not like being in your home where you have all these distractions. You could devote 150 percent of your focus to one thing. And in this case it was the music.” DB