“There is always a defining moment when you first ‘hear’ an artist. I saw Brandi play a house concert (in her own house) and could hear a pin drop in my breathless head when she sang ‘the sweetest words, they ricochet / but the cruelest thoughts sink down all the way’ and was shocked and saddened to learn I couldn’t buy the album it wasn’t on right then and there. This has been happily remedied: every listen of ‘Bees x3’ opens other trap doors in my head and surprises me yet again. I honestly can’t separate the listening of this with my own experience of lockdown during the pandemic, and that may be because songs this intimate speak directly to the unique quality of loneliness that arose; I found myself sobbing uncontrollably when I finally put the CD in, on a cold April day in 2020, and there couldn’t have been a more suitable conflation of events. What a gorgeous and deceptively effortless-sounding collection of perfect songs.”