My Name


I once on a piece of paper, in high school, thought of as many names as I could to go under as a musician, artist, or writer ..

I had a bunch of ideas.

One of them was even the invented word "Devilition" -- I had a few others, but I realized a fictional or made up name didn't satisfy me. It made me think of hackers and chatrooms, and I also revelated that I would probably keep going by just "brendan" when I chatted with people, because it's already easy to protect yourself online, and people are idiots to lie so much in a free place.

I find that the name "Brendan S" just kind of arrived, in my hand, and I wrote it down intuitively, then stared at the S for a while, and sort of felt comfortable with it -- however -- I am terrible with titles and names sometimes, and I mean terrible, one thing I must admit about my writing, and my style, is that I really have to search for the right "thought" -- not just word, but idea .. I want to keep the flow, and my grammar / English teachers always used to say I write in a sort of poetic, technical style .. to them, I was smart, but to me I was just conscious of my thoughts as I wrote.

I used the name "Brendan S" as a stage name eventually, and heard it spoken by the announcer through a microphone at the open mic I played (Little Anthony's in Bar Harbor, a nice place) -- I was pretty lucky to have the crowd I had back then to support me and my music when I really had no idea what I was doing when I performed live sometimes, and the pressure of people staring at me as my hands moved against the fretboard really made me feel as though I needed to be on drugs, or the very opposite, totally spiritual, to put up with their expectations.

Probably the best performance or cover song I've ever done was when I used a resonator pedal, and played in my bare feet the song "Natural Blues" by Moby.


-- BLS