Bee Here Now

Bee Appleseed, who you may remember as Brian Smith, is a folk rock musician who grew up in Canby, Oregon from age three, graduating CHS in 2008. While he began his musical journey in this small town, his career has since taken him to over forty countries and across the United States. To date, he’s recorded around thirty albums of entirely original material.

While much of his music is solo, Bee is also a founding member of Elf Freedom, an eight-person improvised psychedelic rock band based in Los Angeles. Their style is highly collaborative and conversational, with Bee leading the music and co-founder Nora Keys on vocals. Whether performing solo or with his band, Bee treats the stage as sacred space. “It’s a ritual,” he says. “We’re just listening to each other and feeding off each other. It’s presence. It’s energy.” Within the last year, Elf Freedom has played three sold-out shows at the world-famous Philosophical Research Society in LA, the place Bee now calls home. 

Surprisingly, Bee has never taken formal music lessons and is entirely self-taught on a wide range of instruments, namely the guitar, harmonica, banjo, flute, keyboards, and more. He picked up his first guitar at fourteen and quickly began crafting a style all his own. “Now that I’ve been playing guitar over 20 years and playing all these other instruments and not having lessons with those either, it’s allowed me to develop my own style and way of expressing myself.”

Bee’s guitar playing is especially distinctive, influenced by fingerpicking traditions from older folk music. He holds the instrument in a way that lets him strum and pluck simultaneously, producing a bouncy, groovy rhythm few can replicate. 

What makes Bee’s music so compelling is how true it is to who he is as a person. “I don’t really think about it in terms of theory, or even what key it’s in,” he shares. “It’s just like, ‘how does it feel?’” His new song, “I Believe In You,” tells the story of his travels and the people he’s met, tying it all back to Canby, where he recently returned to film the song’s music video. When interviewed, Bee said he had meditated on what message he wanted to share with the people of his hometown: 

"We don’t get to choose the places we grow up in, but these places shape us into the person we become and we take them with us wherever we go. As artists, we end up becoming some sort of cultural ambassadors of these places, especially as musicians who, among artists, are uniquely expected to recreate our art every night – going on tour, presenting our work around the world, moving to cities for networking and opportunities.

"Our hometowns are in all of our introductions. At this point, I must have played over 800 shows, half of which were in other countries, and I told people about Canby more times than I can remember. So I figured I might as well put it in a song — and if it’s in the song, it should be in the video. That’s how I Believe in You came to be. I’m proud of the community I grew up in and am grateful for the opportunity to share my music with the town where I started playing music."