“It’s called a day in November, it’s my favorite piece that I’ve done. You wanna hear it?”
When I walked into Lucas Brogdon’s dorm it was obvious who he is, what he does and what he cares about. Music permeates the place. There were seven guitars in the living room — the six on the floor and the one that Lucas was playing as he straddled the back of the couch. Also on the back of the couch was a blanket, made to look like giant sheet music with little violins, drums and guitars stitched in.
There’s a music-themed throw pillow on the couch that I ask him about too, and he tosses it to me.
“It’s a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt that [someone] stitched onto a pillow. You can look at the stitching, it’s like handmade.”
He’s right. You can see the little knot where the person who made it tied off the stitches when they were done.
Lucas sees the detail in anything musical. Again, it permeates the spaces he inhabits — his dorm and also Barefoots, where he coordinates music, from the playlists in the background to the artists who perform there as a part of the ongoing Barefoots Joe concert series. Discovering music is what Lucas does.
When you talk to him, its hard not to get the feeling that this was kind of inevitable. I asked him why he took on the role of coordinating for Barefoots and why he spends so much time on music as a whole.
“I mean, I just love it.”
There is both elegance and simplicity in the way he talks about it. He waxes philosophical, even poetic, about music. But he’s too self-aware to let himself become the try-hard with a guitar.
“It’s still where I find a lot of my joy personally. Where I find a lot of — I don’t want to get too corny and fake deep, but…fulfillment.”
There is nothing fake about Lucas’ relationship with music, from song-making to song-listening. It is more of a heritage than a vocation. His parents are musicians.
“It feels like it was just sort of baked into me at the beginning. And so I got piano from my mom, guitar stuff from my dad. Music was always like family bonding. We’d go to concerts together. My dad would play at church. My mom taught piano lessons to a bunch of my friends and people in the community.”
Beyond even just a passion for music as a whole, Lucas learned as a kid to enjoy the chase of constantly finding and loving new artists and new styles. His dad showed him 90s hip-hop and Green Day, and he heard worship music in the van on family drives.
Lucas has a passion for discovery that anyone who has ever loved something and could not wait to share it can understand. That feeling of bringing someone else into an experience so that it becomes a communal love fuels the Barefoots music scene.
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Lucas finds and shares music every day. The songs he listens to are a collection of every style, time and artist you can think of. Spotify tells us at the end of the year how many genres we have listened to — Lucas may have listened to all of them.
“There’s a lot of Beyonce in my recently played.”
She appears on that list alongside Kodak Black and Rod Wave and a band he told me about called Drug Church.
“It’s a provocative name. They’re really cool, though.”
I ask Lucas what it’s like to have something so engrained, so every day for him, become his job with Barefoots.
“Discovering music has always been something I’m naturally obsessed with, I guess.”
We talk about what goes into making the playlists that play in the background while people drink their coffee, study and fill in the pockets of conversation that happen around Barefoots every day.
“So it does feel weird to have, like, something that was always private become something that I’m doing for other people and in a more public way. It is the coolest thing in the world to hear, like, a playlist that I made playing in Barefoots.”
Everyone has a preconceived idea of what coffee shop music means, though. There are dozens (at least) of playlists on Spotify devoted specifically to that sub-genre. That makes for an interesting pull between two competing ideas when Lucas makes playlists for Barefoots: trying to fit what people want from a coffee shop environment while not just being cliche.
“I think about how I can fit what people already expect out of Barefoots. [But] the goal is in part for people to, like, for their ears to perk up every now and then and be like, oh, this is a cool song.”
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The second part of Lucas’s role — finding the bands who perform at Barefoots concerts — is another balancing act all its own. This part stands in stark contrast to making background playlists. Where the playlists fit what people already expect from the space, the concerts are all about what is new and different (and realistic). These two parts are opposites, really.
“One of my favorite things about [the concerts] is that we can be exposed to different kinds of music and art and people, because music is made by people who have their own stories and characters and personalities.”
That’s not to say there are no expectations; on the contrary, Lucas thinks a lot about what people think they might find at a coffee shop concert venue, and how to move beyond that. After all, his role is to discover music — not to bring everyone what they already know.
“There’s an expectation that’s already there, and I kind of want to challenge that at the same time to be like, well — does it feel like some people may not feel like they fit in at a Barefoot concert?”
Finding artists for concerts means walking a fine line.
“I like to say that if you’ve heard of an artist, we probably can’t afford them.” Lucas laughs as he shares his concert booking maxim.
The artists who perform at Barefoots may not be famous, but they are really, really good at what they do.
I remember sitting in the audience at the most recent concert, watching and listening to the evening’s main act, Andrea Van Kampen. There were about 60 other people in the room. Van Kampen has about 400,000 listeners on Spotify and a couple of songs with over a million streams. I asked Lucas about that contrast.
“Another thing that is really weird about the digital music industry and Spotify and stuff is an artist can have a song or two that just takes off and gets millions and millions of plays. But still it’s not like they’re mainstream major label kind of recording artists. They’re still just, like, making songs in their bedroom.”
The artists who perform here tend to hit that niche: musical excellence and already a bit of a following, but still making songs on their own.
But the tight-knit Union community and the personal feeling of the venue create a certain kind of experience. There’s a closeness in Barefoots at concerts, both physically and emotionally. Everyone is on the same page, in the same very particular moment.
“I’ve seen students meet an artist that they had never heard of before that night, and ended up like sharing their life story with them. And like, this song means so much to me because of this [in my life]. One of the most rewarding things for me is when people, like, actually become fans and followers of artists because they saw them perform here.”
Lucas used the word fulfillment earlier, and you can see it now. When little moments like this come to fruition, it really matters to him. Because he discovered some music and helped someone else discover it too, and that mattered.
Photo by Laila Al-Hagal
One if the best pieces I’ve read. Keep it up.