Liz DeLillo
Staff Writer
With guitar, cello, accordion, suitcase drum and other eccentric instruments in tow, these musical bandits run across genres. Indie-folk-pop-americana group Bandits on the Run will perform at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the
Amphitheater.
“We don’t really think about trying to stay within a genre — in fact, we actually quite like bouncing around and stretching the limits of, well, ‘What is a Bandits on the Run song?’ ” Regina Strayhorn said in an April 2025 “LifeMinute” interview with Joann Butler. “If we’re doing it, then it’s a Bandits song, so let’s play with that.”
Founders, lead vocalists and instrumentalists Adrian Blake Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd and Strayhorn give a new meaning to “underground” music. Shepherd met Enscoe while he was busking on a subway platform. Their connection over music and Strayhorn’s move into Shepherd’s Brooklyn apartment led to the three performing together in the subways.
“When we first started playing in the subways, that’s kind of how we got our sea legs, as a band,” Shepherd said in “LifeMinute.”
Musician and actor Shepherd has performed on- and off-Broadway, as well as in film and television. Enscoe, also an actor, starred in the Peabody award-winning Apple TV series “Dickinson,” starring alongside Hailee Steinfeld and Jane Krakowski, and premiered the role of Little Brother in the musical Swept Away, a jukebox musical with music from the Avett Brothers. Strayhorn herself is a writer and casting professional and has helped cast shows for streaming platforms, such as Apple TV+ and HBO Max, including for season two of “And Just Like That.”
With their multi-faceted abilities, all three members produce and direct their own music videos.
“One video is not really going to tell you what our vibe is because they are all so different,” Shepherd said in an interview with Jovanna Gallegos for The Michigan Daily. Strayhorn elaborated on the group’s sound, style and emphasis.
“It’s easiest to say we do indie-folk-pop-rock because the main center of all of our songs are our harmonies,” Strayhorn said in “LifeMinute.” “We do something kind of special, which we all love, where we switch off who’s the lead singer, and we all write.”
Recounting their project composing and producing music for Netflix’s “Storybots,” Enscoe discussed how those varied recording experiences helped them grow artistically.
“The project as a whole pushed us to think outside the box of our live arrangement,” Enscoe said in The Pitch. “… We were able to stretch our sound to encompass instrumentation far outside our trio configuration, and we experimented with incorporating elements of blues, funk, bossa nova, New Orleans street jazz, orchestral music, etc.”
Enscoe said the group also plays with various genres for their albums as well.
“We’re always looking for ways to mix it up, and we’ve been lucky enough to have had all sorts of recording experiences, from working track by track in a small writers’ studio for our first album, The Criminal Record, which was produced by our good friend William Garrett … to having a two-week intensive at Bear Creek during the first year of the pandemic, where we recorded our last EP with Ryan Hadlock,” Enscoe said in The Pitch.
Diving not just into new sounds, but aspects of production, the Bandits self-produce their releases.
“It kind of sneaked up on us that we should call a spade a spade and own our process by claiming the title of producer,” Strayhorn said in The Pitch.
With their 2021 EP Now is the Time produced by Ryan Hadlock and their musical film “The Band At The End Of The World” commissioned and produced by the off-Broadway Prospect Theater Company, Bandits on the Run later took a more involved role in their artistic production.
“We’ve been creating and performing for so many years, and we’ve learned so much about ourselves as artists and (about) the kind of things we want to make, so we figured who better to bring that sound to life than us?” Shepherd said in The Pitch. “It’s been a wild and wonderful and huge learning experience, and it feels great to take the reins and see what we can do from this other aspect of music-making.”
Discussing their song “You Have Changed,” Bandits on the Run shed light on their creation of the track.
“Interestingly enough, Regina wrote the first few lines for the chorus before the pandemic, then it sat in our little song bank for a while until we unearthed it during the throes of the pandemic,” Shepherd said in The Pitch. “… It’s really special in that it captures something we were feeling pre-pandemic that was brought into full focus during that time.”
“You Have Changed” reflects the wariness people felt during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There’s an ambiguity to moving forward these days. People are on very different pages, with very different experiences of the past couple of years, and that can make you feel extremely unsettled,” Strayhorn said in The Pitch. “… ‘You Have Changed’ touches on that feeling of trying to work things out in your own mind of what in the world just happened to you, and who you are now without the things you lost. Are you the same? Probably not.”
Even in a world filled with turmoil, the group has found deep connection with each other.
“Being in a band has taught me a lot about what happens when you trust people and allow yourself to have an experience that maybe you didn’t think you would,” Strayhorn said in The Michigan Daily.
