The Budos Band's picks, all of them psych-folk

The Budos Band play instrumental funk, have been going since 2005, and come out of the Daptone circle in Brooklyn, the same one as Sharon Jones and Antibalas.

Trumpeter Andrew Greene sums up how they present themselves: “The avatar of the band is like evil, ornery, occult sort of stuff.”

The titles are written by the drummer, Brian Profilio, who is at work on a novel and reads Grimdark: the seventh album has Lair of 1,000 Serpents, Curse of the Ivory Fang and The Strigoi, which in Romanian mythology are vampires.

Baritone sax player Jared Tankel explains how that works without a singer: “Because we don’t have a vocalist, we don’t have a frontperson, there’s a veil of mystery involved here.”

In June 2025 Bandcamp Daily asked Greene what he listens to. The list is largely acoustic records, nearly all of them with a woman’s voice out front, and it resembles nothing he plays.

Josephine Foster, “Hazel Eyes I Will Lead You”

The first pick is a Colorado songwriter accompanied only by her own instruments.

“It’s like you’re listening to an old cylinder recording from the turn of the century or something,” Greene says. “It’s very old-fashioned but very innovative at the same time. It’s just very honest music.”

The adjective he keeps coming back to, about her and about others, is “daring”.

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Espers, “The Weed Tree”

The second pick is the second album by the Philadelphia group with Greg Weeks and Meg Baird, and here Greene states the thread running through the whole list.

Against the shortcut of saying that music sounds medieval, he pushes back: it really doesn’t. What interests him is the occult aspect, and that is exactly where the parallel with the Budos sits.

“Actually, all of those artists have a parallel with the Budos in that there’s this occult sort of mysterious aspect to it.”

On Meg Baird he adds the technical reason: a very distinct and pure voice, with no artifice.

Meg Baird, “Don’t Weigh Down the Light”

The third pick is Baird’s 2015 solo album, and the most interesting note is not about the music but about how he got hold of it.

“I actually just purchased it on Bandcamp,” he says, “because I really wanted to have a copy and I don’t want to be at the mercy of streaming or the interwebs.”

Then comes the line that explains the whole list.

I listen to a lot of ugly music, a lot of heavy stuff. This is the other side of stuff that I like.

Coming from someone whose day job is playing trumpet inside heavy instrumental tracks, that sentence is the selection criterion, not a flourish.

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Diane Cluck, “Monarcana”

The fourth pick is a collection of lo-fi home recordings from the early 2000s, and Greene names two tracks: Beatless Wonder and Real Good Time.

What he finds in it is an originality that is hard to come across, and lyrics that take over your thoughts: “It’s not mundane in any way, shape, or form. Even if they would sing about something that’s mundane, the way it’s treated is very intriguing.”

Faun Fables and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the same person

The next two picks sit at opposite ends and share a member, Nils Frykdahl.

In Faun Fables, alongside Dawn McCarthy, he makes songs that could accompany a medieval pagan ritual. In Sleepytime Gorilla Museum he makes what Greene calls “very technical music”, with metal and experimental elements.

“That’s on the opposite end of the spectrum,” he says of the latter. It is the list of somebody who listens to both without feeling the need to choose.

The Sha La Das, “Love in the Wind”

The last pick comes home: The Sha La Das are from Staten Island, they belong to the same Daptone family as the Budos, and their 2018 album was produced by Budos guitarist Tommy Brenneck.

They are three Schalda brothers plus their father. One of them, Will, played keyboards in a pre-Budos band of Greene’s, and spent years with Charles Bradley.

The reason he gives is the least musical of the lot: “Just to see them as a family singing together is a positive thing to experience, something you don’t see all the time.”

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What it says about how he listens

The Budos’ heavy turn, Greene says, arrived about a decade in, and in that period they were not listening to funky music at all: it was proto-metal, early psych and hard rock.

The criterion he uses for Electric Citizen, who the Budos have toured with, holds for the whole list: “It’s evocative of stuff that I like but it’s not derivative of the stuff that I already know.”

We lined up the heaviest pick and the lightest to work out what they had in common, and the only answer we came up with is that neither of them puts a chorus where you expect one.

That a trumpet player in a band with no singer picks eight records with singing on them is the best part of the whole thing.