After years of keeping music from taking over his life, Brad Roberts sounds both grounded and quietly re-energized. The Crash Test Dummies frontman has been easing back into the road—not with the full band, but stripped down, intimate, and deliberately a little uncomfortable.
“You just kind of have to resign yourself to the fact that every day you’re on the highway, every night you’re checking into a hotel,” Roberts says. “But the shows are always an adventure. And honestly, it gets kind of dull when you’re not playing.”
This time out, he’s touring as himself—“Brad Roberts of Crash Test Dummies,” as he puts it—playing quiet rooms where people actually listen. That closeness brings its own tension. “It was a little nerve-wracking being that close up and personal,” he admits. “But I kind of enjoyed the nerve-wrackingness of it. It makes me rise to the occasion.”
That nervous energy, he believes, matters. “If you’re not figuring out a way to make yourself nervous before a show, you’re probably not giving it everything you’ve got,” he says. “There’s definitely some truth to that.”
That same restless energy helped pull an older song back into the light. Roberts recently released “I’ll Be Peaceful Then,” a track he wrote years ago but only now felt compelled to share. “It kind of came out of nowhere,” he says. “I was thinking, kids just put out one song at a time now. They don’t worry about albums—they just release it.”
That shift still gives him pause. “I mourn the loss of the album,” Roberts admits. “I miss the continuity, the sense that a group of songs belongs together. That’s how I used to write—like a palette of different feelings.” Still, practicality won out. “I thought, I’m about to go on the road. I can put one song up, play it at the show, and see what happens.”
What happened surprised him. “It just grabs people,” he says. “I discovered that pretty quickly.”
Musically, “I’ll Be Peaceful Then” hides its darkness in plain sight. “When I write dark lyrics, if I play dark chords it doesn’t work,” Roberts explains. “Most of the chords in that song are major chords. There’s something almost church-like about it—not spiritual exactly, but spiritual in a genre sense.”
The lyric came easily. The music followed just as smoothly. “That doesn’t always happen,” he says. “But this one worked. It’s the song I’m most proud of since my last record.”
That pride is hard-won. For years, Roberts equated his personal value with productivity. “That’s a dangerous thing,” he says flatly. “Especially in the music business, where nothing is consistent.” Eventually, he stepped away. “I had to train myself to enjoy life,” he says. “I purposely stopped writing for a while.”
Instead, he returned to reading—philosophy, literature, the subjects he studied at university. “I reconnected with my roots,” he says. “And suddenly the inspiration came back.”
One lyric, in particular, has changed everything. Inspired by Bertrand Russell, infinity, theology, and the cadence of the King James Bible, Roberts says, “It’s the best lyric I’ve ever written in my life.” It took three days of sustained effort. “That terrified me,” he admits. “Because now the music has to live up to it.”
The process was unlike anything he’d done before. “I used to write by just closing my eyes and letting whatever came out happen,” he says. “This time, I knew exactly what I wanted to explore, and I stayed with it until it was right.”
That philosophical curiosity has spilled into other projects too, including his mantra recordings—an unlikely but sincere fusion of Eastern philosophy and Western songwriting. “I wanted to do it because it’s usually done so poorly,” Roberts says. “So much mantra music is just syrupy New Age garbage. I thought, someone has to do a better job. I guess that someone is me.”
He laughs, but he means it. A second volume is nearly finished, made largely for friends, with a quiet cult following among yoga practitioners. “Nobody ever talks to me about that record,” he says. “So it’s really nice when someone actually listens.”
For now, Roberts is content letting things arrive when they’re ready—songs, tours, ideas about infinity and existence. “If you can live completely in the present,” he says, “then you’re alive forever already.”
And that, more than chart positions or formats, seems to be the point.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
