Everything old is new again on latest Draper Family Band recording

LAWRENCE — As songwriter, drummer, bassist, guitarist and singer, Brandon Draper makes up most of the Draper Family Band. But without family input, it’d be just a solo project. So the associate professor of the practice at the University of Kansas School of Music has once again enlisted his father, keyboardist Paul Draper, and his daughter, vocalist Eva Draper, for the group’s second album in a blues-rock vein.

The first single from the new recording, a song titled “In My Dreams,” will be released to streaming services and have its on-air premiere on Kansas City’s FM 90.9 The Bridge on Oct. 3. A second song titled “Cold and Bad” drops Nov. 7. Brandon Draper said he plans a third single release this year before the full second album, as yet untitled, comes out in February 2026.

It’s the latest product of Brandon Draper’s 2024 deal with KU graduate Oz McGuire’s Symphonic Distribution service.

“I signed that label deal a year or two ago,” he said, “and my plan was to put out 10 records in a year. I put out six, so I was close. But then I kept working on the next Family Band record.

“I’ve been traveling to dad’s house in Salina, three hours away, for the past year when I had a Thursday off. He still does some work, but he’s mostly retired. So I would get to the house at dinner time, sit down and have dinner with my mom and dad, and then dad and I would go out to his studio, which is detached from the home, sometimes until 1 in the morning and workshop ideas.”

Eva Draper, who’s still in high school, recorded her vocals (she gets an arranging credit, too, on one song) in her father’s home studio in the Kansas City area.

Draper, who this year was accepted as a member of the Grammy-producing Recording Academy, said he wrote a couple of new songs for the album, but most come from his archive of previously unreleased or barely released songs.

“In songwriting, everybody talks about your catalog — your stack of tunes that you’ve written, your life’s work,” Brandon Draper said. “You keep going. You don’t stop writing. I didn’t write the last album and think, ‘Well, I’m done writing music.’ I keep writing and keep adding to it. I save ideas as voice memos. And that’s another song that I wrote, and that’s another song that I wrote, and I just keep them all stacked up. 

“And then this past summer, I started going through and thinking, ‘These might work together.’ And, ‘Oh, I can do this with that song. I forgot about that one,’ and, ‘I didn’t have the energy five years ago, but I do now.’”

Brandon Draper said he worked with vintage instruments, microphones and other technology to make the new record.

“Oh, man, vintage gear is always going to win,” he said. “And on this record, there are no new instruments. Dad’s playing a 1956 Hammond B-3 organ. He’s got a Model 147 Leslie speaker. I’m playing a drum set that is from the ‘60s. I like those sounds with really good microphones. That’s how we get it. But you gotta have the idea first.”

Likewise, while the album is planned as a digital-only release, Brandon Draper is hankering for at least a limited physical one, too.

“I’ll definitely do some CDs,” he said. “I might even do vinyl. I might even think about packaging the first and second albums as a double vinyl at some point, just to do it. The audio quality is through the roof.”