Brian Rogers’ debut album as Lion makes a big first impression

I’m not surprised when Brian Rogers tells me that he has a freshly printed degree in history from the University of Kansas. The 22-year-old radiates a sort of collegiate youthfulness; he grins brightly and answers questions thoroughly and thoughtfully.

Even his wavy reddish-blond hair is styled in a way that might be described as professorial. But Rogers, former drummer of the now-defunct Lawrence band Forrester, has a post-degree project that sounds less intense than grad school, which he is considering.

Under the moniker Lion, Rogers released a debut full-length album, Disquiet, February 23. It’s a powerful collection of densely layered electronic and hip-hop beats. Disquiet transports listeners to another world, a vast desert filled with silvery mirages, and Lion is the only guide.

Following the digital and cassette releases of Disquiet, I chatted with Rogers about where he finds his beats and shaking daily anxieties.

The Pitch: I’m always intrigued when I meet young artists who are pursuing an education while also making music, but music isn’t their end game. It just seems like this sort of parallel life.

Rogers: I think you’re right. There are a lot of artists that have multiple things going on, or on the other hand, artists who are so engrossed in what they’re doing that they have difficulty exploring any other options. I think something that my parents told me and that’s stuck with me is, “Why do you think you have to choose? You don’t need to pick one thing over the other, especially at this age.” As a college student, I was always dealing with, “Am I going to work on music when I want to work on music, or am I going to get this homework assignment done or get that reading done?” So I’ve always wanted to get to a point where I could do both, and it wasn’t until recently — like in the last year — that I felt like I could have both an intellectual pursuit while also feeling confident in my ability to make music of value.

Tell me about the process of creating some of the songs on Disquiet.

Three of the songs on the album took a week. All the other songs I’d been working on for 11 months. Really, what I do when I am most successful is when I pull up a record or a sample on my computer — just some song that I’ve heard or that I found on YouTube and start with the song. I drag it into my software and listen to it and decide what pieces would sound cool, which ones I want to take and play with.

I feel like that can blur the line between creating something new, art that is yours, and making a change or an edit to someone else’s art.

Yeah, but my first question would be, then, “Can anyone — anyone who’s not me or been talking to me while I’ve been working on this for the last year — tell what I’m sampling and where it’s from? Which, honestly, I don’t even remember where a lot of it came from. So much of it are these small parts and they’re from so many different places, and I’ve changed them so significantly.

So I don’t really worry about that, honestly. My parents ask me that question all the time, and I think it might just be, like, a generational gap or something. You hear all this music that’s from samples and you don’t think about it. The process of producing hip-hop is just so rooted in sampling that I never even questioned it. But at the same time, lawsuits are prevalent throughout the history of the art form, so maybe I’m just naïve.

What you’re doing now is quite different from what you were doing in Forrester. Tell me about the transition.

It really doesn’t feel like much of a jump because, from day one, I’ve never been someone who has been focused on the technical aspects of instruments. I’ve been focused on the way that certain sounds make me feel and the way that playing them in a certain way makes me feel. Technique has always kind of bored me. Not that I don’t have an appreciation or understanding of it. I’ve had piano lessons since I was in second grade and took drum lessons until I graduated high school, but it was the performing and the catharsis of being onstage and just letting loose that made me love playing music, not mastering a drumroll or how to make all my strokes sound the same.

When do you feel the catharsis now?

It’s still in performance. When I perform, I try to release that same sort of energy as I did when I was playing drums. I feel like I left a lot out there. I put it out as hard as I could, and I was never embarrassed about being animated. I still feel that way. If I was embarrassed, one, I would become stiff and not perform well, but second, it wouldn’t feel good.

It’s like dancing. The ideal image of dancing is that you’re moving like no one else is around. It hearkens back to this primal energy where you’re dancing to someone hitting a calfskin drum around a fire. You’re releasing something that you don’t understand. And that’s what production is. It makes you feel something.

Listening to the album, it does feel like there’s a sort of Zen and release about the sound. You’ve mentioned before how making the tracks for Disquiet was really a way to escape your daily anxieties.

Yeah, I guess numerous things give you anxiety throughout the day, but one of the things that I’ve come back to — ever since high school, really — is trying to develop who I am and who I think I could be. I think a lot of my anxiety comes from wanting to explain myself and justify the decisions I’ve made and the path that I’ve chosen in a way that someone takes me seriously, that they don’t think I’ve just floated to the place I’m at now. I’ve made conscious choices. And these songs — this is a release from that. It’s taking a break from those daily stresses running through my mind.