Rollo Brand is a singer, musician and songwriter whose solo work incorporates a wide variety of influences into experimental alternative pop music. He has released three albums since 2025 and is currently based in Los Angeles. He has also performed countless shows around the US as a solo performer and as a supporting musician for other artists. 

Born Scott Stevenson in Sarasota, Florida, his musical beginnings involved playing electric guitar in bar bands while writing tender acoustic ballads to sing in local cafes. It was a combination of shyness and a relentless curiosity about musical expression that led guitarist Scott Stevenson to adopt the name Rollo Brand in 2021 for an anonymous recording project. The anonymity provided shelter from the judgement of other working musicians or family and friends, and resulted in numerous independent releases between 2021 and 2026.

The seeds of this music were planted in 2015. Having worked as a guitarist for the previous two years, he made the choice to forgo higher education and relocate to Portland, Oregon with a friend at the age of eighteen. He immediately got involved playing small concerts at pubs and coffeehouses, the most important being Homebase Coffee in Southeast Portland. The owner of the venue allowed freeform acoustic performances (and occasionally joined on drums) and this became the testing ground for new material written in the attic and unfinished addition of a farmhouse on the west side. A Tascam digital portastudio became a nightly obsession, and throughout the winter he created countless audio experiments and patchwork sampled collages of sounds, learning techniques that found their way into production sessions years later. During the summer of 2016, disillusioned with the small number of venues hosting local shows, he moved back to Florida’s Gulf Coast and began gigging again as a member of working bands.

Still devoted to writing songs and fleshing them out on the Tascam, he relocated to Pennsylvania during the spring of 2017, moving into an apartment over an insurance office in a township northeast of Philadelphia. Having spent years writing songs and tinkering with arrangements, he collaborated with Jack Hubbell (of the rock band Telyscopes) on three home-recorded, independently-released EPs entitled “Sundog!” which were released on Soundcloud and incorporated into live shows. Influenced by Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem, as well as St. Vincent and Lou Reed, these releases contained quirky synthpop with off-beat and sometimes stream-of-consciousness lyrics. A move to South Philadelphia and many months of performing in the underground DIY scene around the city followed the releases, and sessions for a ten-song album began at a studio in Strawberry Mansion during the summer of 2019, also engineered by Jack Hubbell. These sessions resulted in a debut full-length, called “...In the Near Future” and released in February of 2020 (under his original name) six weeks before the international COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. Months of lockdowns and curfews with no end in sight led to the decision to leave Philadelphia after three years and wait out the pandemic in his hometown.

The alias Rollo Brand was adopted in 2021 without informing his friends or collaborators, as both a way to experiment with risky musical ideas anonymously, and as a way to protect against the fear of judgement from the people close to him. The name “Brand” was chosen as a response to years of criticism from more widely-known performers that the variety in his material was confusing to audiences and online algorithms, and that he’d have more career luck if he kept his artistic choices more consistent and “built a brand.” The first name “Rollo” was borrowed from his maternal great-grandfather, a farmer from Nebraska. The first single was a skeletal synthpop track called “Cold Stars,” released in May, and after a brief move to Atlanta and two more singles, the Like A Match EP was released as the first official Rollo Brand project in March of 2022.

Craving more time and space to create without interruption, he relocated to Indianapolis, Indiana in mid-2022 and built a makeshift home studio in an aging duplex on the east side, near the Irvington neighborhood. This was his first time engineering and producing without the help of an engineer, and relentless recording sessions produced two singles (“Wish I Was Closer” and “Feel the World Stand Still”) and another five-track project, called the Curfew EP (2023). A bout of major depression followed this release, going undiagnosed and untreated, and was further complicated by intense workaholism and insomnia. This led to a brief hospitalization for psychosis in 2024 and a year-long hiatus from creative activity.

By early 2025 he was still struggling to effectively treat depression and was working as a nine-to-five employee in local coffeeshops. Aiden Christopher, an artist and producer also active in the Indianapolis scene, offered to engineer and produce sessions for a new project, and four months of writing and recording resulted in nearly twenty unfinished recordings. Around the same time he rediscovered a trove of mostly complete songs created in the months leading up to his mental breakdown, having completely forgotten making them. Three of these found their way online over the summer and fall (“TO YOUR ISLAND,” “SANTA FE 06.13.2023” and “CALL IT CLOSURE”), and after a lengthy editing phase REFRACTIONS debuted in the final weeks of 2025. The tracks were dark and frantic, containing meditations on guilt, crime, isolation, and heartbreak. 

After a move to Los Angeles during the winter of 2026, focus shifted to finishing the sessions recorded by Aiden Christopher the previous spring. Most of the album’s editing was done using headphones in libraries and coffeehouses while couchsurfing around Southern California. After finalizing all thirteen tracks, Fresh On My Mind was released in August of 2026, containing acoustic and ambient songs dealing with the fallout of the breakdown and hospitalization, and the subsequent struggle to reestablish a functional life.