Friday the 13th got even spookier, courtesy of Nandi Bushell and Josh Brolin.
Bushell – the 13-year-old drumming superstar, vlogger and Dave Grohl BFF – commemorated the superstitious holiday by releasing an original song, just in time for Halloween. “Sweet Nightmares” sees the teen incorporate her love of metal with infectious hip-hop inspired vocals that show a surprisingly political mind from this young girl. “A cautionary tale / Will history prevail / When leaders are liars their morales will fail,” she sings. “Bad to the bone / Just leave me alone / Watch them just sit there, these vultures atone.”
In the accompanying black-and-white video, the gothed-out Bushell plays all the instruments while an unknown person in a plague doctor mask stalks her. The video also includes a few close-up shots of Brolin, 55, his eyes growing black like Bushell’s do whenever they say “Run” on the chorus.
It’s somewhat clear who she is telling to run. “One rule for them / Another for us / Abusing their power enough is enough,” she sings towards the end. “These four walls, are crushing me / The panic sets in, I want to be free.”
“The lyrics were mostly inspired by the nightmares I was having at the time,” Bushell told Spin when discussing the song. “So, ‘Say goodbye like you mean it and don’t you ever look back,’ that’s towards the monster in my nightmares. ‘Say goodbye like you mean it’ – because it’s the last time they’re going to be there. And ‘Don’t you ever look back’ because they’re getting away forever, so they shouldn’t look back. And then some of the lyrics, like ‘Empires of a sin,’ I thought they sounded really cool and scary.”
Bushell also told Spin how Brolin ended up on the track. Their mutual friend, photographer Brian Bowen Smith, connected them. “[Brian] thought [Josh’s]voice would sound perfect for the song because it’s scary and it’s really deep,” she said. ” He was really supportive and really nice about the song and liked the music video.”
Brolin, for his part, has recently been seen in Outer Range, an Amazon Prime series about “an unfathomable mystery at the edge of Wyoming’s wilderness.” The Oscar nominee will also appear in the upcoming Dune: Part Two, reprising the role of Gurney Halleck in the sci-fi epic.
Bushell, meanwhile, began posting videos playing the drums in the late 2010s. She first went viral in 2019 when she posted a clip performing Nirvana’s “In Bloom.” The video made its way to Grohl, 54, who was impressed by this young girl’s talents. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she uploaded footage of herself covering Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” before challenging her idol, Grohl, to a drum battle.
In turn, Grohl challenged Bushell to play “Dead End Friends” by his band Them Crooked Vultures — ”[wiping] the floor” with him, the Foo Fighters frontman later revealed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Grohl conceded the battle to Bushell, and in 2021, she joined him and the rest of the Foo Fighters during a show in California to play “Everlong” in front of thousands of fans.
