Durand Bernarr’s New Music Is Rooted in Friendship and Collaboration

L
ast year, Durand Bernarr was hitting a new career peak — and a case of burnout. The Cleveland-born R&B artist had won a wide new audience in the spring with his En Route EP, which would go on to nab a 2025 Grammy nomination. But now he had just a month to crank out a new project. In need of new ideas and perspectives, he pivoted from his usual way of making music. “The difference between this project and the last one was there were way more hands and brains involved in the creative process,” Bernarr says. “Usually I am writing by myself. But I needed something different.” 

As he crafted Bloom, released this week, Bernarr called upon good friends and colleagues like the duo GAWD (“Those are my girls”), who are featured on the dancey “Flounce”; b.kae, who helped write the lead single “Impact”; songwriter Timothy Bloom; and his homegirl Bella Rose, who lent background vocals. He even had some unexpected visits from fellow artists like Melanie Fiona and Trinidad James, who came to offer their encouragement and expertise. In the end, only two songs out of 15 were solely written by Bernarr.

“I wanted particular sounds, but I was open to other ideas people had,” he says. “You never knew who was going to be in the room.” He compares the surprise pop-ups to the time that Temptations sang background on Rick James’ “Super Freak,” or when Eddie Levert, Michael Jackson, and Betty Wright were the background singers to Stevie Wonder’s “All I Do.”  “This was the first time that I worked with people to this degree,” he adds. “It was really just a lot of the homies pulling up.” 

The album, which is an hour and 17 minutes long, is a love letter to relationships of all types, but for Bernarr, who will be touring the project this spring,  it’s most of all about his platonic friendships. “I really wanted to highlight the beautiful bonds that I accumulated that have inspired me to love myself more and set a new standard for what friendship is and how you show up for one another,” Bernarr says. “It was just time to have that conversation, and people were ready. I went on X and I asked, ‘How would y’all like me to do love songs?’ Everybody just went up. I want listeners to be taken on an auditory adventure and to get different perspectives on how we can show up for each other.” 

When I spend time with Bernarr in mid-February, he’s focused, poised, and occasionally breaks out into song. The playlist coming from the speaker he brought to his photo shoot shows that his musical taste is diverse and expansive. He’s a music nerd at heart, with song selections ranging from Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo” to Ricky Dillard’s churchy “The Blood Still Works.” Bernarr sings every vocal part to that song, from the soprano section to tenor, in between poses. Later, he surprises us all with a song that we confidently believe to be LL Cool J’s 1995 hit “Doin’ It.” Fun fact, it’s the song the rapper sampled from: Grace Jones’ 1982 cut “My Jamaican Guy.” 

Bernarr, a Virgo, is not really into the whole zodiac spill. “I identify as a spirit,” he says half-jokingly. Yet he lives up to the archetype of that sign, being detail-oriented and studied in his craft. 

Bloom starts off with the six-minute track “Generous,” which has piano chords that are reminiscent of Bernarr’s childhood attending Sunday morning worship services. Halfway into the song, as Bernarr declares that he’ll be “generous,” the song moves into a funky, Chaka Khan-esque vibe, backed by a prominent bass line that makes you want to dance and clap your hands in unison with the ones already within the song. “No Business,” one of the songs that Bernarr wrote single-handedly, is a sexy callback to Nineties R&B, when singers begged for lovers’ returns and acknowledgement. It almost makes you forget the album is rooted in friendship as Bernarr croons, “I ain’t got no business loving somebody else the way that I love you.”  “Unspoken”  is a ballad that resembles the early 2000s Christina Aguilera pop era, with bluesy lyrics and soft-rock guitar strumming. 

Throughout, Bloom pulls on Bernarr’s musical knowledge and appreciation of many genres, while still remaining unique and authentic to his own vocal style.  “Completed” leans fully into the rock aesthetic, seemingly nodding to Prince with a powerful guitar solo. “Reaching” shows Bernarr’s vocal range, in which, similar to his Dillard demonstration, he sings every part and note while backed by a percussion rhythm that sounds like it could also belong on a Sade record. “That!” featuring T-Pain is a feel-good track, with plenty of dance potential that could find itself viral on TikTok. And “Home Alone,” which is the last song on the record, is personal for Bernarr and feels the most poetic. “It really encapsulates how I feel about the people in my life. The second verse really gets me because it’s talking about my parents,” says Bernarr, referring to the lyrics “Never once felt condemned, Didn’t throw me away .” “It’s a soft landing to the end of the project.” 

Bernarr’s first lessons of music came by way of his mother and father, who home-schooled the young Durand. His mother, a piano teacher and vocal theory coach, was the music director at his church. His father, who’s his current manager, was also a singer and instrumentalist who audio engineered for Earth, Wind & Fire, Whitney Houston, and Jill Scott. While Bernarr’s parents didn’t teach him how to sing, their abilities gave them the tools to nourish his budding talent. “Music was always implemented into the regimen somewhere,” says Bernarr, adding that the first songs he learned growing up were “Not Gon Cry,” by Mary J Blige and “My Funny Valentine.” by Chaka Khan. “My environment was very musical.”

While Bernarr grew up in the church, he didn’t have the traditional experience of singing in the choir. His time on the praise and worship team was pretty short, and most times, his attendance was simply to accompany his mom who was the choir director. Even so, his gospel influence came from listening to artists like the Clark Sisters and B. Slade, formerly known as Tonéx, who he credits as an inspiration when it comes to vocal range and flexibility. Bernarr wrote his first song at age 10, called “Summer Breeze” — a love song to Leonardo DiCaprio after his mother took him to see Titanic. By age 16, when his dad took him on tour with Earth, Wind & Fire, Bernarr knew what he wanted to do with his life. “Being a part of the hive, the system that is working backstage to put everything together, from wardrobe to production, seemed very second nature and I thought it was a bright idea to do it as well,” he says. “To be under that tutelage, I was set up for greatness.” 

Following that first tour, he would enter the industry and later collaborate with Earth, Wind & Fire and Kaytranada, among others. He sang background vocals for Erykah Badu and in 2023, he and his singers dressed up as Disney Channel’s The Proud Family for his first NPR Tiny Desk performance, which generated more than two million views. While Bernarr has made a name for himself in the industry both being supportive and the lead, he forever believes he’s a student and this project is a testament to that. “I have not gotten to a place, nor do I want to get to a place where I feel I know it all,” he says. “I’ve learned that there are certain brains that when they are in the same room, magic will happen.”

In addition to being open to collaborators for his own work, Bernarr has also been returning the favor, exploring vocal production and arranging music for other artists. Different perspectives are the root of his game and the root in which Bloom blossomed. “I look at the people in our lives as flowers,” he says. “We need to water each other, we need to get sunlight, we need to communicate with one another. I hope that it would inspire people to really lean into their village.”