B-Side Guys

The premise is a bee in love with a flower, which sounds like the setup for a children’s book until the lyrics arrive and it becomes something considerably more melancholy. DJ Stanfill, the Los Angeles musician recording as Biloba, writes the bee with a self-awareness that makes him impossible not to pity: “don’t try to say that out of all of your options / I’m the one that you would choose / are you crazy? / I would tell you, if you could, to run.” This is a creature who has fully assessed his own limitations and loves anyway, which is either the most human thing in the world or the most absurd, and “Little Flower” is smart enough to let it be both simultaneously.

The production, handled by Reske, matches that tonal tension with gleeful precision. Train whistles, polka, fiddle, and percussion that lands somewhere between Thomas the Tank Engine and the string arrangement on Eleanor Rigby create a phantasmagorical stage set for the poor bee’s torment. The baroque clownishness of the arrangement keeps the sadness from settling into self-pity, which is exactly the right call for a song whose narrator concludes he would die for a flower that will never know his name.

“I got two wings and a stinger / but nothing worthy for my life to give” is the line that reframes everything. The bee isn’t lamenting unrequited love so much as his fundamental unsuitability for the life he wants, a worker built for the hive who has developed the one feeling that makes the hive irrelevant.

Only for you, little flower / would I want to give my life’ closes the song with the bee’s one genuine declaration, and it lands harder than it should for something set to polka. That’s the trick Biloba pulls off: the sillier the staging, the more exposed the feeling underneath it.