“I never wanted this, if only I knew
I’d make every dream a reality
But it’d take every bit of my sanity
And now it’s so obvious
That the problem was you (Ooh, ooh, ooh)
Caught up in the eye of a hurricane
Let everybody die just to keep the name”
SCATTERBRAIN – BITTER
There are some songs that tell you exactly what they’re going to be before you ever press play, and with a name like BITTER, I thought I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into. Anger, resentment and a few things somebody had been waiting a long time to finally say out loud. I wasn’t exactly wrong, but the more I’ve listened to SCATTERBRAIN’s BITTER, the less interested I’ve become in the anger itself.
What’s underneath all of that noise is what keeps pulling me back. It feels like someone trying to make sense of what happens when something you helped build keeps moving without you, especially when you’re still trying to understand exactly how you ended up outside of it in the first place.
To really get into why this song works for me, though, I think I have to go backward a little and talk about Brian Burkheiser and I Prevail. I’ve listened to I Prevail for years, and Brian’s voice was always a huge part of what made that band work for me. It wasn’t necessarily because I preferred Brian over Eric Vanlerberghe. The interesting part was always what happened when you put the two of them together. Eric could bring all of that aggression, screaming and weight into a song, while Brian usually provided the melody or one of those enormous choruses that suddenly opened everything up. SCATTERBRAIN may now be showing us that Brian can scream too, but within I Prevail, that contrast between them was central to how the band sounded.
Brian had also been there from the beginning. Long before platinum records, huge tours and Grammy nominations, he was part of the version of I Prevail that suddenly found itself getting attention after covering Taylor Swift’s Blank Space. He was there through the Heart Vs. Mind EP, Lifelines, TRAUMA and TRUE POWER, and through all of the changes that came with a group of guys from Michigan turning into one of the bigger bands in modern rock. When you’ve heard someone’s voice attached to a band for that long, eventually you stop thinking about it as one ingredient in the recipe. It’s simply part of what the band sounds like.
Then Brian began dealing with serious health issues. His health had already interfered with his career before, but his battle with Eagle syndrome eventually required multiple surgeries and forced him to step away from touring while he recovered. At the time, at least from where the rest of the world was sitting, it was easy to see that as a temporary interruption. Someone was sick. They needed to get healthy. Brian eventually made it back onstage, and it seemed reasonable to assume that whatever chapter had been interrupted could simply continue.
Clearly, there was a lot more happening than any of us could see. In his interview with Rock Feed, Brian described a gradual breakdown in communication after his surgeries and the decision to miss another tour while he continued recovering. From his perspective, decisions about the band’s future began happening without him, even while he still believed there was a chance they could work through everything. By the time the final conversation happened, the outcome apparently felt much less mutual to him than it would later appear from the outside.
That’s also where I want to be careful with this story because I wasn’t in those rooms, and neither were most of the people arguing about it online. Brian has explained how those events felt from his side, I’m sure I Prevail has its own version, and there are still things surrounding the split that haven’t been publicly explained. I don’t need to fill those gaps in to understand why BITTER lands the way it does for me. If anything, the distance between what Brian believed was happening and what apparently had already been decided makes BITTER considerably easier to understand.
What we did see was how suddenly everything seemed to happen from the outside. I Prevail announced on May 15, 2025, that Brian was no longer part of the band, and only eight days later the song Violent Nature arrived. Obviously, nobody wrote, recorded, produced and prepared that song for release in eight days. Whatever was happening creatively with I Prevail had already been happening before any of us listening knew the band was going to continue without one of the voices we’d associated with it from the beginning. Later came an entire album carrying the Violent Nature name, and suddenly there was no question that this wasn’t a temporary adjustment. There was now an I Prevail after Brian Burkheiser.
That’s when the question changed for me. It was no longer simply about why somebody was no longer part of a band. For the first time, there was this very clear dividing line. We knew what I Prevail sounded like with Brian because we’d spent more than a decade hearing it. Now we were going to find out what I Prevail sounded like without him. Eventually, once Brian started SCATTERBRAIN, we were also going to find out what Brian sounded like without I Prevail.
I didn’t expect those answers to be quite as revealing as they’ve been. The current version of I Prevail is heavier, with Eric taking on more of the vocal responsibility and Violent Nature pushing the band much further into its aggressive side. I still listen to I Prevail, and I actually enjoy the heavier side of what they’ve always done, so this isn’t me saying Violent Nature is a bad record. It’s great at what it’s supposed to be. I’ve just realized that what I loved most about I Prevail was the balance between that heaviness and what Brian brought to the other side of it.
Without that balance, Violent Nature doesn’t feel like the I Prevail I fell in love with. That’s entirely subjective, and I’m sure there are people who prefer this version of the band, but for me something is missing. It isn’t that I need them to keep making the same record forever or that I don’t want them to evolve. Bands should change, and musicians should be allowed to explore whatever direction feels right to them. It just turns out that the tension between Brian and Eric’s different styles wasn’t simply one thing I liked about I Prevail. It was a much bigger part of why I connected with them in the first place than I understood at the time.
Then I started hearing SCATTERBRAIN. That’s where things got weirdly fascinating for me, although the project didn’t begin with Brian immediately putting everything that happened into an original song. Before he could release any of the music he had written for SCATTERBRAIN, he found another way to introduce it. He covered Taylor Swift.
There was something almost too perfect about Look What You Made Me Do being the first thing we heard from SCATTERBRAIN. More than a decade earlier, I Prevail’s cover of Blank Space helped take a relatively unknown band from Michigan and put it in front of an audience that might never have found it otherwise. Now Brian was standing at another beginning, separated from the band that first made his voice recognizable, and once again a Taylor Swift song became the way he introduced himself.
The circumstances were completely different this time. Blank Space felt like a band finding an unexpected door and kicking it open together. Look What You Made Me Do arrived after Brian had already been removed from the thing that first door helped build, while a legal dispute prevented him from releasing his original music. I don’t hear the cover as him trying to repeat the same formula or recreate what I Prevail did. It feels more like reclaiming the starting point. If he had to begin again, there was something fitting about returning to the same place and proving that the first time hadn’t only belonged to the name of the band.
The song choice carried its own meaning too. Look What You Made Me Do is tied to reputation, public perception and what happens when other people’s version of you becomes louder than your own. In Brian’s hands, it felt less like accepting blame for whatever he became and more like stepping back into view after everybody else had already spent months deciding what his absence meant. It didn’t answer every question or tell us exactly what happened, but it made one thing clear. Brian wasn’t finished, even if he couldn’t fully show us what came next yet.
When PHASES arrived next, we finally heard the first piece of that future in his own words. The song carried more history than I initially understood. After leaving I Prevail, Brian went away intending to write and figure out what came next, but his mental health deteriorated into a manic episode that eventually led to his family intervening and helping him enter inpatient treatment. PHASES came out of the aftermath of that experience, which makes the title feel less like a convenient metaphor and more like an honest description of someone trying to recognize himself across several drastically different versions of his life.
Instead of coming out swinging at everyone he believed had wronged him, Brian turned inward. The song moves through the physical and emotional weight of the last several years, but it also sounds like somebody trying to understand who he is after surviving them. There’s pain in it, but not the clean, easily explained kind. It feels unsettled because he still feels unsettled, moving between different phases of himself while trying to figure out which one gets to keep going.
That vulnerability was immediately familiar to me. It was one of the things Brian had always brought to I Prevail, especially when those enormous melodies gave the heavier parts of a song something human to crash against. PHASES didn’t sound like someone trying to make another I Prevail record, but it carried the emotional honesty I had always connected with in their music. Hearing it outside of the band made that familiarity impossible to ignore.
Then FAST LANE showed another side of what SCATTERBRAIN could become. It had the kind of enormous modern-rock chorus that made Brian’s voice feel instantly at home, but it also carried more forward motion than PHASES. The damage was still there, and nothing about the song suggested that life had simply returned to normal, but it wasn’t content to remain inside everything that had already happened. It sounded like someone recognizing that there were still people in his life worth continuing for and reasons to keep moving even when he hadn’t completely made peace with how he arrived there.
Taken together, those first three releases began revealing SCATTERBRAIN one piece at a time. Look What You Made Me Do reintroduced Brian by bringing him back to the kind of unlikely beginning that helped start everything the first time. PHASES gave us the vulnerability and uncertainty underneath what he had survived. FAST LANE started pushing all of that toward something bigger, proving the project could look forward without pretending the past hadn’t left any damage behind.
Then came BITTER. By that point, SCATTERBRAIN already existed as more than a response to I Prevail, which gives the song more weight than it would have carried as the project’s first release. Brian had given us enough of himself that the anger could arrive as one part of the story instead of becoming its entire reason for existing. BITTER doesn’t circle around the conflict or hide how Brian feels about the way things happened, but it also doesn’t have to carry the entire weight of establishing who he is now.
Hearing Brian outside of I Prevail also clarified how much of what I thought of as “the I Prevail sound” had come from his side of the equation. One of the things I’ve found myself appreciating more as I’ve gotten older is how different people leave fingerprints on the things they help create. You don’t always notice them while everyone is together because everything simply feels normal. It becomes the version you’re used to. It’s only after people go their separate ways that you start recognizing which pieces belonged to whom. Sometimes you realize the thing you connected with most didn’t disappear at all. It just found somewhere else to exist. That’s part of why BITTER grabbed me.
That history changes how the song lands, but I don’t think you need every detail of what happened between Brian and I Prevail to understand the emotion underneath it. There’s frustration in the song, but there’s also this sense of somebody finally getting to speak from his own side after spending a long time watching other versions of the story exist around him. BITTER feels less like an attempt to settle anything and more like Brian deciding that his truth deserves a place in the story too. I don’t need the song to prove a case or establish that his version contains every answer. What matters is that he finally has somewhere to put it without making any of it comfortable or pretending the uglier emotions aren’t still there.
We have this strange habit of treating bitterness like a failure. If somebody admits they’re still bitter about something, there is always somebody ready to explain why they need to let it go. Move on. Forgive. Stop giving somebody else that kind of power. Don’t carry it with you. There are a hundred different versions of the same advice, and I’m sure some of it comes from a good place.
I just don’t think that’s always how people actually work. Sometimes you can be okay and still be bitter. The more I’ve thought about that, the more I believe those two things can exist together without contradicting each other. You can rebuild your life and still think what happened to you was wrong. You can be happy with where you ended up and still wish you hadn’t been forced to take the road that got you there. You can forgive somebody and still remember exactly what they did. You can even stop wanting anything from someone and still have moments when the way they treated you pisses you off.
None of that necessarily means you’re stuck. Sometimes it just means you’re being honest about what still hurts instead of pretending you have reached some perfectly peaceful version of acceptance. What matters is whether that bitterness becomes the place where you stop or something you eventually learn how to carry while you continue building a life beyond it.
At some point, though, you have to decide what to do with everything that still hurts. That’s what I keep hearing underneath BITTER. Yes, there’s anger there. There are obviously wounds that haven’t magically disappeared because enough time passed, and there are things Brian seems determined to put on the record in his own way. The song itself exists because he kept creating. Whatever happened behind closed doors, whatever relationships were damaged and whatever pieces of that story we may never know, none of it managed to take away the thing that mattered most for whatever came next.
His voice was still his. That’s such a simple thing, but I think there’s something much bigger hiding inside it. When something ends badly, especially something you’ve spent years helping build, it’s easy to start confusing what belonged to the thing with what actually belonged to you. That could be a career, a relationship, a friendship or a family you thought you’d always be part of. You spend enough time inside something and eventually your identity starts wrapping itself around it. When it disappears, there’s this terrifying moment where you have to figure out which pieces disappeared with it and which pieces you still get to keep.
Yet when I hear BITTER, I don’t hear somebody who lost everything. I hear somebody discovering which parts came with him. That’s why this story feels so relatable considering I’ve never been kicked out of a successful rock band. Most of us have been outside of something we thought we were still part of, though. Sometimes it’s a relationship where the other person emotionally left long before anybody actually said it was over. Sometimes it’s a friendship where conversations started happening without you. Sometimes it’s a job where decisions about your future were being made in rooms you weren’t invited into. Sometimes it’s people you considered family suddenly treating you like you were much easier to remove than you ever imagined.
The details change, but the feeling is remarkably similar. You’re still living in one version of the story while everybody else has apparently started writing another. Then eventually somebody hands you the ending. I think that’s a different kind of hurt than simply losing something. It’s one thing to watch something end together. It’s another to discover that someone else had already decided where the ending was going while you were still trying to save the middle. That’s where bitterness earns its name.
Not because you want to spend the rest of your life angry, but because for a while anger is easier to understand than everything underneath it. Anger has edges. You know what to do with it. Disappointment is messier. Grief is messier. Realizing somebody didn’t value your place in their life the way you valued theirs is much harder to package into something neat. Sometimes we’re bitter. I don’t think there’s anything particularly profound about that. The question is what we do once we are.
That’s what keeps bringing me back to SCATTERBRAIN. The releases before BITTER had already proven the project could hold more than an answer to what happened with I Prevail. We’re hearing Brian figure out what his own musical identity sounds like when it no longer has to fit inside something he helped build with other people.
There’s freedom in that, even if it wasn’t freedom he originally asked for. I’ve experienced enough endings in my own life to know that sometimes the things we eventually become grateful for aren’t things we would have chosen. I don’t think we need to rewrite history and pretend they were secretly gifts. Some things just hurt. Some people handle things badly. Some endings could have happened differently and didn’t. You don’t have to make them beautiful afterward to survive them. You just have to keep going.
That’s also where the title BITTER becomes almost misleading. The more I listen to the song, the less I hear somebody trapped in bitterness. I hear somebody moving through it without pretending to know exactly where the other side is yet. That tension between what has already ended and what hasn’t completely taken shape became the starting point for the photo.
As I started planning it, I kept coming back to FOXCITY’s Photo Booth – Pearly Gates (Nightmare). Not because I wanted this to become a religious metaphor, but because gates have always represented transition to me. They mark the point where one chapter ends and another begins. For a little while, you’re left standing between the two, looking back at what you lost while trying to figure out what waits on the other side.
Once I actually finished the photo, that idea became even more obvious than I expected. The gates aren’t closed. I’m not standing outside of them waiting for somebody to let me through. They’re already open, and I’m standing right in the middle of them. There’s a path continuing behind me, even if I can’t see exactly where it goes.
The more I thought about Brian’s story, the more that worked for me. Whatever happened between him and I Prevail had already happened. There wasn’t a version where he could simply stand outside the gates forever waiting for everything to go back to what it had been. SCATTERBRAIN became the path on the other side. It might not be the path he originally expected to take, but it’s one that was his to decide what to do with.
The lighting ended up telling more of that story too. I originally imagined almost completely disappearing into silhouette, but the finished photo became something different. The moon sits directly behind me while warmer light reaches in from the foreground, leaving me somewhere between the two. The world around me is dark, but I’m not hidden by it. You can still see me standing there.
Even the moths ended up fitting into that idea more naturally than I planned. They’re moving through the scene instead of sitting neatly in one place, with some disappearing into the darkness and others catching just enough light to become visible. I don’t necessarily need them to represent one specific thing. I like them better as another reminder that nothing in this photo is completely still, even when the place itself feels suspended between two worlds.
I’m okay with not knowing everything, and that’s another thing I’ve gotten better at understanding. Closure doesn’t always mean getting every answer. For a long time, I treated closure like there was supposed to be one final conversation where everything finally made sense. Somebody would explain why they did what they did. I’d understand it. There could be an apology. Everybody would say what needed to be said, and somehow the story would finally feel finished.
Life doesn’t seem particularly interested in giving us those conversations. Sometimes the explanation never comes. Sometimes you get one and realize it doesn’t help. Sometimes you hear an apology and discover it can’t undo what happened. Sometimes the only closure available is deciding you’re finished waiting for somebody else to provide it.
I don’t know what happens next between Brian and I Prevail. Someday those relationships could be repaired, or they might never be. There may even be parts of what happened that make that impossible. That’s their story, and I’m much more interested now in seeing what both sides do with whatever comes next. We finally get to hear something that was impossible to separate when everybody was standing together. I Prevail kept the name and moved further into its heavier side. Brian walked away with pieces of the sound I had apparently connected with all along.
They walked out the door with him. There’s something worth remembering in that. When somebody removes you from their story, they don’t get to keep everything you brought into it. They don’t get your creativity. They don’t get your ability to love people. They don’t get your humor, your ideas, your loyalty, your talent or whatever else made you matter there in the first place. Those things belonged to you before them, they belonged to you while you were there, and they’re still yours afterward. Sometimes it takes losing the place where you were using them to finally understand that.
FOXCITY’s Photo Booth – Pearly Gates (Nightmare) gave me the environment I needed to bring all of that together, while Specter Skies’ Layered Soul Day Cycle shaped the atmosphere around it. I used the Deep Night setting for the enormous moon and the colder glow cutting through the darkness. Together, the backdrop and sky allowed that idea to take visual form without either one feeling like scenery simply placed behind me.
The styling itself was just as intentional. Brian’s look throughout the BITTER video is understated, and I wanted to nod to that without trying to recreate him outright. Instead of something elaborate, I kept everything grounded with cold ash’s REFINED Tee in black and [Deadwool]’s Dean jeans. It’s a simple look, but that’s exactly why it works. Nothing distracts from the mood, the lighting or the story the photo is trying to tell. It’s a quiet callback to the video. To finish everything off, I added Noche’s Basic Shine. It’s a subtle detail, but with so much of the scene disappearing into darkness, it gave the foreground light just enough surface to catch without fighting the colder moonlight behind me.
The more I’ve listened to BITTER, the more I hear Brian putting his truth somewhere it can’t simply be spoken over. He doesn’t have to remain standing where I Prevail left him while he waits for everybody else to agree on what happened. The gates are already open. He walked through them and started building something on the other side. I think that’s what I’ll remember most about BITTER. You don’t always get to control the story somebody tells about you, but you never lose the right to tell your own. Brian’s story didn’t end when his place in I Prevail did.
You can be angry about how you found that out. If you’re being completely honest, you might even be a little BITTER. Fine. Build something anyway. The rest of the story was always yours to write.
If Brian ends up seeing this, I hope I did his story justice and that I was fair in how I interpreted everything. Credits for everything can be found below, until next time…
“There can only be one of us, and I never lose
Should have never made me an enemy
So let me bring you back to reality
Yeah, don’t forget that I’m the only reason that you’ve tasted the fame
And without me, you would never have a name or a face
So when it all falls apart, and it goes up in flames
Just know you only got yourself to blame”
SCATTERBRAIN – BITTER
For all things SCATTERBRAIN, click here!
Credits:
Head: LeLUTKA.Head.NOA.4.0 ~ Jaden Nova
Head Applier: VELOUR: KALEB Skin for Evo X ~ Kiria Mama
Hair: [MFCNT] THOR Bun – Grooming Hair – LeBarbier Alpha
Hairbase: LeLUTKA.EvoX.Hairbase.044 (BOM) ~ Jaden Nova (Comes with the LeLUTKA NOA Head)
Eyes: [ContraptioN] Depthglass Eye ~ Walton Wainwright
Eyebase: Avi-Glam. Prism Eyes – Pack 2 ~ Eye Daddy
Ears: ^^Swallow^^ Gauged S Ears ~ Luciayes Magic
Ear Tattoo: RichB. Ears Tattoo #08 ~ Salvy Hexem
Beard: [MFCNT] Ducky Skunk Beard & Stache – LeBarbier Alpha
Beard Layer: [MR] Jimmi Facial Hair for EvoX Heads Style 1 ~ Daniel Whiskers
Body: [LEGACY] Athletic Edition (1.7.1) ~ MeshBody Resident
Skin: VELOUR: PICASSO HOMME Skin for Legacy (FIT/TAN) Picasso Neck ~ Kiria Mama
Hand BOM: K.O.K.O.S SHOP – SEXI MAN HANDS-BOM ALL BODY. ~ Aleric Dallas
Nails: Pare.Cure Mesh Nails Both Hands [Short] – Legacy ~ Flazedo Resident
Tattoo: Boscato Vigor Upper Body Tattoo MEDIUM – Boston Blaisdale
Shine: Noche. Basic Shine – Legacy ~ Danny Boo ~ NEW @ Reborn Event (July 22-Aug 7)
Shirt: cold ash. Legacy M – REFINED Tee (Black) ~ ColdAsh Resident
Pants: [Deadwool] Dean jeans ~ Masa Plympton
Rings/Bracelets: *RE* Atreides Bracelet & Rings ~ Crashnoww Resident
Earrings: = DAE = SXD1 ~ Naomi Darkheart
~Scene~
Backdrop: FOXCITY. Photo Booth – Pearly Gates (Nightmare) ~ Little Snacc
PBR/EEP: Specter Skies Layered Soul Day Cycle – Deep Night setting ~ Syd00 Resident