The Story Has to Change Pronouns
A Case Study of Phases (2026)
“For twelve years, Brian Burkheiser’s own story kept losing him as its subject. Phases is the first version written back into his.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanics behind why they work.
This article discusses the video’s imagery and onscreen narration in detail, including its handling of vocal injury and surgery, and of a manic episode and psychiatric hospitalization.
A Note on Sourcing: Phases is the debut original single from Scatterbrain, the solo project of Brian Burkheiser, former co-lead vocalist of I Prevail, released February 13, 2026 through his own Scatterbrain Records. The video is credited to directors Kurt Mackey and Brian Burkheiser. Some of the biographical material below is drawn from Burkheiser’s own account in a February 2026 interview with Rock Feed, as reported by Loudwire, and is attributed to him directly rather than presented as independently verified fact; further biographical detail comes from reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle, Blunt Magazine, AltPress, and Blabbermouth.net. This essay is built primarily from direct, caption-by-caption analysis of the finished video’s complete onscreen text, cross-checked against the timed sequence of the footage itself, and from a parallel analysis of I Prevail’s 2019 video for “Hurricane,” used here as a primary source for the specific comparison it invites rather than as a subject in its own right. No official lyric sheet for the song was available during the earliest phase of this research; a credited lyric sheet was obtained after the video analysis below was substantially complete and is used only to describe the song’s subject and address in general terms. In keeping with this series’ standing policy, no lyrics — from this song or from “Hurricane” — are quoted anywhere in this piece, in any form; where lyrical content is discussed, it is described entirely in this essay’s own language. Readings involving the relationship between the two videos, and between the song’s lyric and its video, are interpretive and are presented as such.
Nine seconds in, before anything else has happened, a caption reads MY NAME IS BRIAN over a mountain ridge and a crossing eagle.
It is not the first time he has opened a video this way. Seven years earlier, in 2019, I Prevail released a self-directed video for their song “Hurricane,” and its very first caption reads the same six words in the same position: MY NAME IS BRIAN. What follows in each video is where the resemblance turns into an argument. Hurricane’s next line is I SING FOR A BAND CALLED I PREVAIL, and the one after that is HERE IS OUR STORY. Phases answers with 12 YEARS AGO I STARTED A BAND, and then THIS IS MY STORY.
That single pronoun swap — OUR to MY — is not a coincidence of phrasing. It is the entire argument of this video, stated before the song has even started.
The Words Are the Only Performance
Phases runs just over four minutes and never once shows Brian Burkheiser performing the song to camera in the conventional sense — no lip-sync, no staged studio take built as the video’s visual spine. What the video offers instead, almost continuously, is onscreen text: white, bold, condensed, center-frame, laid directly over more than a hundred pieces of archival footage spanning roughly twelve years. A full transcription of the captions runs to 108 separate cards, arriving at a pace of roughly one every two seconds.
That density is the point. A concert clip, on its own, cannot tell you whether the person onstage felt triumphant or trapped. A management signing cannot tell you whether it felt like arrival or obligation. The caption can, and does, continuously — and because it always speaks in the first person, every one of those images gets reassigned a narrator before the audience has time to supply one on its own. The archive doesn’t get to mean whatever it originally documented. It means what the text currently sitting on top of it says it means.
This isn’t quite the same thing as a man refusing to appear on camera, but the rule holds more completely than it first appears to. The video’s single most theatrical-looking image — Burkheiser shirtless under a rig dripping black liquid, captioned I SHARED MY TRAUMA, shot with visible lighting equipment and crew in frame — looks like a scene built fresh for this video. It isn’t. The same black-liquid tableau appears in the shoot of Burkheiser’s earlier Taylor Swift cover video, meaning the shot in Phases is itself archival: repurposed footage of an older production, not new performance staged for this one. Even the video’s most constructed-looking image turns out to be another home movie. It just happens to be a home movie of a professional set. The rule doesn’t bend for its most striking shot; it’s confirmed by it. The video’s actual performance is typographic. The song plays underneath as emotional continuity. The words are doing the narrating.
The Same Sentence, Twelve Years Later
Set against “Hurricane,” the scale of what Phases is doing becomes measurable rather than merely felt.
Hurricane’s 65 onscreen cards use collective pronouns — we, our, us — roughly 31 times, and first-person singular language only about 9 times. Its structure is a band’s origin myth: a shared dream, a shared collapse, a shared rebuilding. Individual wounds are named specifically inside it — Brian’s depression and vocal pain, his missing his younger brother’s childhood, bandmate Eric Vanlerberghe’s grief over a friend’s death — but the video gathers them into a single collective recovery. The pressure breaks the band. The band pulls itself back into the studio. The album, Trauma, becomes the shared object that proves the group survived. Hurricane’s closing card promises OF THE MOUNTAIN WE HAVE TO CLIMB — the difficult future the strengthened band will face together.
Phases opens standing on that exact mountain, alone.
Where Hurricane runs roughly 3-to-1 collective-to-singular, Phases inverts the ratio almost completely: of its 108 cards, around 61 use first-person singular language, and only a small handful use anything collective. The later video isn’t building a legend. It’s keeping a ledger — naming years, doctors, diagnoses, surgeries, a marriage, a birth, a hospitalization, in a density Hurricane’s mythmaking never had room for.
Several of Hurricane’s own lines resurface inside Phases, restated in a different grammar. Hurricane’s TO MAKE MUSIC THAT CAME FROM THE HEART, describing the band’s founding dream, becomes Phases’ AND STARTED WRITING SONGS / THAT CAME FROM THE HEART, describing what Brian does after the band has pushed him out — the same phrase, now describing a beginning that excludes the group it once defined. Hurricane’s WE PUT OUT A COVER SONG / IT WENT VIRAL — referring to the band’s breakout Taylor Swift cover — is restaged in Phases as its own turning point, an iTunes chart screenshot captioned WHEN OUR COVER WENT VIRAL, less than a minute into the runtime. Even the word “trauma” migrates: in Hurricane it appears in red as the name of the album the band will carry around the world, a product built from pain. In Phases, Brian says only I SHARED MY TRAUMA — the word returned from branding to biography.
None of this can be confirmed as intentional callback; no interview or credited source has described Phases as a direct response to Hurricane. But the density and specificity of the overlap — the identical opening line, the same career event restaged as the same turning point, the same typographic system, the same visible collaborator credited on both — make coincidence a difficult explanation to sustain. What the comparison shows, at minimum, is that Phases isn’t inventing a language for reclaiming a story. It’s picking up the exact tool I Prevail once used to tell its collective one, and turning it toward an account that no longer has room for “we.”
The Song Withholds a Name Too
The lyric itself turns out to share the video’s central habit, in a register the captions never touch.
Where the onscreen text is addressed almost entirely inward — a first-person account of what happened to him — the song’s lyric spends most of its runtime addressed outward, to a second person the words never identify. That “you” is blamed for manipulation, for making him feel he wasn’t enough, and for the fallout that followed; the song’s recurring hook, distinguishing what he didn’t choose from what he still controls, is delivered directly to that unnamed “you,” not as private reflection.
It would strengthen this essay’s argument considerably to read that “you” as I Prevail, or as the people around the split specifically — and the timing, and everything else this video does with the band’s own visual language, makes that reading tempting. But nothing in the lyric confirms it, and nothing in Burkheiser’s own public statements pins the address to a specific target rather than a general one. What can be said with more confidence is a narrower, formally interesting fact: the song and the video withhold a name in the same place. The captions never write “I Prevail.” The lyric never writes who “you” is. Two different tools, aimed at two different senses — one visual, one sung — arrive at the identical decision not to name the party responsible. Whether that’s one coordinated choice or two separate ones converging on the same instinct isn’t something this essay can settle from the material available.
Who Gets to Be the Subject
That grammar keeps recurring at the sentence level, and it isn’t neutral about who earns it.
Across all 108 captions in Phases, exactly three use a third-person subject rather than “I”: HE FOUND A VOCAL POLYP, HE HELPED ME WITH MY MENTAL HEALTH, and HE DIAGNOSED ME WITH A RARE DISEASE. All three refer to doctors, each one named on a preceding card — Dr. Rubin, Dr. Lewerenz, Dr. Osborne. For most of the video’s runtime, they are the only individuals granted the status of a named, active grammatical subject.
Compare that to how the video handles the people who did him harm. Nothing resembling institutional wrongdoing is ever assigned an actor. DECISIONS WERE MADE BEHIND MY BACK. FALSE NARRATIVES WERE SPREAD. AGREEMENTS UNRAVELED. THE TOUR WENT ON WITHOUT ME. Every one of these is passive construction with the responsible party scrubbed from the sentence. The former band and its label are never named at all — never even reduced to “they.” They don’t rise to the level of a pronoun.
The video grants exactly one other active subject, and it doesn’t arrive until the very end. The coda’s YOU’VE HELPED ME FIND MY FAITH, YOU’VE HELPED ME FIND MY REASON, YOU’VE HELPED ME FIND MY PURPOSE hands that same construction to a second party — his wife, his family, whoever the earlier THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO STOOD BY ME is addressed to — without ever naming them individually (see The Coda Opens the Frame, below). So the rule isn’t “only doctors get to act.” It’s narrower and more consistent than that: only people who helped him ever become the subject of a sentence in this video. The ones who can be credited by name get it mid-video, while the video is still building its case. The ones who are only ever addressed, never named, get it saved for the very end, once the case has been made. Harm never gets the sentence at all.
This is a more precise version of an instinct anyone watching the video is likely to have — that it studiously avoids naming I Prevail. It’s not simply avoidance. It’s a consistent grammar of trust: earned care gets an active verb, whether it arrives as a named doctor partway through or an unnamed “you” at the close. Institutional harm never gets one.
The Screen Fails Where the Voice Fails
The video’s darkest material isn’t handled uniformly, and the pattern in how it’s handled turns out to be the same one.
At the caption IT ALL LED TO A MANIC BREAK, the accompanying image is a specific, well-lit archival shot: a Beverly Hills balcony, pizza boxes, a red cup, a firepit, Brian reclined with a phone in hand. At I JUST WANTED THE NIGHTMARE TO END, the image is studio footage — Brian seated with another man at a console, plausibly the actual session where this song was made. Painful as both moments are, Brian remains the visible, composed subject of his own footage in both. The narrating “I” is still in the frame.
Two other cards go to black with no image at all: I WAS WRONG…, the hinge between the video’s two collapses, and MY FAMILY CHECKED ME INTO A MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY, its most vulnerable disclosure. What unifies these two and separates them from the manic-break and studio cards isn’t severity of content — the manic break is, if anything, the more alarming subject matter. It’s that both are the instant the first-person account itself fails. I WAS WRONG is the moment the narrator turns on his own prior narration, admitting the story he was telling wasn’t the whole one. The facility card is the one moment someone else’s decision — his family’s — physically overrides his. Everywhere else, however dark, Brian narrates what happened to him. In these two places, for a few seconds, nobody is narrating at all. The screen doesn’t withhold the body because the subject is too painful to show. It goes dark exactly when the “I” that has carried the entire video can’t hold the sentence together.
The Coda Opens the Frame
Hurricane’s pronoun arc moves from I to we — the individual absorbed into the group by the closing card. Phases moves from I to you. After the second collapse resolves into found purpose and fatherhood, the closing cards turn outward: THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO STOOD BY ME, YOU’VE HELPED ME FIND MY FAITH, YOU’VE HELPED ME FIND MY REASON, YOU’VE HELPED ME FIND MY PURPOSE, closing on I HOPE MY STORY INSPIRES YOU TO SHARE YOURS.
The video also declines to measure its ending by the same yardstick it used for the first half’s success — no chart numbers, no crowd shots, no industry recognition. The final images are domestic: a wife, a son, a wedding. Having spent most of its runtime insisting on sole authorship of his own account, the video’s very last move is to hand the same authorial tool to someone else. Not “believe me.” Closer to: your account also deserves a narrator.
The Cost of Changing the Pronoun
This method carries real costs, and they’re worth naming plainly rather than folding into praise.
The account is testimony, not adjudicated fact. The captions make specific claims — exclusion, unraveled agreements, decisions made without him — that the video is not positioned to verify independently, because it is assembled entirely from his own archive and his own text. What this essay can responsibly describe is what the video states and how it stages that statement, not whether every claim inside it would hold up against an account from anyone on the other side of it.
The captions leave little room to read the images on their own terms. By telling the audience exactly what each shot means before it can generate meaning independently, the video trades ambiguity for control. That’s the entire mechanism this essay has been describing — and it’s also a real narrowing. A viewer is rarely invited to disagree with what they’re looking at.
Twelve years of radically different weight get compressed into a uniform rhythm. A viral release, a marriage, a surgery, a birth, and a psychiatric hospitalization all arrive inside the same two-second card cadence. The consistency is what makes the video move; it’s also what risks flattening events of genuinely unequal magnitude into equivalent beats on a timeline.
The video’s account has a counter-account, and this essay owes it a mention. I Prevail’s own public statement announcing Burkheiser’s departure described it as mutual — language that sits in direct tension with the video’s captions about being shut out and pushed away. This essay is not positioned to adjudicate which account is more accurate, and doesn’t attempt to. But testing the video only against itself, without naming that a different official version exists, would be a quieter version of the same one-sidedness this essay has been describing in the video itself. The band’s characterization is on the record. It belongs on the record here too.
The essay’s own reading of the song’s “you” is more tempting than it is confirmed. Treating the lyric’s unnamed second person as I Prevail — or reading the song and video as sharing one coordinated instinct to withhold a name — fits the rest of this essay’s argument almost too well. That fit is a reason for caution, not confidence. A breakup song addressed to a generic “you” is common enough on its own; this essay’s job is to say plainly that the sharper reading is a critical interpretation this piece finds persuasive, not a fact anyone involved has confirmed.
Reclaiming a former band’s own visual signature to narrate a split from them is a genuinely pointed act, not only a vulnerable one. The Hurricane comparison sharpens the video’s craft considerably, but it cuts both ways: restaging your former band’s own collective origin language inside a solo statement is an assertive, even confrontational move dressed in the language of healing. The essay shouldn’t only credit its cleverness without naming what it’s doing to the party it never names.
The perseverance message remains unresolved. Touring is described as having taken priority over needed surgery; not giving up is also credited as the reason he survives the second collapse. The video changes what he’s persevering toward — relationships rather than a return to scale — but it doesn’t fully settle whether “I couldn’t give up” is the lesson or part of what caused the damage in the first place.
Extensive medical and psychological disclosure is treated as evidence, which risks normalizing the expectation that it should be. The video is candid about surgical footage, a diagnosis, and a hospitalization in ways that make an often-invisible set of struggles physically legible. That candor shouldn’t be read as proof that this degree of exposure was owed, either by him or by anyone telling a story like it.
Closing
Two videos begin on the same six words, spoken by the same man, seven years apart. In the first, the sentence immediately widens into a band. In the second, it holds.
That’s the whole method of Phases, compressed into its opening breath. Everything that follows — the caption grammar that saves an active verb for the people who helped him, a named doctor at a time until an unnamed “you” gets it at the very end; the two black screens that fall exactly where the narrating voice itself gives out; the restaging of I Prevail’s own origin-video language inside an account that finally excludes the word “we” — is the same argument, made at every scale the video has available to it. For over a decade, other people’s sentences kept absorbing him: an earlier collective narrative in which “I” became “we,” a professional dispute that delayed his own name from reaching an audience, a family that once had to make a decision for him that he couldn’t make for himself. Phases doesn’t undo any of that. It doesn’t need to. It only needs to hold the pronoun long enough to hand it, deliberately, to someone else at the end — which is the one thing none of the earlier versions of this story ever let him do.