‘My life’s work was being delightful. That really hurt me’: breakout Americana star Brennan Wedl on freeing herself through song
With her roots stretching from the Catholic church to riot grrrl, the US singer-songwriter explains how sobriety and self-analysis powered her classic new Waxahatchee-produced album
With her roots stretching from the Catholic church to riot grrrl, the US singer-songwriter explains how sobriety and self-analysis powered her classic new Waxahatchee-produced album The songwriting on Brennan Wedl’s new album is so ironclad that I kept checking the credits to see if any of its songs were actually covers of peak Lucinda Williams tracks that I’d somehow missed.
Nope: all originals by a 29-year-old songwriter whose radiant, hooky, tough Americana puts her toe-to-toe with genre godheads such as Williams circa Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, or Sheryl Crow had she grown up playing church basement punk shows; also, a vision of Courtney Love in cowboy boots. “I love Lucinda’s very earnest way of looking at daily life, and I hoped to achieve that on this record,” says Wedl, calling from her Nashville home, surrounded by vintage magazines and tchotchkes.
Wedl is warm and dudely; she answers almost every question with an exuberant “ toootally! ”. She cites her favourite of her new songs, the absurdly immediate Just Another Daddy Who Did Me Wrong, a bittersweet number that questions her self-destructive appeal. “It’s a very harsh look at reality, but also about how our minds can create so much fantasy around reality.
I’m working on not projecting too much on reality these days.” Continue reading...
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