‘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
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.”
You could reasonably say Wedl doesn’t have too many reasons to fantasise Her new, self-titled record was produced by Waxahatchee (AKA Katie Crutchfield) and her longtime producer Brad Cook, who asked to make the album after Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan put them on to Wedl’s music.
“I just couldn’t wrap my head around her voice,” says Crutchfield, who had never produced before. “It’s immediately iconic, so timeless and confident – for someone who was, at the time, so undiscovered.” When Crutchfield heard an early version of Two Dollar Pistol, a loving, windows-down nudge to someone frustrated by ambition, “I was like, this person’s writing huge melodies that can be played in arenas. This is a really different level of songwriting.”
Wedl puts the fully formed nature of the album – her third solo release after more muted outings – down to never having known herself better. Combining newly written songs and others from her 20s, “it’s a lot about communicating between various versions of you, time-travel with music; conversations with the unknown, dialogue with large themes like the man, God, Jesus, the trope of ‘daddy’.”
Like many of the US’s best young alternative songwriters, Wedl comes from a religious background – but, unusually, she hasn’t rejected it wholly. She grew up in Missouri with nuns for aunts. “I’m really grateful to have seen a lot of different sides of the Catholic church,” she says. “I saw nuns devoted to service, to education. But I also saw the assault of young boys. My grandfather is a huge advocate for female priests and says we can’t keep brushing this under the rug – the church will die if they do not change their ways. So, coming from elders in my family who have really made Christianity their own, it inspired me to put a little pagan twist on it in my adult life.”
Weld discovered riot grrrl when she attended the She Rock She Rock summer camp at age 12, and found common ground between the church and punk in their impetus to come together “to build the new era of something”. Minnesota offered a great local soundtrack in the Jayhawks, the Replacements and Prince (members of the New Power Generation, his backing band, played in her grandparents’ church band), and Wedl played both with her uncle and her first band, Sex Education. (Not something they actually got much of in high school.) “As I get older and listen to these artists, it really makes me dream of the day that I’ll move back to Minnesota and be with family,” she says.
She first left home to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied songwriting and co-founded the playful queercore outfit Dazey and the Scouts. They lasted just over two years, then became a minor pandemic TikTok sensation when a kid dancing to a Morrissey-impersonating verse in their song Wet went viral. “TikTok has its dark sides, but the discovery factor does bring people together – being able to see yourself in some kind of art or music, no matter where you are, is magic,” says Wedl.
Music also helped Wedl see herself more clearly. Her album’s rockiest moment, Pretty Little Fantasy, attacks perceptions of her as “somebody’s daughter … prim and proper”. Growing up as the eldest and only girl, she says, “I wanted to be so helpful, and I think girls are taught that a lot. But then I was introduced to riot grrrl and Marina Abramović and disgraced women throughout history, and it took most of my 20s to come to the conclusion that I was still carrying the self-imposed life’s work of being delightful, and that doesn’t help anyone – actually, it really hurts me. I think ‘delightful’ is the mask I wore out of not dealing with my own shit – and so if I was a delight, no one would have to investigate further.”
On stage, Wedl cultivated being “dead serious about having fun – the ambition to live the life I want”. It filtered into the rehearsal space, then her everyday confidence. Recently, she was reminiscing on an earlier version of her solo project. “There was an upright bass player and an electric bass player because I didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings by saying they couldn’t play,” she says, laughing. “I’m sure that sounded horrible!” That was 10 years ago now. “Being the leader of a band is a constant crash course in people-pleasing, self-assuredness and respect, and I’m so grateful that I get to learn these huge life lessons through music.”
She also credits “various 12-step programmes” with breaking these moulds. “Twenty-one has found me sober,” she sang on her last album, 2019’s Holy Water Branch. “A lot of my life boils down to: how do my daily habits make up who I am?” she says. “When I was drinking, I was really focused on the next time I was gonna do that, who was gonna be there – this mental obsession with the wrong things.” Quitting drinking didn’t erase her problems, but it made them clearer. She realised she had become someone who wasn’t writing, neglecting “this shortcut for when I couldn’t really explain what’s on my heart to others; I could explain it to my guitar and to my journal.”
Writing, she says, “can be how we communicate with what we don’t see, what contracts we sign with ourselves. What we want to bring into this reality can be done with pen and paper a lot of the time. It’s really magical.”
Waxahatchee on Brennan Wedl
From first hearing Brennan to making the record to now, I kind of still can’t fully wrap my head around her existence. She’s unique. Three or four years ago, Lindsey Jordan [AKA Snail Mail] was at my house and we were going back and forth, playing each other stuff. She put on I Wanna Be Your TV, by Brennan, and didn’t give me any context, and I had to stop her and be like, what is this? Is it recent? Did somebody young make this or is this an old song I’ve never heard? She told me Brennan was from Nashville. I couldn’t stop listening to her – I listened to that song a million times.
Shortly thereafter, she put out some singles with [west coast label] Kill Rock Stars, a handful of which we re-recorded. Eventually, we got in contact and I got to know her, then got to watch her play music in a studio, her technique, her approach. At every turn, she impresses me – she’s so talented and so humble but not in a grating, overly precious, shucks, I shouldn’t be here kinda way. She has the absolute perfect amount of confidence. She can really write a hook. The melodies are amazing. As I got to know her better, [I saw that] her lyric writing is really strong, too. It’s all influenced by my favourite stuff: it’s Kathleen Edwards, Lucinda Williams, Tom Petty – the people’s songwriters.
• Brennan Wedl is released via Anti- on 21 August