{"id":707541,"date":"2026-07-23T18:52:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T18:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/707541\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T18:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T18:52:10","slug":"my-lifes-work-was-being-delightful-that-really-hurt-me-breakout-americana-star-brennan-wedl-on-freeing-herself-through-song-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/707541\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018My life\u2019s work was being delightful. That really hurt me\u2019: breakout Americana star Brennan Wedl on freeing herself through song | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

The songwriting on Brennan Wedl\u2019s 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love Lucinda\u2019s very earnest way of looking at daily life, and I hoped to achieve that on this record,\u201d 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 \u201ctoootally!\u201d. 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. \u201cIt\u2019s a very harsh look at reality, but also about how our minds can create so much fantasy around reality. I\u2019m working on not projecting too much on reality these days.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could reasonably say Wedl doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s Lindsey Jordan put them on to Wedl\u2019s music.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI just couldn\u2019t wrap my head around her voice,\u201d says Crutchfield, who had never produced before. \u201cIt\u2019s immediately iconic, so timeless and confident \u2013 for someone who was, at the time, so undiscovered.\u201d When Crutchfield heard an early version of Two Dollar Pistol, a loving, windows-down nudge to someone frustrated by ambition, \u201cI was like, this person\u2019s writing huge melodies that can be played in arenas. This is a really different level of songwriting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wedl puts the fully formed nature of the album \u2013 her third solo release after more muted outings \u2013 down to never having known herself better. Combining newly written songs and others from her 20s, \u201cit\u2019s 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 \u2018daddy\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brennan Wedl \u2026 \u2018I dream of the day I\u2019ll move back to Minnesota.\u2019 Photograph: Daniel Topete<\/p>\n

Like many of the US\u2019s best young alternative songwriters, Wedl comes from a religious background \u2013 but, unusually, she hasn\u2019t rejected it wholly. She grew up in Missouri with nuns for aunts. \u201cI\u2019m really grateful to have seen a lot of different sides of the Catholic church,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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\u2019t keep brushing this under the rug \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wedl 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 \u201cto build the new era of something\u201d. 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\u2019 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.) \u201cAs I get older and listen to these artists, it really makes me dream of the day that I\u2019ll move back to Minnesota and be with family,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cTikTok has its dark sides, but the discovery factor does bring people together \u2013 being able to see yourself in some kind of art or music, no matter where you are, is magic,\u201d says Wedl.<\/p>\n

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Music also helped Wedl see herself more clearly. Her album\u2019s rockiest moment, Pretty Little Fantasy, attacks perceptions of her as \u201csomebody\u2019s daughter \u2026 prim and proper\u201d. Growing up as the eldest and only girl, she says, \u201cI wanted to be so helpful, and I think girls are taught that a lot. But then I was introduced to riot grrrl and Marina Abramovi\u0107 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\u2019s work of being delightful, and that doesn\u2019t help anyone \u2013 actually, it really hurts me. I think \u2018delightful\u2019 is the mask I wore out of not dealing with my own shit \u2013 and so if I was a delight, no one would have to investigate further.\u201d<\/p>\n

On stage, Wedl cultivated being \u201cdead serious about having fun \u2013 the ambition to live the life I want\u201d. It filtered into the rehearsal space, then her everyday confidence. Recently, she was reminiscing on an earlier version of her solo project. \u201cThere was an upright bass player and an electric bass player because I didn\u2019t want to hurt someone\u2019s feelings by saying they couldn\u2019t play,\u201d she says, laughing. \u201cI\u2019m sure that sounded horrible!\u201d That was 10 years ago now. \u201cBeing the leader of a band is a constant crash course in people-pleasing, self-assuredness and respect, and I\u2019m so grateful that I get to learn these huge life lessons through music.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also credits \u201cvarious 12-step programmes\u201d with breaking these moulds. \u201cTwenty-one has found me sober,\u201d she sang on her last album, 2019\u2019s Holy Water Branch. \u201cA lot of my life boils down to: how do my daily habits make up who I am?\u201d she says. \u201cWhen I was drinking, I was really focused on the next time I was gonna do that, who was gonna be there \u2013 this mental obsession with the wrong things.\u201d Quitting drinking didn\u2019t erase her problems, but it made them clearer. She realised she had become someone who wasn\u2019t writing, neglecting \u201cthis shortcut for when I couldn\u2019t really explain what\u2019s on my heart to others; I could explain it to my guitar and to my journal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing, she says, \u201ccan be how we communicate with what we don\u2019t 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\u2019s really magical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waxahatchee on Brennan WedlWaxahatchee. Photograph: Sonja Horsman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

From first hearing Brennan to making the record to now, I kind of still can\u2019t fully wrap my head around her existence. She\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve never heard? She told me Brennan was from Nashville. I couldn\u2019t stop listening to her \u2013 I listened to that song a million times.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 she\u2019s so talented and so humble but not in a grating, overly precious, shucks, I shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s all influenced by my favourite stuff: it\u2019s Kathleen Edwards, Lucinda Williams, Tom Petty \u2013 the people\u2019s songwriters.<\/p>\n

Brennan Wedl is released via Anti- on 21 August<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The songwriting on Brennan Wedl\u2019s new album is so ironclad that I kept checking the credits to see…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":707542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-707541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/707542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}