Brennan Wedl Manifests all the Right Things
Like catching a train or winning the lottery, it is a rare thing to find someone in their 20s in the exact right place at the exact right time. But that’s where Brennan Wedl lives- in the right spot. And more literally, right now, in Nashville. Brennan is a singer-songwriter from Minnesota who has been in bands like “Brennan and the Bats” and “Dazey and the Scouts” while simultaneously pursuing her own sound. She has two emotionally resonant EPs currently out, Jersey Devil and Holy Water Branch, with a third on its way, Sleeping with Jeans On, which will be released April 2nd. Brennan’s sound feels inherently nostalgic yet her lyrics place the listener firmly in the present, like a young Joni Mitchell on Tik Tok.
I met Brennan when I was a freshman in highschool, Silly Bandz on my wrist, “Price Tag” by Jessie J on my iPod Nano. In the decade since, I’ve seen her hair go from blonde to red, long to short, straightened to natural, and one particularly memorable period when she died her banged bob half black and half bleached. When I interviewed her over Zoom on a recent Saturday morning, her hair was its natural color, her face framed by curly bangs. After years of guessing about our futures, Brennan has seemed to arrive at hers.
Interview has been condensed for length and clarity, and slightly unhinged tangents about high school have been omitted.
C: Brennan! How are you doing?
B: I am truly happy. I am truly happy and excited about life and I’m feeling really damn good.
C: So I have actual questions written down, and I’m worried they are going to get too earnest, so just bear with me.
B: I love it.
C: If you had to describe this album to someone who has never heard your music, how would you describe it?
B: It is the love child of Lucinda Williams and Elliot Smith.
C: I knew it was going to be a love child of some kind.
B: It has a little twang, and it’s very honest songwriting. I’d say it’s the most honest sound, closest to what my soul sounds like. Nashville has definitely sunk it’s claws into me.
C: When you are making the actual music, do you start with the melody or do you start with the lyrics?
B: I start with the guitar. And I try to find a good sound that could stand on its own, and then I do lyrics and melody at the same time. Kind of like [Brennan starts to sing] “lala, going to the store…”
C: Okay, so you have to add an extra song on the album and it’s called “going to the store”... Can you talk about the title and how you decided on Sleeping with Jeans On?
B: A few years ago I wrote a song called Sleeping with Jeans On and I had a teacher that said, “don’t be offended, but this is a little country sounding,” and the album’s a little country sounding, so I thought, why not. There’s kind of an homage to that in [one of the songs on the album,] “Manifesting All the Wrong Things”. The line is, “fluorescent flicker, you’re sound asleep, while I slowly slip on my jeans.”
C: And are you someone who sleeps with their jeans on, ultimately?
B: Absolutely not. Psychotic.
C: What was the process of making the album?
B: It’s kind of my quarantine EP, like I wrote the songs in quarantine, and then it was a very sexy process. Matt [Brennan’s partner] and I recorded it together, just me and him. He played drums and lap steel, I played guitar, I sang, and we just kind of worked on it together for a few months. Just kind of easy breezy, going slow, and now we are at the end. Quaran-EP.
C: I was relistening to your older songs, and I feel the theme of home is very present. Your last album seemed to express a very nostalgic sense of home, whereas this album feels like finding people as home, and building home. I wanted to know how you felt your music has reflected your own sense of home.
B: I think that home changes a lot. I recently wrote a little ditty about home being wherever you go. I’m a big creature of comfort, so I like having a space, I like going home to a place. That’s like the ultimate comfort. I think in this EP it’s like an actualized vision of home. And I think it- I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I feel most home in my body and life than ever before. And I think it translates. And also being quarantined- you’re always home. Home is your world. I think that was just on my mind.
C: I’ve never known you without you wanting to be a musician, and that has always been a part of you. How have your goals changed and what being a successful musician means to you?
B: It definitely used to be a crapshoot, like, “I’m going to perform at Jingle Ball!” [laughs] In the beginning it was definitely like, “I’m going to be so famous and make my bullies mad.” And then I started to learn things about the music industry and was like oh, this is hard. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no other option and that’s been a huge driving force for me. I don’t do anything else. I’ve put all my eggs in this basket, so, figure it out! I get little books on how to succeed, I’m a business bitch, trying to make it. The pandemic has been a really interesting flip flop on what you know, because live music used to be what you do all the time to gain exposure, but now it’s like being a content creator online. It took me like a year to accept that, but now I’m TikToking, and live streaming, and it’s fun.
C: One of my favorite aspects of your music is that you have such a classically beautiful voice, but you are also not afraid to use a lot of minor sounds and whispers or lean into the uncomfortable. I mean you were in choir, you have this choir voice, but you also have some twang and even moments of haunting on this album- how do you choose when you use that darker side of your voice?
B: I think it’s all about balance and putting on enough of the special sauce. It’s all about the sauce, and I think the darker side of my voice is the special sauce. And you don’t want too much sauce, because you might get lost.
C: Lost in the sauce.
B: Exactly. I think songs definitely evolve from the time I write them to the time I record them to when I play them afterwards- I play with the inflections and the tones, and I think it is about how I feel in the moment. I don’t know if I’ll ever find “my sound”. It’s always changing, and I think that’s interesting. I think for me music is about expressing whatever I’m feeling in that moment. I love just writing little ditties that will never be heard, they will go to the Island of Lost Songs. I can always- it’s like therapy or like journaling. I can always come back to songwriting and find that I answer some of my own questions. And when other people identify with that, that’s just a great feeling.
C: We met at a Catholic high school, and I think both of our childhoods incorporated a lot of faith, a rather rigid view of faith. It was really interesting that there is a lot of spirituality present in your songs. They felt communal, in an almost church-like experience. How does faith and spirituality affect your music?
B: When I was in Boston [Brennan studied at the Berklee School of Music] I was really into witchy shit, and my witch friend told me that my magic was songwriting. So I really feel that. And I think a lot of songwriters can attest to this too, where you are simply a vehicle for a song and you're working with nature and with the energy around you to create a song. And it’s not just you. And I’m really respectful of that and I know that it is a really ancient craft. It’s really honest and you can’t bullshit yourself while you write the song or it will be shit. But shit is the best fertilizer. The bad songs make the good songs.
Brennan’s album Sleeping with Jeans On will be released on Spotify and all streaming platforms on April 2nd. Her first single, “I Wanna Be Your TV,” will be released on March 26th. You can find her other EPs, Jersey Devil and Holy Water Branch linked here. You can follow Brennan @brennanwedl and find her wandering on the Island of Lost Songs.
