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THis writing on Brennan Wedl’s new album is so compelling that I’m checking his credits to see if his songs are actually Lucinda Williams songs that I somehow missed. No: all the records written by the 29-year-old songwriter who is bright, shiny, difficult in Americana puts him toe to toe with the gods of the genre like Williams circa Car Wheels on Gravel Road, or Sheryl Crow was growing up playing church basement shows; also, a vision of Courtney Love in cowboy boots.
“I love Lucinda’s very honest approach to everyday life, and I hope to achieve that on this record,” says Wedl, singing from her home in Nashville, surrounded by old magazines and tchotchkes. Wedl is warm and dudely; he answers almost every question with joy”too much!“. He mentions his favorite song on his new single, “Just Another Daddy Who Did Me Wrong”, a sweet number that questions his self-harm. I’m trying not to show too much reality these days.”
It’s fair to say that Wedl doesn’t have much reason to watch his new, self-titled album produced by Waxahatchee (AKA Katie Crutchfield) and his former producer Brad Cook, who asked him to make an album after Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan put it on Wedl’s music.
Crutchfield, who had never spoken before, said: “I couldn’t hide his voice. “It’s at once beautiful, timeless and believable – for a man who at the time was not known.” When Crutchfield heard the original version of Two Dollar Pistol, drawn lovingly, through the window to a man frustrated by his desire for fame, “I was like, this guy is writing big songs that can be played in the arena.
Wedl sets the tone for the album – his third solo release after a largely vocal hiatus – to the point where he’s barely noticed. Including new songs written by some of his 20s, “a lot about communication between different versions of you, time travel and music; conversations with the unknown, conversations with big topics like man, God, Jesus, the group of ‘fathers’.”
Like many young songwriters in the US, Wedl comes from a religious background – but, strangely, he never denied it. She grew up in Missouri with her aunt’s nuns. He said: “I am very grateful to see different aspects of the Catholic Church. “I saw nuns dedicated to service, to education. But I also saw little boys being beaten. My grandfather is a big supporter of women priests and says we can’t keep messing with this – the church will die if they don’t change their ways. So, from the elders of my family who really made Christianity their own, it encouraged me to put it on my pagan life.”
Weld discovered riot grrrl when he attended the She Rock She Rock summer camp at the age of 12, and found the common ground between church and punk to come together to “build a new era”. Minnesota gave the Jayhawks, the Replacements and Prince (members of the New Power Generation, his backing band, played in his grandfather’s church band), and Wedl played both with his uncle and his first band, Sex Lessons. (Not something they actually discovered in high school.) “As I grew up listening to these artists, it made me dream of the day I’d go back to Minnesota and have a family,” he says.
He first left home to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied songwriting and co-founded the musical group Dazey and the Scouts. It took more than two years, then became a mini-epidemic on TikTok when a kid dancing to a Morrissey-inspired verse in their song Wet went viral. “TikTok has its dark side, but what it’s discovered is that it brings people together – being able to see yourself in art or music, no matter where you are, is magical,” says Wedl.
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Music also helped Wedl feel better. The most surprising moment in her album, Pretty Little Fantasy, challenges her view as “somebody’s daughter… prim and proper”. Growing up as an adult and the only girl, she says, “I wanted to be very helpful, and I think that girls are taught a lot. But then I was introduced to riot grrrl and Marina Abramović and the most embarrassing women in history, and it took me many years of my 20s to come to the realization that I was still working on a life of making myself interesting, and in fact I am not hurting, and I feel very sad. ‘Interesting’ is a mask that I put on for not dealing with my badness – and If I were interesting, no one would search anymore.”
On stage, Wedl developed it as “the desire to have fun – the desire to live the life I want”. It is filtered in the rehearsal space, it is his daily confidence. Lately, he’s been reminiscing about an earlier version of his solo project. “There was an upright bass player and an electric bass player because I didn’t want to offend someone by saying they couldn’t play,” he says with a laugh. “I’m sure it sounded awful!” That was 10 years ago now. “Being a band leader is a constant process of making people happy, building confidence and mutual respect, and I’m so grateful that I learn these great life lessons through music.”
He also praises the “12 different programs” and breaks down these forms. “Twenty-one has found me powerless,” he sang on his latest album, 2019’s Branch of Pure Water. “Often my life boils down to: how do my daily habits make me who I am?” He says. “When I was drinking, I was thinking about the next time I was going to do this, who was going to be there – the obsession with the wrong things.” Quitting alcohol didn’t solve his problems, but it made them clearer. He realized that he was someone who didn’t write, ignoring “this shortcut of a time when I couldn’t explain my heart to others; I could explain my guitar and my journal.”
In writing, he said: “It may be the way we communicate with things we don’t see, the contracts we sign with ourselves.” What we want to confirm this can be done with a pen and paper in most cases.
Waxahatchee on Brennan Wedl
From hearing Brennan to making history to now, I can’t wrap my head around his presence. He is special. Three or four years ago, Lindsey Jordan (AKA Snail Mail) was at my house and we were going back and forth, playing with each other. He put on I Wanna Be Your TV, by Brennan, and he didn’t give me anything, and I had to stop him and be like, what is this? Is it recent? Did someone young make this or is this an old song I’ve never heard of? He told me that Brennan was from Nashville. I couldn’t stop listening to him – I listened to that song a million times.
Soon after, he had a song with (western label) Kill Rock Stars, a few of which we also recorded. After that, we got in touch and I got to know him, then I saw him playing music in the studio, his way, his way. He always makes me happy – he is talented and humble but not in a dignified way, very precious, chaff, I shouldn’t be here way. He has perfect confidence. He can write a hook. His music is amazing. As I got to know him better, (I saw that) his writings are very strong. It’s all about what I like: it’s Kathleen Edwards, Lucinda Williams, Tom Petty – folk songwriters.
