Baltimore native Brittney Spencer is a free-spirited artist celebrated for infusing life, truth, and wild imagination into her music. Recently named in Rolling Stone’s “25 Artists To Watch,” Spencer released her fabulous debut album ‘My Stupid Life’ last Friday. Our review of it is here in case you missed it the first time around. We were thrilled to catch up with her to talk all about it in this interview.
Congratulations on ‘My Stupid Life’ Brittney and thank you for your time today in what I know is a busy schedule!
Thank you! It’s been so exciting and I’m a little overwhelmed right now because I just found out a few minutes ago that the album is number one on the iTunes Country chart and number five in the All-Genre category too! How is this happening???
After such a long wait it is well deserved.
Thank you. I wanted to take my time and make it right, you know? I was on the road a lot in 2021 and 2022 and it would have been hard to finish writing and recording an album during those years. I needed to take time off the road last year so that I could finish the record in the way that I knew it needed to be done.
I’m really grateful for my team and my label for giving me the space to finish this album and not rushing me into it. It’s been four years now since I released my first EP and two years since I signed my record deal and I just wanted everything to be right.
Unusually for a debut album it’s very collaborative. Ashley Monroe, Maren Morris, Grace Potter, Jason Isbell, Jennifer Wayne, Abbey Cone – they have all contributed to it, amongst others, in different ways. Is that a reflection of who you are? It takes a village, right?
I’m just kinda that way in general – I’m a very communal and collaborative person. I hear things and my brain automatically goes,’ I think someone like Abbey Cone would sound so good on this song!’ (laughing) I’m naturally just that way. I’m a very one-on-one person, I like hanging out at the kitchen table and talking to someone rather than being the life and soul of a big group somewhere else.
I also wanted the collaborations to be with different kinds of people. I wanted my fans to hear themselves back and that means different styles and different voices. I wanted someone on there and something for everybody and I feel really grateful that my friends didn’t think it was too much of a dorky idea! (laughing)
Your career over the past few years has kind of been defined by collaborative events and moments with the likes of artists like The Highwomen, Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris to name but a few. Is there a special moment that holds a cherished place in your heart?
I’ve been lucky to have some really cool moments and it’s very difficult for me to rank them because they all mean something to me. Singing with my sister, Mickey Guyton was awesome. Singing with Jason Isbell was so cool – I can still remember the very first time we sang ‘Gimme Shelter’ as an encore song out on his tour – it felt so intense and when it got posted on line it just took off.
I will say that there was one show where I was scared out of my brains! It pushed me so much as a singer. That was filling in for Amanda Shires on a show with The Highwomen. I’d only gotten the call 24 hours prior to the show! Amanda called me and told me that she couldn’t make it and asked whether I could fill in for her……….tomorrow! (laughing) I had to learn 13 songs in a few hours and I stayed up all night and learned the songs! Brandi (Carlile) had to send a plane for me to get there because it was too last minute to even get a commercial flight.
There was a moment in the show when I looked around at the fellow performers up on stage with me and I could not believe that it had only been a year since I met them all on Twitter! They literally jump-started my career because they found me singing one of their songs on Twitter. I admire them as artists so much because you also know who they are as people as well, right? To go from being on Twitter and know that they trusted me to sing up on stage with them made me also trust myself – I wanted to rise to the occasion and repay their faith in me but I also wanted to show everyone that I was capable of dong that permanently. That moment was a big step forward for me as an artist. It was a pivotal moment in finding out who I am.
The most recent pivotal moment, I guess, is the album release last week. If I could take you back a decade or so and let you speak to the Baltimore you who was just about to set off to try and ‘make it’ in Nashville and let you give some advice to her, what would you say?
I think I’d tell myself to be a little more open. I would tell me to find myself a little quicker than I did, maybe, and not to be so afraid of myself. This album is me learning how to open up and become a lot more vulnerable than I have been in the past. I’m learning to be more vulnerable and honest with my feelings in real life – I mean, I hate feelings, I really do! I say that as a very emotional person too. (laughing) Feelings are so hard to navigate. If you ignore them you are ignoring your own intuition so we should all listen to them a lot more than we sometimes do, it’ll save yourself a lot of pain in the long run.
I would also tell me not to listen to people who try to tell you to live a more closed off life. I’m not the kind of artist who can just do something because it ‘makes sense’ for my career, right? My heart has to be really into something to be able to make the right decision. I don’t chase things or do things because it might ‘look good’ for me. It has to make sense to me as a person and I have to go to sleep at night knowing that I’m a good person, or at least trying to be a good person. This road can be cold and it can be evil and I’m fighting like hell to not contribute to anything that makes things worse.
The album feels very much like a journey. From the swet, naive opening of ‘New to This Town’ to the soul searching of last track, ‘Reaching Out.’ Did you structure the sequencing of the songs deliberately in order to achieve that?
Oh yeah! It was a big process. I wanted the album to be a journey, for sure. I wanted to open up with a vulnerable song about me feeling lonely and I knew that I wanted to close the album down with ‘Reaching Out’ which is a really vulnerable song for me as well.
In between I wanted to take people on a sonic journey. After ‘New to This Town’ I wanted to jolt people out of that mood and throw them into something lighter and a lot more fun so we went with ‘I Got Time.’ I’m in a fun space then, so let me ring my friends and get them all on a girls night in, right? I also felt it was important to have ‘Bigger Than the Song’ in the first five songs of the album because it was the first single that came out………..
You then have a little grouping of ‘The Last Time,’ ‘My First Rodeo’ and ‘Deeper’ all clustered together which feels, to me, like the R&B and Soul part of the album.
That was really intentional. My introduction, coming from Baltimore, to the south and the music of the south was a lot of soulful people. Every summer we would go down to South Carolina because someone would have passed away. I don’t know how or why but that always seemed to be the case! It was always in the summer time. When we would go we would listen to a bunch of soulful R&B singers who came from the south – I loved hearing their dialect and phrasing and it was how I learned about singing in that way.
I wanted those three songs to encompass a lot of what my introduction to the south was. That’s who I am, at my core. I’m a conglomerate of a lot of things and I wanted to reflect that on the album. My producer, Daniel Tashian, was such a genius. He’s great at bringing sounds together and we were able to play around in the studio and find out what sounds and songs fitted the mood that I wanted to create.
Alongside the soul searching and vulnerability there’s a whole bunch of fun on the album too with songs like ‘I Got Time,’ ‘Night In’ and ‘First Car Feeling’ – which sounds like it could have been lifted from a Keith Urban album to me. Was that important to you, to show that side of your personality too?
I love Keith! Showing the fun side of me was definitely at the top of the list of my priorities. We recorded way more songs than we put on the album and Daniel and I had to narrow it down to the finished article. I’m constantly out on the road playing shows and I said to Daniel that if I had to tour this album for the next two years I needed some uptempo and fun songs to sing and play live. I didn’t know whether I could live in raw, ballad, vulnerability land for 90 minutes a night for the next two years! (laughing)
When I listen to songs at the end of the day when I’m cooking dinner I have a playlist for that. When I’m trying to stop over thinking things I have a different playlist that pulls me out of reality. When I want to be in my feels and challenge my thinking, I have a different playlist for that too. It’s what everybody does, right? I wanted the album to feel like that as well. You don’t go through the whole day just needing one mood or one type of song. It was important for me to have different sounds and emotions on ‘My Stupid Life’.
It was important to me to have a little nostalgia on the album and that’s where ‘First Car Feeling’ comes in. It’s about remembering a time when you didn’t have as many pressures as you do now. Everybody can relate to a song like that.
‘First Car Feeling’ and ‘Bigger Than the Song’ sound like massive radio hits to me. Is success in that format important to you and what will be the measure that you use to determine the success of the album overall do you think?
I love the radio. ‘Bigger Than the Song’ is a love song to the radio. I would love to hear that on the radio one day and success in that format is one of my metrics of success but not the only one. Success, in general, is not about charts although I know that those things are important but I’m going to leave that to my label and focus my attentions elsewhere. Right now, I’m actually just interested in talking to and interacting with the fans.
I’m out on tour with Grace Potter at the moment and I’m out at the merch stand after my set or after the show and that’s the favourite part of my day, just talking to people. I love hearing how my songs relate to people – that’s my metric of success. That’s what I make music for. I know what the numbers are and I know what they need to be so that I can sustain a career and keep making music but my main focus will always be on the songs and the fans and making sure those two worlds meet and that I can make music that helps people feel less alone in life.
Is there a hidden gem on the album that people like me aren’t talking to you enough right now? I feel a track like ‘Desperate’, which is fabulous, might get a little overlooked or overshadowed by the bigger, bolder, louder songs?
I will say that given the album only came out three days ago all of the songs feel a big hidden right now! (laughing) ‘Desperate’ is a cool deep cut and I really love ‘If You Say So’ too. That one is one of my favourite songs on the album right now. When we went into the studio Daniel (Tashian) changed the vibe of that song. It was in a different time signature and very much more like a ballad. He put some lift into it and gave it a groove which now makes it so much more fun to sing live out on the road. The older, original version is still there on Youtube from five years ago if anyone wants to track that down.
I do hope we get to hear you sings these songs live here in the UK at some point in the coming year.
Oh, it needs to happen. London is my favourite place in the world. To give you some context, I literally flew over there just to watch some American football last October! (laughing) I’m that person. I want to come back and play some shows for you as soon as I can. The UK crowd has been so kind to me throughout my career, I love you guys so much.
Check out Brittney Spencer’s fabulous new album ‘My Stupid Life’ in all the usual places right now.
