Interview with Nat Brennan
Nat Brennan is a singer and songwriter.
Lemons
Contents
Max Raskin: I wanted to start with your lyrics. You have two lines about lemons tasting sweet and turning glass back into sand — I know you’ve said you’ve started to get more into folk — there’s a kind of folk music where the lyrics are unexpected. How do you write a lyric like that?
Nat Brennan: What I've always loved about folk music and its reemergence is the specificity of the lyrics. My favorite type of song is one where someone's talking about an experience that's so specific and so real. But even with the amount of specificity, anyone can listen to it and feel something.
The lemons line is born out of the reoccurring experience of having someone say something just for it to sound nice and to sound different. “I like lemons, because they're sweeter.” Sweeter than what? That has no real substance to it, you know?
MR: And you have a line about going to Massachusetts that seemed oddly specific.
NB: That's real. I was supposed to go to Massachusetts to tour colleges, but then I didn't because I wanted to stay back to maybe run into a boy that I liked. It was the stupidest thing that's ever happened to me, but that was what that came out of.
MR: Even though it’s specific, it’s layered.
NB: I think you're taking what you need to take from the lyrics, leaving what you need to leave.
I'm also a really big fan of artists like Phoebe Bridgers. I will say she's a bit of a basic choice, but Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, those types of artists…
MR: Why do you need to say she’s basic?
NB: I often get branded as just an angsty Phoebe Bridgers wannabe…and I'm honored, but there's a lot of depth to my music taste and to where I get my influences from — she just happens to be one of them.
Stage Fright
MR: You’ve been performing your whole life — what do you do to prep? Do you get nervous?
NB: I get really nervous. It’s a kind of nervousness that I know in my head that I can't escape, so I just try to accept it. I think the nervousness for me came from when I started performing my own music. When I thought I was going to be a big Broadway star and I was just doing theater in high school, I didn't get that nervous because I had someone else's material and my job was just to process it and put it through myself and convey the message that way. But once I started having my own messages to tell people, and it was my own work that I was doing, it got a lot more nerve wracking.
MR: What did the anxiety look like for you?
NB: It's very physical. I'll be talking a lot. I'll be walking around a lot.
MR: Do you throw up?
NB: No. I sweat a lot. I sweat a lot for sure. I haven't gotten so nervous that I've thrown up yet, but it's definitely gotten close. I can't eat before performance, even though I should.
And it's not just the day of the performance.
MR: Are you nervous now for your show next week?
NB: Yeah. It goes in waves. It'll come in imposter syndrome waves where I think, "Oh, I'm not supposed to be doing this. This is not good. The songs are terrible." But then I have the highs where I think, "This is going to be amazing. I'm so excited. Nothing can stop me." It is very much a really long experience of nervousness.
MR: Where do you get your cultural inputs?
NB: I watch a lot of TV. But it’s weird because I'll binge-watch a TV show, and then I won't watch TV for months.
MR: What's the last show you binge-watched?
NB: Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I loved it, but it really distracts me from my work.
I really like going to museums. There's something about looking at art that never used to resonate with me, but more recently I'd say my attention span has gotten longer. I've really valued going to museums and sitting with a piece of art. I had to sit in front of a piece of art for 30 minutes for an assignment once — and that’s where that started.
MR: What piece did you choose?
NB: It was very small painting of a wave. The wave broke off into six different female figures.
Top of the Pops
MR: What's your top three songs from last year on Spotify?
NB: First one is “Deep In Love” by Bonny Light Horseman, which is this tiny indie folk band that I saw open for Bon Iver over the summer. And this is one of my favorite songs of all time.
The second was “River” by Leon Bridges.
And then the third one is “Nothing/Sad N Stuff” by Lizzy McAlpine. And she's one of my biggest influences. So no Phoebe Bridgers, which is insane.
MR: What band have you seen the most in your life?
NB: This artist called Lucy Dacus. She's one of my inspirations for my music. She's kind of indie rock.
MR: Do you have a favorite musical?
NB: I used to be such a big theater kid. You know this for sure.
I would say my favorite is probably either Waitress or Little Shop of Horrors. Waitress is my dream role. And I grew up with Little Shop of Horrors and it’s very near and dear to my heart.
MR: What’s your tattoo?
NB: Julia, Ava [sisters] and I all have it. It's three ginkgo leaves put together in a chain and we each drew one of them.
MR: How do you think about being a sister and being a twin?
NB: The three of us are so close. We didn't realize how abnormal it was to be so close until Julia was in eighth grade at camp, and we would always be hanging out with her. These girls were making fun of her for being so close with her younger sisters.
Being a twin is something that is so special to me. It's not only that we're the closest to each other that people can be, it's that we have had basically the exact same experiences. The longest I've gone without her is maybe two weeks. And that's a lot. We didn't go to the same high school, which was hard for me, especially because I just had a hard time making friends in early high school.
MR: Why do you think you had a hard time making friends?
NB: I was just so antisocial and just did not want to talk to anyone.
MR: What would you do when you were being antisocial? Would you listen to music?
NB: I was listening to music all the time. I was reading a lot and just doing all my work.
MR: What kind of books were you reading?
NB: A lot of romance novels.
MR: Your first single is a love song — are there things you want to explore beyond that right now?
NB: It's so hard because even if I'm writing about something that isn't romantic, I still always kind of personify it and call it “you” or “him.” That’s something that I found to be so difficult to stray from.
Canyon Time
MR: What else do you want to explore?
NB: I want to write about sisterhood. I've had a really interesting relationship with my body, which is something that for the past couple years I've been exploring. I actually spoke about this my senior year, but I have struggled with eating for a long time. And that's something that I want to incorporate into my music. I've written a couple songs about it, but a lot of it either seems too real…I think I would want to wait until I can get it really perfect.
MR: One of the things that folk songs tend to be about — and something I think that must have seeped into you from your grandfather — is America.
NB: Yes.
MR: Let me ask you a big question: What do you think about America?
NB: America's interesting.
MR: We went down the Grand Canyon together and you were just down there again…
NB: …that's what I love about America. I really want to get the vibe and write about being a river woman in the Grand Canyon and just that heart of America.
When someone asks me, "What do you think of America?" My first thought is always politics. And that's something that I just despise. I love the beauty of the West and of the dirt, and I love to romanticize that.
I think I want it to be a topic of songwriting. It’s been so long since I've been in the country. I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut and then I moved to the city pretty young. So I tend to write about things that are more busy and city-like. I think that the two parts of my personality are the city person who is always going, going, going. And then I am so tied to the Grand Canyon part of myself.
I have this one song called “Blue Moon” that I'm hopefully going to release soon, which I wrote in the Grand Canyon this past summer.
MR: What’s it like being in college now. What are apps that people use?
NB: The one I can think of is BeReal. Do you know what that is?
MR: No.
NB: It's the new form of social media. I had it for a couple months and then I deleted it because even that got toxic. But basically a notification goes off at a different time every day, but it's the same time for everyone who has it. And you take a picture of whatever you're doing at that moment and it takes a picture from your front camera and your back camera. You have two minutes to take a picture.
MR: How did it get toxic?
NB: I have a Gen Z Mind, so I got really just into looking at what people are doing and then, you know, you get jealous or you get.
MR: What's a Gen Z mind to you?
NB: My mind is so malleable by today's technology. It's so easily morphed and influenced.
MR: But you're self-aware of that?
NB: I like to think so.
MR: How do you combat it?
NB: I kind of just yell at myself. If I get way too into it, I just shut my phone off or I literally am like, "Go read a book." I say that out loud and then I go read a book .
Rings and Fame
MR: What book are you reading right now?
NB: I'm reading Reckless Daughter, which is about Joni Mitchell written by one of her friends. Then it's The Garden of Eden by Hemingway. And then this random book called Island City.
MR: Ken Burns just did a documentary on Ernest Hemingway on PBS. It's great.
NB: I haven't read any Hemingway other than this one.
MR: I would recommend A Moveable Feast.
NB: Okay, good.
MR: Can I ask you about the nose ring?
NB: I got this in junior year of high school.
MR: Where’s the actual ring from?
NB: My mom got it for me for Christmas. It's just a really thick silver.
MR: Do you like jewelry?
NB: I love jewelry.
MR: If your house is burning down and you have one piece of jewelry to save, what are you saving?
NB: Well, I would say my dragonfly ring, but I lost that a week ago.
MR: Really?
NB: Yeah.
MR: How do you feel about losing it?
NB: I feel really sad. I'm really, really connected to dragonflies. I don't know why. I've just always really felt this connection and so I always made a point of wearing something that had a dragonfly on it and so it was that ring for a really long time.
MR: How do you feel about fame? Do you want to be famous?
NB: Being famous would be nice, but I don't need to be famous.
MR: What would be nice about it?
NB: Considering that I want to do music for my career, it would be nice not to have to work the starving artist lifestyle.
But I'm not going to lie and say that I'm completely selfless and that I don't want a little recognition. But this is something that grandpa has ingrained in my mind since I was born — as long as you're doing what you love, you don't need to be on a billboard.
Stefani Gaga
MR: What do you think you get from your father and your mother?
NB: From my mother, I get basically all my talent for sure. And she's taught me a lot of valuable lessons about respecting myself and standing up for myself and that I can have a certain sense of strength within my own being.
I think from my dad, I got the drive and the commitment to doing something that I love. He taught me that if you love something, you really have to go and chase it.
MR: How did you choose your stage name?
NB: So Brennan is my middle name — it’s a name in my dad's mom's family. I'm trying to think ahead and if this whole thing does work out, I really want to have a distinction between Natalie Sexton and Nat Brennan because I think a lot of artists can get really caught up in kind of portraying a certain image. And it was partially because of the sex thing. I didn't want to have sex in my stage name.
MR: Is that a little bit like Lady Gaga?
NB: I was thinking of her.
You think of Lady Gaga and she has such a distinct character. She's outrageous and she's just out of control. But Stefani is a lot different. You see the two melding together at some points, which isn't bad. But I want to make sure that who I'm portraying as a persona is different from who I actually am. Not that it'll be a bad persona, just that it's not always who I have to be.
Daydream Believer
MR: I notice you do this thing where you rub your eye — do you have any nervous habits?
NB: I do that a lot, but that's also because there's usually something in my eye and then I move my eyebrows a lot.
MR: You mean you raise them a lot?
NB: Yeah. I have that nervous tick especially when I'm meeting new people. In the beginning of high school, it happened a lot and I would not be able to stop and I would have to hold my forehead.
MR: What do you think that's about?
NB: I have no clue.
MR: Are you shy around new people?
NB: I think I've trained myself to not be, but deep down, I am. I'm really an introvert, but throughout the later years of high school, after I kind of spent the first few years with no friends, I just forced myself to be okay with meeting new people and being a little loud sometimes.
I think that's where my antisocial-ness came from — a fear of being really seen and being seen as too loud or too much.
MR: Do you daydream?
NB: A lot.
MR: What do you daydream about?
NB: I daydream about performing. I daydream about romance. I'm very much a hopeless romantic. It's unhealthy for sure. I think I am in my teenage girl era for sure.
MR: Is there any musician from the past that you're interested in learning about and exploring?
NB: Joni Mitchell. I mean, Janis Joplin is my idol. She's everything to me. And I've been learning about Phil Spector, which is…he’s just crazy.
I wouldn't say he's cool. I mean he has cool vibes, but he is also just insane.