INTERVIEW: Brynn Allison
By Madison Lemler
PC: Blake Beaver (@blakebeaver)
Brynn Allison is a 19-year-old, self-taught singer-songwriter from Edwardsburg, Michigan. She released her first EP, Meteor Showers, in the fall of 2019 and followed up with another EP called Hopeless Romantic in May of this year.
Allison began participating in musical theater at a very young age and, since then, her appreciation for music has only grown. Through theater, she built confidence and friendships and now studies theater at Ball State University. Eventually, she combined her love of music and interest in poetry, picked up her dad’s guitar, and tried her hand in songwriting. Without any music theory training, she started getting serious about songwriting in the summer of 2019 and then released her first EP shortly thereafter. When it comes to songwriting, every artist has a different approach: for Allison, it’s more sporadic than a step-by-step process. She takes note of one-liners, verses, ideas, and concepts that naturally come to her.
“It really was something I fell in love with, and fell in love with quickly because I was able to process what I was going through [through it],” Allison said. “[Songwriting] is something that I started doing because I thought it would be fun...For me, it’s something that’s so raw and honest and vulnerable.”
Alison kicked off Hopeless Romantic with a bang, namely through the single, “Jumpstart.” “‘[It] started as a love song to someone else’s girlfriend,” Allison described. “And it ever-evolved into something crazy […] The morning of its release, I came downstairs and my brother, sister-in-law, and my two nephews were blasting it on the TV and dancing to it.”
Creating the song was a memorable experience for the young artist, from the beginning. It was written in twenty minutes with the help of her friends, Danial Lytton and Mason Mast, in a dorm room at two in the morning. It’s one of Allison’s favorite songs that she’s written and one of her favorites to perform live. She made a video documenting the writing process and uploaded it to her Facebook page.
Like many small artists, most of Allison’s work is self-produced. The entirety of Hopeless Romantic was self-produced and “Racecar” from her first EP was also the product of just her and her laptop. Through her theater connections and people she met while she was at school, she found producers and a community that allows her to make the music she wants.
“I try to base my sound—like, the actual instruments you’re hearing—on the feeling of the song,” she described. “I think music is so fluid nowadays and you don’t really have to fit into one box.” That said, Allison made Hopeless Romantic fall onto the more acoustic side of things because the whole EP has a feeling that’s much more vulnerable compared to what comes next.
The EP is the first installment of a two-part series entitled ‘The Judas Project.’ The series, Allison’s “passion project,” was originally supposed to be a singular album—when she left for school last fall, Allison had just broken off her first long-term relationship and, understandably, wrote about how she was feeling. But, after all was said and done, she decided that the songs she wrote contained two sides of the same story, so, she split them into two EPs. The second installment, Judas, is said to come out early this fall.
“Half of the songs were very ‘hopeless romantic,’” Allison described. “And, then, the other half of the songs were very powerful and healing and questioned the things you believe in and what’s beyond the surface-level of heartbreak- like, all of those feelings afterward.”
“Judas” was the first song Allison wrote for the holistic ‘Judas Project’ and what started the project itself. Before Allison wrote the song, she was writing ‘glittery’ songs about love and growing up, but she found that she was capable of so much more than those few things.
“[‘Judas’] opened up this whole new world of new music and new writing and this new sense of self and sense of music,” Allison explained. “This is my whole heart and soul on an EP [Judas] […] I'm getting to open this door to so many emotions that I knew I had but didn't know how to deal with and [getting to] relive them and grow with them and put them to music which is just so cool.”
In the bible, Judas was the disciple that traded information about Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Though Judas is a villain in that story, Allison uses him to represent the aftermath of heartbreak—the part when you learn to love yourself again. As Allison explains, she was brought up in a very Catholic household, so, writing and producing a song with this sort of material was a terrifying, but justifiable decision. “[‘Judas’] wasn’t so much a song of religious questioning,” she explained. “I was using [religion] to convey the idea that you have to question everything you’re taught or you’re never going to know what you believe and what you don’t.”
The future for everyone, especially with everything that’s going on in the world right now, is unpredictable. That being said, Allison’s first and foremost goal is to release Judas as soon as possible. “It’s all fully written,” she said. “I’m working on it with a couple of different producers and I’m working on it a little bit by myself. But, because the music itself is so different, I wanted to bring in some full-band aspects to [it]. If I start writing more, and I feel like it’s stuff I can put on this album, [I will].”
Allison also hopes to continue playing shows soon, just as much as the rest of us hope to be able to go see shows as soon as possible, too. “My favorite part of this process [releasing material] is performing and letting people see, in real-time, who I am what I’m about,” says Allison. “When I perform, it’s just me and my guitar, and I think, at its core, [it’s just] me and my music because everything is written on my guitar.”
All-in-all, Brynn Allison is a very talented and diligent musician. She sets time aside every day to write, even if her biggest achievement for the day is a song about her fear of the ice cream man (yes, she actually did that). Her main goal isn’t necessarily to become a huge star, but for her music to impact people and to connect with them in some way. ‘The Judas Project’ inspired her to tell other people’s stories and everything going on in the world at the moment has only inspired her more.
“There are so many stories to tell,” she said. “As an artist, I feel like it's my responsibility to tell those stories and to use [my] privilege and my platform to be able to tell their stories, whether that be through music [or] social media. I think the core of songwriting is human connection we’re all living through the same things and trying to figure it out,” said Allison. “If my music can help one person process their situation, that would mean the world to me.”
You can listen to Hopeless Romantic on Spotify and Apple Music right now!
You can also follow Brynn on Instagram, @brynnallisonmusic!