Dove Shore
Audio By Carbonatix
Brett Landin is grappling with a whirlwind of feelings. The country-pop singer just graduated from the University of Southern California in May. In recent weeks, she has been putting the final touches on her debut EP Who Knew, which was released last Friday – a project three years in the making, encapsulating the emotional turmoil caused by love, growth and relationships in one’s early 20s.
We chatted with the Dallas native via Zoom days ahead of the EP’s release. She is in New York City with friends, gearing up to celebrate her 23rd birthday. She doesn’t have concrete party plans yet, but hopes the night ends at a bar or jazz lounge, listening to live music.
Though her parents did not work in music, Landin recalls her mother having an apt sense for emerging sounds, often sensing the music that would take over the landscape before it made a breakthrough.
“I feel like she was always on the cutting edge,” Landin says.
One of Landin’s earliest favorites was “My Front Porch Looking In” by Lonestar; she remembers dancing to it with her father. From a young age, her parents cultivated her love of music, no matter how noisy she was.
“I was the little girl who was banging on pots and pans on the floor,” says Landin. “And I feel really grateful that my parents allowed me to create music, even in an unconventional way. I’m sure it was probably very overwhelming at the time, because I was very chatty, and then combined with banging on pasta pots, that was probably a nightmare at times. But I’m very grateful that they facilitated my creativity.”
Landin briefly attended the Episcopal School of Dallas, but she felt something was missing during that time. In her sophomore year of high school, she studied in England for a year, where she discovered she wanted to pursue her art full-time.
“I had like powerhouse women voice, dance, and acting teachers who sat me down one day and were like ‘You’re really good at this, you should try and pursue musical theater,'” says Landin.
By her junior year of high school, she transferred to Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where she concentrated on acting.
When she graduated from high school, she began to pursue and audition for various acting gigs, but the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a creative shift. Discouraged by Zoom auditions, but still feeling a need to create art, Landin chose to focus on singing and songwriting.
Songwriting became Landin’s form of journaling, something she kept to herself.
Given the painful relatability of her songs, especially her latest single, “More Than One Way To Cheat,” it’s no surprise that Landin would want to wait until the time was right. Over a punchy, crooning track, Landin shares an account about a heartbreaking betrayal that feels all too familiar in the age of modern dating.
“Don’t say you never touched her in that little voice so sweet / Every woman knows there’s more than one way to cheat,” she sings on the song’s chorus.
The idea for “More Than One Way To Cheat” came to Landin at 3 a.m. one night. A few months later, she took it into a writers’ room with producer Christopher Dwight Harris and songwriter Leslie Satcher in order “to get some eyes on it.”
Around the time Landin made the shift from acting to singing, she’d started to notice a rising trend in the form of digital affairs.
“I think the access to social media works as an interface of intimacy,” says Landin, “and I felt like that was coming up a lot, not only in my personal life, but also in my friends’ lives and in fielding conversations. My friends would call me for advice, and they’re telling me like, ‘Oh, well, he did this, and that sits really poorly with me, but I guess he didn’t physically do anything.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, we’re in quarantine, he couldn’t physically do anything. And what he did was a supplement.'”
When writing songs, Landin doesn’t like to use the same method every time, probably because inspiration strikes her at rather “inconvenient times,” as she says.
“I’ll be like sitting in the car in traffic, or I’m out with friends, and I hear something that somebody says, or I audibly say something out loud, that resembles a lyric or an idea that I would want to expand upon,” Landin says. “And l’ll write it down on a napkin, we’ll write it down on my notes app, or we’ll pull out my phone and record a voice memo. And then, when I have the time I’ll sit down and start to flesh that idea out.”
In her early days of songwriting, Landin was hesitant to share her words with the world, but her new EP feels like a testament to growth and a companion to young twentysomethings coping with a broken heart.
Songs like Who Knew‘s title track feature Landin likening the dissolution of a relationship to sandcastles crumbling after being crushed by rushing ocean waters. In another standout, “Ain’t Nothing You Can Say,” Landin details recurring patterns and her refusal to fall for them again.
“I really wanted to target my age group and [write about] experiences that I wish I had heard on the radio, and that I needed at the time,” says Landin, “because I was going through something that I felt wasn’t being talked about, whether that’s emotional cheating, or whether that’s falling fast in a relationship, and questioning its authenticity – because it felt so natural and real.”
