Brennan Wedl releases her first solo project through the label (Kill Rock Stars) leading with this earnest yet playful debut, 2 Dollar Pistol. Originally from Minnesota, this gritty indie/Americana storyteller sings the scenes of her life with honesty and style.
WEDL states “The duality of solo acoustic guitar in the verses and huge distorted guitars in the chorus tells a larger story of my music career so far- a little bit of everything, experimentation, self-discovery, duality, gemini. I like to play with very bold and visceral imagery in my lyrics to make the song sound and feel huge”
Brennan Wedl documents those dizzying years spent in the world of ‘twenty-something’. Her radically unvarnished accounts detail an expansive universe that interweaves the everyday with scenes that might include catholic church camps, queer awakenings, one-night stands, or collapsed ‘forever’ relationships. The result? An eminently relatable catalog of moments when profound realizations arrive unexpectedly. While she has been steadily releasing poignant dispatches as a solo artist since 2016, in 2024 she takes a striking step forward with a new series of singles that will be released via Kill Rock Stars.
These recordings capture Wedl at her most unbounded and creatively impulsive; delivering sweetly lilting country one minute, and crashing rock the next, ringing out with jangling brightness at times and introspective in hushed acoustic guitar picking elsewhere. This impulsiveness is something that Wedl wrestles with daily. Much of her material is indirectly inspired by her quest to live cleanly after the realization that she couldn’t live the life she wanted when drugs and alcohol were involved. However, in a move that is definitive of her approach, she explodes this specific experience into an allegory of life at large. Central is her tug of war between moderation and hedonism. A battle that she may, in any instant, apply to intoxicants, relationships, spirituality, sexual liberty, and beyond.
The bubbling undercurrent throughout is a commitment to find comfort in restraint. Wedl’s knack for encapsulating the moment has been apparent since co-founding the teen Boston band Dazey & The Scouts in 2017 and through their viral resurgence in 2020 as a new audience found themselves drawn to the allure of their self-described “hormonal freak show”. As she heads into 2024 her newest compositions prove that she remains viscerally attached to her emotional core and an acutely gifted narrator of life’s highs and lows.
