Brit Taylor used to love mornings.
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The emerging Americana artist with the luscious alto tone used to love that first cup of coffee and the view of the sunshine peering through the windows.
But then, 2017 happened…and all of a sudden, mornings turned downright ugly.
“In the span of a year, I was jobless, divorced, had a broke down car and lost my dog,” she says matter-of-factly during a recent interview with American Songwriter. “It almost sounds comical. (Pauses.) But for me, it wasn’t very funny.”
Indeed, for the first time in her life, Taylor found herself in a deep depression.
“I mean, the divorce came out of nowhere,” quietly says Taylor, who moved to Nashville when she was 17 and got married at 23. “I’m from a small town where that’s just not something you do. And that’s certainly not something that I thought would ever happen to me.”
But it did.
“I would wake up happy and smiling, and then I would remember everything and all of a sudden I was laying my head back on the pillow,” remembers Taylor of the year that changed everything. “It only took a few minutes for me to be hit with reality every morning, and it’s hard when you realize that you are going to have to deal with those emotions for the rest of the day. It was a crazy experience.”
But like pain often does, the depression she endured taught Taylor a valuable lesson. It also gave the East Kentucky native her debut single “Waking Up Ain’t Easy.” And in a world that continues to lament in the pain of a pandemic along with racial tensions that have gone and taken hostage of the year, it may seem that we are in desperate need for a lullaby to calm our collective worries.
But this ain’t no lullaby.
This is Brit Taylor’s truth.
“It was a song title that had been in my phone for about six months,” recalls Taylor of the melancholy song. “The title alone had always floored me, and for a long time, I told myself that it was just going to be too emotional for me to write.”
But a writing session with Dave Brainard ultimately led Taylor to face her fears and face the emotions she had been trying to hide for far too long.
“For me, this entire song came out of intense heartache,” she says.
Granted, once the song was complete, Taylor admits that she found herself flip flopping back and forth as to if this was the right time for a song such as this, a song about pain and hurt, a song that certainly wouldn’t come with a happy ending or a pretty bow.
But then, Taylor realized it was the ultimate time for a song such as this.
“Writing the song was the first step in my healing,” said Taylor, who is currently working on songs for an upcoming project set for release later this year. “It was the first step in getting back to being who I once was. And the fact is that people are hurting right now. And there is a comfort knowing that other people are going through some of the same emotions.”
These days, Taylor says that life might not be what she once envisioned, but in it’s own way, it’s perfect.
And yes, waking up ain’t as hard as it used to be.
