Interview: Catching up with Brooke Eden

Photo by Ford Fairchild

“My little dog, Dolly, just jumped up on my lap. So she's here for the interview, too. She just likes being on camera, she loves the attention.”

In these days where Zoom interviews and Teams meetings have become the default for almost everyone, pets and the like joining us has become normal. And it has to be said, Brooke Eden’s little dog Dolly is super cute.

But as cute as she is we’re not here to talk dogs, we’re here to catch up with Brooke and find out what she’s been up to. Let’s rewind, right back to the beginning.

“I'm originally from the southeast coast of Florida, it's called West Palm Beach. My dad was a drummer in a local country band, so I was four years old when I started singing, and then started singing in the bars and the country bars with my dad's band and that just became my life. I went to University of Florida and graduated with a business degree, but a concentration in marketing and spent about a year in Florida. After I graduated from college, I spent about a year in my hometown doing shows. I just needed to save money in order to move to Nashville and the way I knew how to make money was through singing. So I was singing five nights a week, four hours a night, really building my vocal muscle and learning what made my voice unique and what made me unique. After about a year, I felt like I'd saved up enough money to move to Nashville.”

Part two of Brooke’s story is very much a rollercoaster ride, from the highs of being spotted at her very first show to the lows of lowlife chancers full of promises and lies.

“The very first night I got to Nashville, I got up on stage at a honky-tonk called Tootsie's that’s world-renowned and ended up getting on stage and singing a couple of songs after some drinks. They offered me a job to sing on weekends and the very first show that I had, the bandleader, his name was Greg Humphrey. He came up to me and he was like; “Listen, this is honky-tonk school. And I feel like you've already been through honky-tonk school. So what else do you want to do in Nashville?”

I'd been writing on my own, but I’d really love to learn how to write a country song like a Nashville country songwriter. And he was like; “Let's write on Tuesday.” So we started writing together about twice a week. And that's how I met my songwriting community in Nashville.”

“One thing led to the next and I wrote this song called ‘American Dreamin’, and my co-writer was signed to the publishing company under my current record label. She really wanted the publishing company to hear the song that we’d written, so we went in, sang the song, and they loved it, but also thought that the record label should hear me as an artist. The VP of the label, John Loba, came down and heard me play, and two weeks later I had a record deal offer and a publishing deal offer and I've been with that same record label ever since.”

Sounds simple, right? Well that’s the redacted version.  

“Gosh, the number of weird situations that I've been in where these people promised that they were going to make me famous and we ended up finding out that they were like shadesters. I mean, it's too many to count. There were so many bumps along the way where it could have just gone in a really bad direction. But luckily, I ended up here. That was just the short story.”

Among the dodgy situations that threw up “a red flag” and “ended up being a bad situation” that Brooke avoided are the good people; “Once you're in Nashville, people know each other and you can't get around here for too long being a shadester.” It also means that, in the main, it’s a good place for new people to arrive at; “Nashville is so great. It's a city full of amazing people who love to create and just really genuinely good people. Nashville has a way of weeding out the bad ones. It makes it a lot easier for new artists coming to Nashville, you can ask anyone in this town as it’s so small, they'll be like, oh, yeah, they're awesome or you need to steer away from them. So it's nice that we have this community where people kind of that each other for you.”

That’s the short version of how Brooke got to 2021. Having been pretty quiet since 2016 there’ve been a lot of changes going on; “I personally was going through a lot of change and growth in my life and at the same time my record label got bought out by BMG. So they were going through a lot of change as well. BMG came in and they listened, they said; “We really want you to go and make music that is totally you. We don't want to put any boundaries on that.”

“Given that opportunity, I didn't take it lightly. I didn't just want to put out the first three songs that I wrote. I wanted to really make sure that I was creating a sound and a brand and a unified project that was really me because I had been given the opportunity. I felt a responsibility to really put out authentic songs. And, you know, I was going through a whole process of self-love and self-acceptance during all this time and also creating music that was so different than the music that I was creating five years ago.”

Brooke and I spoke about her new music, and where she’s at now. You can find all that in part two of the interview, coming next week.

In the meantime, if you want to find out more about Brooke then visit her official website, or check out what she’s up to on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

You can also hear her new music on Tidal, Spotify or Apple Music.