New Orleans-based singer/songwriter Brittany Guerin, best known as the mononymous moniker Britti was gifted with a voice that has been described as bridging the distance between delicacy and flint — and like many singer/songwriters can’t remember she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t singing. “According to my mom, I was singing before I could talk,” Guerin says, likening herself to a Disney character. “I would sing throughout the halls of the house, throughout the aisles of the grocery stories, in my car seat,” the Louisiana-born artist recalls. “I was just a little bird, doing what came easy.”
Raised by her mother and grandmother — whom she does dubs “brown sugar and cayenne pepper,” respectively — Guerin continued to nurture her talent everywhere, sining in the school chorus and the church choir, between learning dance steps and playing soccer. “Singing is my passion,” she says. “But simultaneously, it’s also my purpose.”
Guerin relocated to the Crescent City and earned a degree in music performance from Loyola University in the mid 00s. But shortly after, was when when the clock began to slow down to a crawl on her vision, with her diploma collecting dust, as she landed into a retail grind that was both tantalizingly and depressingly performance adjacent. She spent a decade selling instruments and sheet music to aspiring musicians and artists while deferring her own. “For this 10-year span, I just stayed in that safe space of just thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll get to it. I’ll live my dreams eventually. I’m young.’”
While singing always came naturally, promoting herself just didn’t. But when a long-term relationship ended just before the pandemic, ironically her former partner’s parting gift was to urge her to pursue what she was clearly meant to do, proving that sometimes the wrong person can have the right idea. “He broke my heart into pieces that you would need a magnifying glass to find,” Guerin says, but it also set on a path to creativity for the first time in several years.
“I remember saying this out loud in prayer, ‘What if I actually try believing in myself?’ I had this whole dialogue with my ancestors, my spirit guide, and the divine like ‘What if I try?’,” she recalls. During a two-month furlough in the midst of the pandemic, Guerin began running meditating and — after buying her dream Martin guitar — writing songs.
“I was perfecting these songs at 2:00 in the morning, because there was no time limit because I wasn’t working.” Except, she was. “I started treating myself like a business and putting myself out there and posting videos at least once a week, and just really building my self-confidence,” she says of early clips that saw her covering some of her favorite songs like Sheryl Crow’s rendition of “The First Cut Is the Deepest” and Lainey Wilson‘s “Rolling Stone.”
The Wilson cover caught the attention of a country A&R executive, who saw her talent but also understood that Guerin was a little too left-of-center for Music Row. Others expressed interest but didn’t quite have a handle on her sound. “There were a lot of nights sitting on the floor crying and thinking ‘Okay. These darts are going forward, but they’re not hitting anything,’ and feeling very discouraged.”
Then she decided to cover her favorite Dan Auerbach song “Whispered Words (Pretty Lies).” “I’ve always really enjoyed his writing style, the New Orleans-based artist says of The Black Keys frontman and producer. “As joyful of a person as I am, I love a good melancholy song.”
“I was praying every single day that I would find somebody who would be able to hear my voice, see my potential, and have the resources to help me cultivate my dream,” she says. No one was more surprised than Guerin that that person turned out to be actually be Auerbach.
“I saw a video of her singing and strumming the acoustic guitar in her bedroom,” Auerbach recalls. “I thought she had an intriguing delivery, and I wanted to learn more. So we flew her up to Nashville to meet.” “
“You know when something feels wrong, and you know when something’s meant to be,” Guerin says of the meeting. “This is who I had been praying for.” On the day she flew up to Nashville, Auerbach says “we instantly hit it off.” And the pair began writing right away with The Black Keys frontman and producer brining in various co-writers, who he thought would complement the direction the two were heading and “lend an interesting flavor to the album,” including Roger Cook, Bobby Wood and Pat McLaughlin.“For someone who hadn’t done any of this, she took to it really quickly, and we just hit the ground running as soon as we started these writing sessions.
”“I’m sure he’s great with everybody, but we definitely vibe,” says Britti of the locked-in nature of the collaboration. “To the point where I’m just like, ‘Can I write with him until I’m 115, please?’”She also was thrilled by the speed with which the album came together, and the remarkable group of players Auerbach convened to bring the songs to life. “I felt like I was being heard, seen, and felt. I’m still in awe,” she says of the estimable group which included Robert Plant & Alison Krauss‘ and Sharon Van Etten‘s Jay Bellerose (drum), Sheryl Crow’s and Stevie Nicks’ Tom Bukovac (guitar), Yola‘s and Don Henley’s Mike Rojas (keys), Auerbach himself and a talented cast of collaborators. “I just pick people who I really respect and are very talented and get them in the room together,” says Auerbach of this first-time configuration of players. “Very rarely do bad things happen. They fed off her energy ultimately.”
And although she’s a relative newcomer, Auerbach believes that Britti was ready. “She grew up in the most musical environment in the world. It’s in her DNA,” The Black Keys frontman and producer says of Britti’s Louisiana upbringing. “She knows more about music than she ever realizes.”
Guerin points out that she honed her ear listening to contemporary R&B stations driving in the car and then signing hymns with friends and family in church. She would delve into blues, Zydeco and Motown with her grandmother and then switch to classical music with her grandfather. An uncle played jazz and schooled her in its intricacies on forays to and from New Orleans.
All of those sounds and more inform her 11-song, Dan Auerbach-proruced full-length debut, Hello, I’m Britti, which is slated for a February 2, 2024 release through Easy Eye Sound. Naturally, the New Orleans-based artist is heartened by what she sees as “progress in the world of understanding fluidity.” ”When I got together with her, it was clear that she was interested in all types of music. We talked about Sade a little bit, how much she loved her stage presence. And we talked about Aretha’s songs, Blues Brothers’ stuff, New Orleans music, we talked about all kinds of stuff,” adds Auerbach on the album’s varied influences and moods.
Fittingly, Hello, I’m Britti‘s 11 tracks tell their own compact stories with the album’s material rooted in the spectrum of emotions flowing from the haze of heartbreak to the electricity of new love to the quest for self-understanding and self-acceptance. The continuous thread that holds it all together is the New Orleans-based artist’s unique delivery.
Hello, I’m Britti‘s latest single, the gently swaying “Lullaby” pairs shimmering and yearning pedal steel, twinkling keys and understated percussion with the New Orleans-based artist’s vulnerable, heart-worn-on-sleeve vocal in a way that’s hauntingly gorgeous and cinematic. The song is an old to the comfort and security of a hard-won — and perhaps harder-earned — intimacy.
Directed by Vanessa Pla, the cinematic, mostly black and white visual for “Lullaby” is a retro-chic and glamorous look at the artist’s private and public life that explodes into lush color for the last third, in which we see Guerin on stage performing.
