INSIGHTFUL SONGWRITING: Briana Calhoun

After struggling with addiction, depression and anxiety, Briana Calhoun sought a relationship with God that opened doors. Now, at age thirty-four, she is focused on her passion for music.

article by Vanelis Rivera | Photography by Andrew Bailey

For Briana Calhoun, crafting music started and grew during her teenage years, but a long journey ensued before she could share it with the rest of us: “When you’re a teenage girl, everything is a catastrophe and you need something to get you through, so my outlet was songwriting. That’s how it got started.” Though she picked up the guitar at age twelve, she only became serious about guitar around age sixteen to accompany her songwriting, which blossomed thanks to her teenage angst. A three chord regimen quickly turned into more complex bar chords and nifty strum patterns. As the struggles of her teens and early twenties faded away, the driving force of Calhoun’s music artistry focused on complex emotions and resolutions. With an eclectic style of country, pop, Americana, and folk, Calhoun’s new EP Learn Girl is packaged with passion and persistence.

Originally born in Dallas, Texas, Calhoun moved to Louisiana at the age of twelve. She learned to love music at an early age due to the musical legacy of her mother Amanda McDowell, a local musician and songwriter, and her grandfather, a pianist. “We were big into church growing up,” she says, crediting the experience with sharpening her performance, harmonizing, and guitar skills. It wouldn’t be until her early thirties, what some may consider a late start, that Calhoun found herself in the best position to pursue and create music. She explains, “The one reason I’m thirty-four and just now going after my music one hundred percent is, I had a rough go at it during my twenties.”

Throughout her childhood, familial and personal struggles mounted by the age of sixteen. Issues that began as low self-esteem became a “full-on” battle with addiction, depression, and anxiety. This battle lasted for ten years and diminished her drive to pursue music the way she really wanted to. She thought her creative life was over, but then she began to seek a stronger relationship with God, and the doors opened. She utilized her journalism degree to procure a writing spot with the Farmerville Gazette and the Ruston Daily Leader. A couple of years in, the director of a private school in Farmerville approached her to teach Spanish, a degree she had yet to take advantage of. At that point, she still wanted to pick up all the pieces from her former life, so she took the offer and is now in her seventh year of teaching. While teaching, she met her husband Jeremy Calhoun, and they brought their daughter Bristol into the world. Finally, she is financially established enough to record her songs, and she’s more focused in executing her passion with tact and emphatic decisiveness than ever before.

A few months ago her passion for music was at a Shakespearean crossroads—to pursue or not to pursue? Her overall sentiment was, “If I don’t do something now, it’s going to be too late.” She decided to turn to her social media platform. “I thought I was taking a risk, putting how I felt out there on Facebook,” she admits. But after the post, a few opportunities unfolded, like an open invitation to write with established Nashville songwriters. More is happening for her now than ever before, and she’s noticed that it coincides with the moments that she embraces and shares her vulnerability. She explains, “My confidence and self-awareness is so different now that I’m in my thirties. In my twenties, I was just so unsure of myself. I was insecure about my music. I didn’t have a foundation, and honestly, I didn’t think I was good enough. Something inside me told me I wasn’t good enough.”

Her recent risks have merited rewards, and her mindset has drastically shifted. Not only does she now know she’s good enough, she has cemented her decision to pursue a music career. “I’m not being braggadocious. I know that God gave me this gift, so I’m going to try to do something with it. I feel like it was for a reason,” she says. Even if nothing happens, Calhoun never wants to look back and have to say, “I didn’t do what I could.” More importantly, her dreams impact her daughter. “I want her to be the kind of girl that can do it all, and I want her to know that about herself because she sees it in me,” Calhoun asserts, knowing children learn by example.

Currently, she’s in the final stages of tracking and mixing her EP at Fort Sumner, Dan Sumner’s recording studio. “I love Dan to death, and we really work well together. He listens to me and I listen to him. He’s like the cool college professor that all the kids want to hang out with,” she laughs. The title track of the record, “Learn Girl,” represents her recent songwriting approach—relatable songs about self-empowerment and battling the punches of life. “I still have a lot of things I struggle with,” she says, but the songs don’t center around angst like in her teenage years. “Learn Girl” began as a lecture to herself in song. In the midst of beating herself up for a decision, an inner voice told her, “Stop. Just stop. Appreciate yourself.” In an early version, the chorus started like a reprimand, but she ended up turning it around, making it about lifting yourself up. The process mirrors the change in her approach to life. “When you’re sitting there and you’re self deprecating, it only leads to more negativity,” Calhoun notes, encouraging people to always find the good. Just as upbeat but with a call for self-evaluation, “Hangup” is about the human nature of having vices. “I think it’s funny how some people can be so judgemental about other people, but everyone has something that they struggle with,” she says. The point of the song is to illuminate the fact that just because you don’t see someone’s vice, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Regardless of what that vice may be, the song calls for listeners, in a surge of wordplay, to hang ‘em up.

One of her oldest songs makes an appearance on this EP. Calhoun wrote “Whiskey” when she was seventeen, and it was simply about a bad decision to drink. “The song says it all,” she declares. It’s not a song she relates to or that represents her currently, but she remembers the moment when she woke up and started writing it. People often tell her how much they enjoy that song, so she added it to the EP, which also helped to show her country side. “I don’t want to not be true to myself,” she says. This song, while not a part of her present, is a piece of her past, and it helps her chances as a country writer. Though “Whiskey” is not a country song in the vein of “I fell off my horse and broke my knee,” it’s about whiskey and being heartbroken, common subjects of the country genre. “I’ve always said there needs to be a new genre called southern pop,” she claims, adding, “I’m not really country. I’m not really pop. But you can tell I’m from the south when I play.” Lately, she’s dived into the discography of Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris, making observations on the genre lines being crossed in country music. Early on, a lot of her influencers were singer-songwriters from the sixties and seventies like Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and James Taylor. Her chief musical influence remains her mom. “Mom has a lot of good stuff,” she says, mentioning her mom’s body of work.

Calhoun has written about ten songs in the past couple months. “I actually dream a lot of my songs,” Calhoun casually reveals. A recent song in her growing body of work, “Touch Me,” was almost entirely constructed in a dream. In it, a Nigerian prophetess was revealing hidden aspects of a seated audience. Calhoun verged on leaving out of fear of what would be revealed about her, but the prophetess caught her mid-move. You, stop! Come back. The prophetess then instructed her to empty the contents of her purse and informed Calhoun, Nothing you have is yours. Everything you have has been given to you. You need to remember that. Calhoun left and found herself in a van with several people. You want to hear my latest song? She had an old school tape recorder and pressed play, revealing the current chorus of “Touch Me.” Upon waking, Calhoun used the plot of the dream in the verses—I want someone to empty all my secrets out / And know exactly what I’m all about / Maybe I’m wrong, but that could be right now / If you touch me.

“A lot of artists think that you have to have a lot of drama to write good stuff,” says Calhoun. She used to think that as well, but now she knows better. Writing about troubled times is quite often relatable, but Calhoun believes that good, lasting songs should be insightful, a skill heightened by co-writing. “I tell my students when I make them do group work, you work with other people to broaden your perspective,” she says. Good songs also craft truthful lyrics, engaging wordplay, rhyme, and rhythm. “I’m a big word nerd,” she admits, mentioning a song where she took colloquialisms and idioms that included the word “kind” and strung them into verse. “You can get into my car and I may be listening to Kendrick Lamar or Nora Jones or The Band,” she says, admitting her moody music appetite. Keeping her musical choices diverse helps her write with acumen, and it keeps her music from sounding repetitive.

Briana Calhoun is the type of artist that keeps her beginner guitar mounted next to her Taylor acoustic. She shadow boxes when she sings bridges to her songs and claims to do pushups in order to reinvigorate a recording session. Though her vocals have a powerful punch, she can still crack jokes about minor inconsistencies: “My voice is cracking like a thirteen year old that smokes a pack a day.” Calhoun is nestled firmly where down-to-earth meets gracious talent—the framework of lasting artists.

Calhoun’s songs are available on iTunes and Spotify. She released her first EP “999” in October and re-released an original single “Playing Pretend” from August of 2016. Links to her music and social media can be found on her website: www.brismusic.com. For booking information contact: (318) 331-5340. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram (@brismusic.la) to stay tuned for a release party to be scheduled soon.