Christy Bruneau, a San Diego Music Awards nominee, and talented San Diego singer/songwriter favorite, has been writing and performing her always memorable songs since the late 90's. As a performer one is taken by her vocal skills, musicianship, ease and honest presence. The skillfully written stories she sings touch your heart and linger in your mind long after the last note is sung. Often categorized as a folk/blues singer, Christy's newest project realizes an intriguing and exciting bold new direction, an approach musically exploring Appalachian, and Americana style elements with songs and literary stories written from real family tales about all of our often shared experiences of hurt, loss and hope.
Thank you, Christy for agreeing to the interview. When and what had you start songwriting?
It was in 1997 when I really started writing songs. I had a broken heart, a whole bunch of poems, and a guitar from the OB pawnshop. My roommate played guitar and showed me a handful of chords. So I shut myself in my room, and I wrote a whole bunch of songs like “Heart of a Woman” which I recorded on my first album Angels of Mercy. Once I started writing I really couldn’t stop.
At the time I had just so happened to be living on Newport avenue a couple of blocks up from Java Joe’s place on the corner of Newport and Bacon. The whole place was bustling with singer-songwriters who were dying to pour their hearts out on stage. So I would write for days in my room on a song. Then I’d head down to Joe’s hoping to get picked for open mic with Wendy on Sunday nights so I could sing it. Eventually Joe asked me to do some of his songwriter showcases, which I did along with other local songwriters, Lisa Sanders, Jeff Berkley, Jason Mraz, Anya Marina, Carlos Olmeda, and many, many more.
I had no idea that I would fall so in love with writing songs, or that I would actually need to write songs. Music had always been a mainstay in my life since I was young. And it had often saved my life really. It was a necessity as far as having to listen to and feel I related to. But once I started writing and performing it became an insatiable need for me to continue, like my need for food. I really didn’t feel I had a choice not to write. So I kept going.
Was writing and playing your songs at coffee shops enough for you?
During the late 90’s I was trying desperately to keep up with this new insatiable need to write while I also finished going to college at SDSU. I really wanted to sing with a band and work with other musicians who could take my lyrics further. I was and still am for sure more of a lyricist. So I started the band The Dharma Bumz with my then roommate, and a couple other guys. We wrote a bunch of songs together that were really great but never got recorded. We played a few shows. But everyone didn’t all get along, so we broke up. I was back on my own singing in the coffee houses around town again for the next couple of years. And of course writing, I was always writing.
So you said you were going to school, did you finish?
Yes, I graduated from San Diego State, 2000, got my teaching credential, and put music on hold for about a year. I had about two-dozen new songs written, and I was dying to record them. But I was broke and in debt. I was offered a job teaching third grade right out of school,so I took it. Teaching took up a tremendous amount of time and energy. I found myself falling into a kind of depression without writing and performing. But the insatiable need to continue on with writing was burning. I went back to writing poetry and I wrote a couple of songs while in class when my students were reading. My song “Little Girl” was one of those songs.
During my 2nd year of teaching I couldn’t put music off any longer. I started recording my songs under the project name The Unknown Poets with my old roommate and guitar player from the Dharma Bumz, Charlie Ruse, and his friend musician/producer Robert Edwards. So for a good chunk of that year I taught elementary school during the day and spent many nights in the studio. We finished recording our album entitled Angels of Mercy in the Spring of 2002. A few songs were added as we went like “I Close My Eyes” which we wrote the night of the terrorist attacks on 9-11. I knew by the end of that project that teaching elementary school full-time was for sure not my calling.
I resigned from teaching full-time and put all my efforts into playing live, writing more songs, and recording. For the next two years I played coffee houses all over Southern California. I put together a live band opening for now touring acts Xavier Rudd and the White Buffalo. And I wrote more songs.
I never totally quit teaching all together. I currently teach middle school and high school part-time, and I teach songwriting once a week at Muirlands Middle School.
You had something happen that any songwriter would be thrilled to have happen – tell us.
Angels of Mercy caught the attention of Hollywood director Sven Pape. He was working on his film L.A. Twister when he heard the recording. He decided to license two of the songs from the album for the movie as well as cast me in the movie for a scene that needed a singer-songwriter. The movie was released in 2004, and did quite well as an independent film.
2004 and 2005 were big years. I recorded ten of my best songs that I had written over the last five years with musician/producer Tom Andrews who is now touring with the White Buffalo. And I married my boyfriend of fours years, Drew, a La Jolla native, and avid surfer. Right after we finished mastering what would later be released as “Somewhere in the Middle” (nominated for Best Local Recording in 2010) Drew and I found out we would be having a boy in November 2005. So I put the release of my CD “Somewhere in the Middle” on hold and I focused on what was to come. From 2005 until 2010 I spent most of my time with my son and my husband.
We had a wonderful conversation about a turn in your artistic course. Would you share?
When my son was just six months old a friend of mine gave me the book 'A Man’s Search For Meaning' by psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl. I was depressed, not writing much, and complaining to her about my life. The book changed me. And it changed what I wanted to write about. I dedicated the next song I wrote, “Human Opportunity”, to Viktor Frankl and his arduous work. From then on I became obsessed with understanding my history and my family’s history. There was a huge connection in Viktor Frankl’s story and my family’s war stories.
Much of an artist's work can come from an extremely personal place, and often their best work comes from that place. Would you share a bit of that story?
In 2008 my father died a tragic alcoholic death one hot July day in Arizona. He essentially let his house turn into a local crack house in Apache Junction so he didn’t have to die alone. He was only 59, a Vietnam Vet, and he had spent his entire adult life on drugs or alcohol never talking about the war or his tragically abusive upbringing. I knew after that I needed to really dig in and do some research on our family.
Then in 2009 my grandmother turned 90. We had always been extremely close but I felt this sense of urgency to talk with her about her life, my life, and my family’s life. She agreed to talk and let me write it all down. She too had a tragic upbringing and rose out of a life of extreme poverty by joining the Army as a WAC (Women in the Army Corp) during WWII. After the war she then married my grandfather, a WWII veteran and career Army seargant. They started a new life like a lot of other people did, trying to leave that life before the war and life during the war behind. However, she had lost two brothers during the war who she rarely if ever spoke about. They were like ghosts in our family. Ghosts that were reminders of the terrible pain that war causes. I knew my next songs had to be about my family, about war, and the affects it had on us.
Wow! I think that this is often the unknown story in many families. So your heart got strummed by the weighted words of you dear Grandmother and the focus of a new project emerged. What was the next step?
So for the next three years my grandmother told me secrets she never told anyone. She talked about the war and what my grandfather had endured with the 1st Armored Division in Africa and Italy. She told me everything she could about my father, even though he was her son-in-law. She loved him like a son. She told me about her brothers and what she remembered happened. She told me about her raging abusive father and her mother's early death when she was just five. Songs started to unfold from her stories. I started researching a lot about WWII and more songs unfolded. As I collected the stories and information and wrote, my grandmother started expressing her lightness and freedom. As I watched her get relief from her stories I could actually see her soften, and so songs of a sort of salvation unfolded for me to write. We worked on her story until she left us in Oct. 2011.
I'm sorry for your loss. What a gift and a blessing she was to you and us through your work. It lead to the first recordings of your concept?
Yes. In June of 2011 I started recording a few of these new songs with Jeff Berkley at Berkley Sound. I recorded four songs and released a four-song E.P. entitled Stories to Tell/Sweet Salvation.
I am really looking forward to 2012. This year is the year. I have the rest of the songs for Stories to Tell/Sweet Salvation to record and release. A few of these songs I feel are very important and shed light on our world’s history of extreme and destructive thinking which led us into WWII and all wars and conflicts. I have stories, poems and lyrics that I plan on publishing in a book to go with my music. I am looking at doing shows different this year possibly including speaker(s) sharing their stories, guest artists, and more.
That would be a must see and we look forward to the book. Let's chat about the EP. 'Pray' is heart touching and has a rich personal feel to your performance – it has the making of a song that other artists may find irresistible – very nice. Is it a song/story to be included in the new project? Tell us the back story of how the song was written?
"Pray" is one of the salvation songs of the Stories to Tell/Sweet Salvation project. Really this song unfolded in like 15 minutes one morning. I had been doing a lot of research on the gypsies of WWII as well as the Hitler Youth. Reading of the tragedies of the war became quite overwhelming at times. I was obsessed for about a year on reading everything I could. That morning I was practicing actually something my guitar teacher wanted me to try with some diminished chords and I this song came through. I definitely feel with this project that I am more of a vessel for songs to be written. They are not of me alone. I think the song was a sort of a comfort song of sorts – a song of gratitude. A song of my strengthening belief that "something big" is in all of us that is inherently good, even in those who appear to be the most evil. I chose to use the words God and pray and Lord really because they are the most universal of understanding of that something. However I wanted to say right away that this was not religious. I have this kind of reluctance to write about God because I don't want to be put into the category of being religious. I would say that my research on the war has turned into a bit of research into people's beliefs on God. War and God seem to go hand in hand even though I do not believe God causes war. But God is often a part of the human thinking during tragedy and war is of the biggest tragedies experienced in mass. The over all message that I keep getting while hearing or reading people's tragic stories about the war is that their is relief, spiritual relief, in sharing the story. This song "Pray" is an example I guess of that spiritual release.
Rusty Jones, Christy Bruneau, & Jason Weiss
'Spiritual' is my favorite on the EP. I'm a sucker for old timey styled country spirituals and this one delivers. The honest soul searching feel of the lyric and vocal is appealing. Is this another of the project songs. Is there a story here?
"Spiritual" is the third song I wrote for this project. I didn't know at the time I was doing this project. I had written Human Opportunity about Viktor Frankl. And I had written Big Bad World, which is a song not about WWII, but about a 13 year old student at the Middle School I was teaching at in 2008 who was murdered over Christmas break of 2007. In June of 2008 my brother deployed for Iraq and my father died that July. It was a hard year. When we returned from my father's memorial in Arizona, and my brother went back to the war in Iraq, I found myself really at a point where I had a choice to either close up my heart or stay open and really embrace what was in front of me. Most of my family turned their backs on any belief of there being a God when loved ones died or went to war. The tragedies I guess were blamed on God. So I chose to try to stay open and I started a daily meditation. I also really fell back in love with bluegrass, probably because it reminded me of my father and spending time with him in Minnesota with his family. I was listening to a lot of Ralph Stanley and a lot of my father's old music. I wanted to write a song that was again like a comfort song, but bluegrass. So I wrote Spiritual that summer. I think more in a hope that if I stay open, if I let my heart stay open and if I trust there is a plan for me that is good that I will be cared for. Hence the chorus:
'He said won't you come – come to me
I have a glorious plan
Won't you stand for all that I am child
Please take my hand'
Soon after I wrote that song it became clear what the path for me was. And that was to dive into the story of my family and let the songs unfold. That with each dark song there will be a song of salvation.
Who is playing with you on the EP, how about an introduction and a little background as to how the recording came about?
"Spiritual" really came together as I had planned in my head when Jeff Berkley arranged it and Dennis Caplinger played the fiddle part. I really heard female backing vocals only on this project for some reason and so my friends who are also great singers Mary Dolan and Anna Warner are singing back-up.
Jeff Berkley really has a great ear for what I am trying to do which is more Appalachian storytelling music. We recorded the e.p at Berkley Sound with Jeff playing drums and guitar, Doug Walker on upright, Dennis Caplinger on banjo, fiddle, dobro, and mandolin. Mary Dolan and Anna Warner sing back-up.
Is there anything you would impart to your peers and fans?
Today the sky is the limit with what we can do as writers and musicians. I am so excited about what we songwriters have at our fingertips now to help us express our music and contribute to our fans and to all those around us.
Very true. Dave and I will be keeping an eye on you and your journey. Thank you Christy for your generosity and commitment.
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