Alex Rae
3 min readMay 27, 2022

Brenda Cay Releases Her New Stellar EP “Love or Dreams”

Brenda Cay displays her full talent for writing witty, touching, and relatable songs in her latest Love or Dreams EP by taking the listener through a journey of both love and loss. It has songs that can make you laugh, cry, and reminisce on the pain and pleasure of the past while simultaneously bathing the listener in a sweet southern charm.

The EP starts off strong with a song called “Every Promise You Didn’t Make,” a love song and a glance through a 50-year marriage. The title cleverly conveys how the narrator’s partner might not have made some promises, but that doesn’t mean they were ever broken; every unmade promise was kept, in the narrator’s eyes. The song emphasizes appreciating the present, as that’s the only time we have with the people we care about. Stories of relationships tend to attribute breakups to unfulfilled promises, which is why this opposing storyline is skillfully crafted.

The second track, “Alone With You,” opens by painting a scene, two lovers together in a truck, listening to the radio and “stargazing at a private show.” Cay quickly turns this picture on its head, singing that “I’m alone with you running through my head/alone while you’re in someone else’s bed.” The listener quickly realizes that this song isn’t about gaining love, it’s about losing it again, albeit in a different way than the first song. The lines “even when you were here/you were already gone/and I was alone,” convey how the person the narrator is talking about was never really present in their relationship even when it was happening, but the narrator still longs for them anyway. Love doesn’t always make sense, and it can make us feel lonely even when we’re supposedly in it. Cay gets that point across skillfully in this track.

The track “Drunk On Country Songs” breaks us out of the sorrow with its fun beat and witty lyrics. Cay’s line “sipping on relationships on the rocks” is particularly clever. It has overall themes of using country music to cope, especially when alcohol isn’t doing it anymore. But our favorite country artists will always be there! Let’s all go get “Drunk On Country Songs” and pregame with this one! With the first two tracks discussing a love lost in the most literal sense and a love that might have never existed to begin with, this track brings to the EP a lighter reprieve while still keeping the overall tone of the EP intact.

The last three tracks on the EP all cover different roadblocks in life. The title track, “Love or Dreams” expertly presents the push and pull of choosing between one’s passions and the person they love–a struggle many people face. This builds the EP’s already strong relatability factor. “Wherever You Are” actually takes the EP down a different avenue, painting the picture of a mother sending her child off to college. It’s the only song on the EP that isn’t about a romantic relationship and is beautifully written.

The final track, “Talk About Nothing,” brings us back to the start of the EP, with a song that discusses the kind of love where you don’t really need to talk about anything deep or profound to enjoy yourself. Sometimes, just sitting together and being goofy, shooting the breeze, is enough. It caps off the love story this EP tells perfectly.

Fans can see and hear more of Brenda on her Website, as well as her Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

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