A Night Out With Annie Brobst
This up-and-coming country music talent discusses her decision to leave the Midwest and her day job as a teacher to follow her musical muse in Boston, and understanding the importance of looking back to move forward.
Annie Brobst and I made plans to meet at a little Italian restaurant in the North End of Boston at 6:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. She was going to drive in, by herself. Her being an Ohio native, living in the suburbs of Boston for the last decade, I had a feeling that there was a chance that she might get just a little lost in the winding roads of the city.
At 5:50 p.m., she called me.
“So, I’ve gone through the tunnel three times now,” she sighed. “Google Maps is taking me all the wrong ways. It’s saying I’ll be there in 15 minutes.”
“That’s okay,” I told her. “Just let me know if you get too frustrated and want to park and meet me somewhere in the middle!”
Five minutes later, I got another call.
“It took me through the tunnel again. I’m right back where I started, but I really want to try this place. I don’t want to give up just yet. Let me give it one more shot.”
10 minutes after that, Annie walked in — composed, positive, and perfectly quaffed. She sat down, and apologized profusely for being late. She took off her coat, tucked her phone off to the side, brushed her platinum hair out of her eyes, and just like that, she was settled, ready to start.
Annie grew up around Columbus, Ohio, with her mom, dad, and older brother, Levi. She was the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, singing and dancing little girl that the whole neighborhood knew. She got into sports, mostly because she wanted to show up Levi, and ended up playing competitively in the boys leagues through middle school. Like most girls in high school, she made mix-tapes to match her mood, and sent songs to crushes that explained feelings she was too shy to say out loud.
She graduated from Kenyon College with degrees in Spanish Language and Literature, the science of how people connect through language. Not long after that, she decided to make a big move, the kind that some midwesterners dream of, and others don’t understand. She landed in a suburb of Boston, where, by day, she was a Spanish teacher, athletic coach, and confidante to her students.
When the final bell rang, she would transform to become the front-woman of the Annie Brobst Band, a country music group that played local haunts and regional clubs.
Eventually, burning the candle at both ends became too much to maintain, and she stepped back from teaching to devote herself fully to music.
This is where we find her now: a full-time singer-songwriter, fresh off a breakup with “traditional work”, running her music career like a small business, dealing with heavy emotional turmoil, and trying to make it big in an industry that is notoriously relentless.
“It’s hard,” she says. “Today was hard.”
She’s referring to earlier in the day, when she caught up on the business side of the musical world with her de jure boyfriend and de facto manager, George LeVasseur. They spent the majority of the day sitting side-by-side in their shared apartment, updating her calendar of gigs all the way through October. While the tag team effort came with some stress, Annie says, there’s no one else she’d rather have in her corner.
“It’s also nice because he’s the type of guy that will do whatever you need. And you can ultimately, put more stuff on people like that…When I use an outside agent [for booking and promotion], you don’t know if you’re their number one,” Annie explains. “With George, I never have to wonder. I know if he’s making a call, I know who he’s going to push.”
That kind of loyalty and dedication can be hard to come by. In her professional career, Annie’s definitely seen her fair share from the other end of the spectrum. Earlier iterations of her band dissolved because of power-struggles and blurry chains of command.
It took a while before Annie realized that she had to be the decision maker when it came to the band. With a name like The Annie Brobst Band, “It sounds narcissistic,” she cautions. “But any scrutiny we get also comes back to the Annie Brobst Band…The good things come to me, but the bad things come to me too.”
It didn’t take long for her to get fed up with the tension that comes from in-fighting. Last year, she took stock of the band, assessed where she hoped they were going, and decided to dedicate time to personnel improvements.
After a few rearrangements, the band’s evolution began to take shape. By the start of 2017, Annie had established a group that works well together, sonically and personally.
As the bartender tops off our glasses with the house merlot, Annie catches me up on her recent audition for The Voice, her goals for the next year, what still drives her, and how — even after all this time — she still gets stage jitters.
If you’ve ever seen Annie live, you would never guess that she has any form of stage fright. Or that she ever operates at less than 100 percent. Part of it is just who she is, and part of it is the mentality of being “the underdog.”
It’s a philosophy that Annie has adopted over the course of a lifetime. As the scrappy little sister, playing in the boys’ sports leagues, she learned to thrive as the little fish in a big pond.
As a musician, it’s a concept that’s served her well.
“I had to fight and claw for my spot,” she explains. Now, “I’m a female in the country music scene…so, that young mentality came over me. ‘I still need to fight for this.’”
But the truth is, Annie doesn’t need to fight as hard anymore.
She has a strong fan base that follows her from town to town, calling themselves the “ABB Army”. They know Annie’s original music by heart, are avid social media users, and have some amazing dancers in their ranks.
She’s written original music that is performing well in the greater Boston market. Her debut single, Ghost, helped her win Country Music Act of the Year in 2016 from the New England Music Awards.
Ghost is also getting played on local radio stations like 101.7 The Bull. For Annie, hearing her music on the radio was a dream come true. But to hear her tell it, she’s more grateful for the personal relationships that Ghost has given her than anything else.
Ghost is Annie’s story. It tells the tale of a young girl leaving home in a small town, and setting out for the coast. The lyrics depict what Annie’s life has been like for the past few years, how she’s grown, and some of the lessons she’s learned. It’s a personal track, so when she decided on Ghost as the subject for her first music video, she knew she had to pick filming locations that felt close-to-home.
“The bar scene is at O’Neils,” Annie says, sounding nostalgic. “The football field is Danvers High. The farm is our friends’ farm in Ipswich. So all of it, was never something we had to pay for, but it was also our way of telling them ‘We loved that you helped us get off the ground.’”
Annie also knew that she was going to need a male counterpart to act out the story that the lyrics tell. She starts to laugh as she tells me about asking George who she should ask to act with her.
Without hesitation, she remembers, George said “Why don’t you ask Colton?”
Colton Bradford, that is, primetime DJ for The Bull.
Annie and Colton had become friendly when her music started to get air time on Sunday nights, but she was still nervous to ask him to help with her music video. On the one hand, she wasn’t sure if he would want to do it, and on the other hand, she wasn’t sure if he was allowed to do it. After working through the possibilities in her head, she decided it couldn’t hurt to ask.
“I texted him, and I was like ‘Any chance you’d want to be in my video?’ and he was like ‘Hell. Yes.’”
This being her first video, Annie didn’t really know what to expect from filming and acting with another person on screen.
“I’m not an actor, I’m not an actress,” she says. “I can’t take myself too seriously.”
But, Colton made it easier by making up stories that helped her get into character. Whether it was saying something out of character during a fight scene, or telling her about his interactions with her fans after one of her shows, Colton knew how to get Annie to react genuinely. The final product came out better than she imagined, she says, in large part because he made the experience so positive.
“He did amazing — he’s a much better actor than I am,” she tells me, laughing. “And he didn’t ask for anything in return. I feel like we’ve really become friends since then, because I got to know him better.”
When the video was released in January, Annie was on a high. It was her first music video for her debut single — a song that she and her songwriting partner, Roger Hagopian, had penned together. She had filmed the whole thing with Colton, a new-found friend in the industry, who supports and believes in her. She was getting positive feedback on the end product from her fans — both new and old. Things were heading in the right direction, she thought.
Then her family life came knocking.
In early February of this year, Annie got a phone call from her Aunt in Ohio. Annie’s mom had had a massive stroke, and was in the hospital.
“She said ‘If you want to talk to your mom, or see her again, for the rest of your life, you need to come,’” Annie tells me.
It was a harsh reality. Annie had had a tumultuous relationship with her mother for the better part of the past 15 years.
“She left my family my senior year of high school,” Annie says calmly. “I was always pretty cold to her after that, because she missed some pretty big moments in my life my senior year, and I don’t think you can ever really make up for that.”
Over the past 12 years, her mom had tried to meet up and reconnect, but Annie says it was all pretty superficial.
“I did give her one chance,” Annie says. She pauses, and get’s quiet for a moment.
She continues, “She asked me to lunch. She had just gotten married — she like, splurged and went up to Prince Edward Island, and was coming back through Boston. I was teaching because, I remember, I stepped out for lunch. So, I sat down to lunch and it was all surface level for like an hour and a half. I was awkward. I can’t make small talk for an hour and a half. And I was hoping for — like, if this is the one chance i’m giving you where you get to the meat and potatoes, lets talk about it, lets settle it — and she didn’t.”
“You need to go back and say everything that you wanted to say. And she can too. You deserve explanations,” Annie says firmly. “Even if there is no explanation, and it’s just “I screwed up. I’m sorry.” You need to be able to go back and say the apology.”
Over time, it became more emotionally exhausting for Annie to see her mom and have those surface conversations than to only engage when necessary. Over the years, she had come to terms with not having a “normal” mother-daughter relationship. Or, she thought she had.
Then, her Aunt called and said she needed to pack her bags and get to Ohio to say her goodbyes.
“So I did,” Annie says. “I had a show Monday night — a huge fundraiser for our friend who was going to the Super Bowl — and I had to leave first thing Tuesday morning. I got there and she was in a coma, so I don’t think she ever could hear or understand anything I wanted to say to her. And I did take the moment, because in seeing that, I fell apart. It was really tough.”
Annie’s mom passed away on February 2, 2017. There was no Lifetime-movie-type reconciliation. There was no real closure. All there is now, Annie says, is finding somewhere to put all of it, and coming to terms with the idea that her mom didn’t hear whatever words Annie whispered to her in those final hours.
Landing back on the East Coast, Annie felt unstable. Part of the foundation she had built her life on had just crumbled. Emotions she thought she had found a place for years ago, in her heart and mind, were resurfacing. She wasn’t sure where or how to pick back up with life, work, and music.
“Then Roger sent me a piano piece, and he never sends me piano pieces…like two days after it happened,” Annie says, smiling. “When I am ready, I think I would like to do it that way. I could use that piano piece. Just because the instant reaction that I had to that piano piece was ‘mom’. And when I can put it in words, and when I can get through it — Because I know i’m going to have to sit down with Roger and just spill it. I think someday I could turn it to music…I think that’s, like, her song. I just need to figure out what that’s gonna be.”
Listening to that piano piece, and thinking about her mom as a part of her bigger story has helped Annie to get back into the swing of her music. It’s been the creative process, her fan base and performing that she’s been able to find some semblance of normalcy to life since February, she says.
As I sit across from her, about a month later, Annie seems healthy. She’s still struggling, but has refocused on the music, taking care of herself, and what comes next.
For now, that means gearing up for the next six months, which will be filled with a series of small-town gigs punctuated by big-time shows.
Every Monday night, Annie retains her acoustic residency at O’Neil’s — a hometown haunt in Salem, MA. She frequents Loretta’s Last Call on Lansdowne Street in Boston, and Toby Keith’s in Foxboro, taking the stage as a full band in front of at-capacity audiences. She’s started playing in places like The Whiskey Barrel in Haverhill and Osborn Tavern in Danvers, because, she says, she loves looking out and seeing familiar faces at every show.
Those familiar faces, she hopes, are going to pop up in the crowd in June when she opens for her idol Miranda Lambert at the Bank of NH Pavilion.
“We’re doing a 90 minute original set,” Annie says. “And it’s the first time where we’ve opened for someone — and we’ve opened for a lot of people — that I feel like the people that are coming to see her might be interested in what I’m doing. Because there’s a look, a sound, a presence — everything I do I’ve learned from her.”
To Annie, there was no better role model than Miranda Lambert. Like Annie hoped to do, Miranda was able to break out of a small town, pursue a dream, and achieve — despite hardships.
While Annie speaks highly of someone she considers a role model, she’s already an example for the rest of us to follow in her own right. She exited the rat race on her own terms, chose to pursue her craft, all while balancing the personal hardships and internal struggles we all wrestle with.
Annie’s story reminds us that pursuing those passion projects, taking risks, and straying from the beaten path is an awful lot like navigating those winding Boston streets — it is always worth one more shot.
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