Powerpop Protégé Brett Harris’s Musical Future Is No Longer ‘Up in the Air’
North Carolina singer-songwriter Brett Harris learned from the best – touring with jangle-pop pioneers the dB’s (whose Chris Stamey produced his debut album, Man of Few Words, in 2010) and serving as a core band member in live performances of Big Star’s Third. “British Invasion, music from Memphis, Motown, Stax Records stuff – that great era of the pop song – just always stuck with me, from as early as I can remember,” Harris says, sitting on an Austin porch during South by Southwest, on what just happens to be the sixth anniversary of Big Star legend Alex Chilton’s death.
Ironically, though, Harris “didn’t grow up in musical family at all… but we had a third of Beatles’ catalog in our house. We didn’t have a turntable, but I had the records, at least, to look at, and to interact with, and to just wonder what was inside of them,” he chuckles.
However, it was obvious to the Harris family that Brett, even when he was only 2 or 3 years old, was destined to be a musician. “My family said I used to make up songs, all the time – mostly about my brother,” he recalls. “I think one referred to him as a ‘slimy beast,’ over and over again. But it had a good hook!”
Still, it took Harris six years to follow up Man of Few Words, finally releasing his acclaimed sophomore effort, Up in the Air, this month. While of course the Third concerts and his work with the dB’s caused him to put his solo work on hold at times, Harris admits he also experienced a minor between-albums mid-life crisis.
“I started to question my motives, perhaps, during the course between making this last record and the one before,” he recalls. “Because in that time, I turned 30, and I saw a lot of my peers and colleagues that were in bands go a different course. They decided that this sort of hustle, this grind, was not for them, and they were much better off going to graduate school, or working a full-time and making music just a part of who they are.
“But I’ve had those jobs in the past, and I’ve walked away from them, because I was kind of slowly dying on the inside. This is something that is in me and I have to do.”
Watch Brett Harris perform two songs at Yahoo Music’s SXSW headquarters here. Sadly, “Slimy “Beast” is not one of them, but you’ll enjoy these songs nonetheless. And below, check out a bonus clip of when Harris and Big Star’s Third visited the Yahoo Music studio in 2014:
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