Waxahachie, Texas native Trevor Brooks wasn’t meant to stay in his home state. He enrolled at Texas Tech after high school but following a 19th birthday trip to Nashville with his musical grandmother, he realized he wasn’t suited to the kind of music being made in Lubbock, and soon returned to Music City to stay. That return was in 2012, as the songwriter arrived with a notebook full of lyrics that were in desperate need of being turned into songs. For Trevor, writing lyrics was a way to express the feelings of a rather self-conscious child, one who grew up in a family more into sports than playing instruments, although there was always a steady flow of music being played on the stereo. Think Martina McBride, Vince Gill, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts and the Dixie Chicks, courtesy of his mother.
Trevor was also indirectly encouraged to sing. “My grandmother has one of the most angelic, beautiful voices I have ever heard,” Trevor muses. “I grew up hearing her sing in church and couldn’t get enough of it. To this day it brings tears to my eyes hearing her sing.”
All of that, plus a love of the Backstreet Boys (yes, really), David Nail, Keith Urban, Sam Smith and The 1975 brought him to Belmont University (where he eventually graduated), and into Alive Studios, where he recorded his debut EP ‘Lonely At Its Finest’. “Each song is a true story of past relationships and friendships, and each story molded this album. When it comes to relationships, I feel as if I’ve been told ‘no’ a lot – at least, that’s the part that I remember,” reveals Brooks. “I tend to remember the ‘no’s’ and the leaving parts more than anything.”
Led by the fraught single ‘Drive By’, equal parts country and alt rock, Trevor is correct in the notion that this record represents a whole host of heavy emotions and difficult lessons learned. His voice breaks on ‘Steal My Car’ and submits to the dominant electric guitar, while the dobro gives ‘Finished That Bottle Too’ a reflective, melancholic feel, and ‘Talk Me Out of Her’ builds to a passionate crescendo. “Bottle up the lonely, let it pour all over me. I’ll sip it slow til I go drowning in your memory,” Trevor sings on closing track ‘When The Lonely Feels Normal’, an emotive piece of classic Americana to be proud of.
