Troubadour Blue

Troubadour Blue is Brenna and Daniel, a Nashville roots band that exists because their college ensemble director told each of them, separately, to call the other.

SALTYmf heard Troubadour Blue for the first time at the Fernandina Beach Songwriter Festival a year earlier, went looking for them afterward and has been following them since. The band came back to headline, and the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast sat them down a few hours before the set. Brad Banyas told them what he had noticed from the audience the year before, which was how much the two of them pick at each other on stage.

They met eleven years ago in Belmont University's bluegrass ensemble, directed by Tammy Rogers King of the SteelDrivers, who was also Brenna's fiddle teacher and who helped start the festival they were sitting at. Brenna was born and raised in Nashville and started fiddle at three. Daniel came from Austin wanting to play guitar for other people, and about a year into Belmont he told his guitar professor that playing for other people was not doing it for him. The professor told him that if he hated it he should write better songs. Daniel writes close to 300 songs a year now. Their debut record is Shadow of a Doubt, last year brought an EP called Heathen, and they still slip 1980s pop into a set they insist is not a covers set.

Both of them graduated and became side musicians. A year or two in, each of them got coffee with Tammy Rogers King separately and said the same thing, which was that it was great and something was missing. She told each of them to call the other. They formed the band in the fall of 2019 and COVID arrived a few months later, so they kept writing through it and recorded while everyone was home. They are still fully self funded, and Daniel is blunt that marketing dollars matter and that bootstrapping makes it hard to be heard when you release into the same week as everybody else. Brenna says the advice she still needs herself is patience, because the industry is slow and it does not pay well at the start, and maybe ever.

Daniel calls what they do involuntary blood harmonies. He is the oldest in his family and Brenna is a middle child, and he describes them as the siblings neither of them asked for. On one long van run the band got to talking about alternate universes, and Rico, their mandolin player, said from the back seat that in every universe he ends up right there in that van. Daniel says the same about the band. They hold a residency at the Station Inn in Nashville, first Tuesday of every month.