AmericanaFest 2026: The Whimsical World of Brennan Wedl

Brennan Wedl describes her bowling technique this way: “Low and slow. I won’t elaborate.”

It’s an interesting vibe midday on a weekday at Donelson Strike and Spare, the local gem of a bowling alley that Wedl calls “severely underrated.” It’s where she suggested meeting with the Scene for an interview over a round of bowling and a mean game of air hockey. Around us, a kid is darting into the arcade and some serious bowling regulars are filing in, chatting with the employees and setting up for solo daytime practices. Wedl’s ripped black-and-orange striped tights are perfect for the last days before Halloween season, and they make for a great look with Strike and Spare’s flame-print bowling shoes.

“I like to have my birthday party here,” she says. 

Wedl brings a refreshing sense of play to the often gloomy intersection of noise rock and Americana. On her August self-titled album, her debut release for ANTI-, she revels in late-night outings and whimsical imagery. The music video for single “Let’s Be Models” finds her running around between a backyard stage and a shopping mall. She dresses in turns as a Nosferatu with leopard-print gloves and one of a trio of witches, accompanied by Salt Water Baby’s Yasmeen Abu Nada and the Belcourt’s Quinn Hills.

“Let’s Be Models” was released jointly with “Two Dollar Pistol,” and both songs are odes to friendship. While “Models” is exuberant, though, Wedl says “Pistol” is about “encouraging your friends to go for what you know they’re capable of.” It’s a soft-spoken rally against self-doubt, and an ode to being proud of a friend’s accomplishments — even when they don’t see them.

To communicate that pride, Wedl employs a series of quirky metaphors, almost designed to make a listener crack a smile. One of these, the line “you got vampire eyes coming out of the sockets,” takes inspiration from the cultural phenomenon of sexy vampires. 

“They got that face card,” she explains. “Like, ‘You’re hot, girl! Go for it!’” She counts Twilight among her top four favorite movies — alongside It Follows, The Polar Express and Jim Carrey’s The Grinch. She likes horror, but avoids anything “too fucked up,” preferring the crass comedy of Freddy Krueger and classics like Black Christmas.

There’s an occult current there, and a religious one too. Wedl grew up in a Catholic family in Minnesota, visiting her aunts in a convent. These days, “nun” is one of her go-to Halloween costumes — “you just need a really big black shirt, a really big white shirt, and then another black shirt, and then a skirt” — and syncretic spiritual imagery looms large in her work. Brennan Wedl opens with “Scorpio,” a mixed-signals lament with a bewitching subject at its center. “High Priestess,” a play on words with her current favorite tarot card, considers heartbreak and selfhood over the course of a stoned drive. “Tasmanian Devil,” a largely spoken-word track that echoes Sonic Youth and Liz Phair, spins out into the alternating refrains “supervoid” and “Where’d you go, Jesus?”

“If I’m not practicing spirituality … it’s like I’m disconnected from the internet,” she says, listing tarot, prayer and “reflection through magic” as components of her spiritual practice. “[It] helps me move through life as authentically as possible.”

The noisy, avant-garde “Tasmanian Devil” reflects some of her previous work. Before Brennan Wedl, there was Dazey and the Scouts, a queercore punk band that Wedl and fellow Berklee College of Music students Otto Klammer and Lea Jaffe formed in Boston. The group released its sole album Maggot in 2017 — a raucous surf-punk record that has had an interesting afterlife ever since the song “Wet” picked up viral steam on TikTok during the pandemic. The band’s work became anthemic for a massive online community of queer kids figuring themselves out.

“To meet young people all over the world who have heard these songs — it blows me away,” says Wedl. Maggot celebrates its 10th anniversary next year. “We’ve been revving up the group chat. It’s really fun to dream together again.”

For her solo work, she sought to incorporate the kind of music she grew up with: acoustic guitar-driven solo songwriting. “I wanted to find a way to stay true to both avenues,” she says. She landed on the term “grungetry,” which she traces back to L.A. band Dolly Creamer. 

It’s a popular intersection: “A lot of people are twanging up their electric guitars right now.” Wedl attributes this trend to the storytelling tradition in roots music, which she thinks people are turning to in response to a chronically online world. “Living in the time of social media, it’s a lot of showing, not necessarily telling. So I think it’s a challenge now that a lot of artists are undertaking to just really elaborate on what’s below the surface.”

Her primary influences are Tom Petty and Lucinda Williams — two artists known for effortless, subtle complexities. She announced her signing to ANTI- by celebrating another hero: Kathleen Edwards, whose song “Six O’Clock News” Wedl describes as a “childhood soundtrack.” She recorded a cover with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield that was released in March.

“Katie and I share a few key musical heroes,” Wedl says of Crutchfield, who also co-produced Brennan Wedl and sings harmonies across the record. “It was just such a beautiful full circle to sing that song with her, and to venture into making my own music with her.”

The city of Nashville shows up on the album as well, with a few loving send-ups of its particular quirks. “Two-Dollar Pistol” asks: “Is it that Southern silly? Is it that Nashville nonsense?” “Fake Cowboy” could be about half of the guys in town, but she points to a telltale sign of “pretending to be country.” Her love for the city is practical on one level — “It’s a great home base to drive out of” for tours — and deeper-rooted, too.

“The people who live here take care of each other,” she says. A onetime Belcourt employee, she says the theater “totally supported” her tour schedule, and she still picks up the occasional shift. She describes the local queer community, which she’s proud to be part of, as “inspirational” for its compassion and hardworking ethos.

After a busy season of touring with Crutchfield and MJ Lenderman, and before a fall run with Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy, she has two local shows coming up during AmericanaFest: a set scheduled for 7 p.m. Sept. 18 at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, and another at 1 p.m. on Sept. 19 during Paste’s Live on Broadway party at Ole Red. Songs from Brennan Wedl are sure to be on her Blue Room set list, along with “some old rockers.” But she teases the potential for some surprises too.

“Katie and [Lenderman], on the Waxahatchee-MJ Lenderman tour, they were experimenting with some covers, and it inspired me. ‘Crash Into Me’ by Dave Matthews Band, I’ve been practicing that one. Maybe it’ll make a goofy little appearance.”

AmericanaFest Preview 2026

Talking with rising star Brennan Wedl, running down our favorite shows and more to gear up for the festival

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