The first time it ended for Alanna Quinn-Broadus was outside a Boston gym, yelling at her bandmates through her cellphone and breaking down in public. She was the frontwoman of Medicated Kisses, an emo “mall-punk band” as she calls it, and that was the moment she thought her dream of stardom was over.
“We were in Hot Topic,” Quinn-Broadus says with a laugh. “I’ll show you a picture.”
What’s so funny?
“I’m really proud of the work we did,” she explains, “but when I met my husband, I was like, ‘Will you come to one of my shows?’ And he was like, ‘No.’ ”
Quinn-Broadus, 32, is eating a sandwich on a Sunday afternoon at Ugly Mugs Coffee & Tea in East Nashville. She still wears all black like she did in her mall-punk days, but the eyeliner and cut-off gloves? Long gone. These days, when fronting soul/funk act and local club favorite Alanna Royale, she rocks candy-apple-red Reeboks. They stand out when she cocks her leg up on the seat as she chats with the Scene. Maybe it’s just in her tone: Now, for the first time, she’s comfortable with who she is and where she’s going.
Back in her Kisses days, as the band was getting traction and label interest, Quinn-Broadus played showcase after showcase for every record company in New York, she recalls, hearing the same thing again and again: The band was tight, she sounded great, but if she could just lose some weight.
“Everyone was telling me that this was the one thing holding me back in my career,” she says. “I had the pressure of other people in my band who never said anything about my weight, but everybody knew that this was the issue. I was pretty enough, but I had to be thinner.”
So Quinn-Broadus began seeing a trainer five days a week, working out, she says, for “hours and hours and hours,” while maintaining a steady diet of steamed broccoli and lemon juice. One day she passed out at the cafe across from her gym. But she was losing weight, and wasn’t that all that mattered?
“I was psyched,” she says. “Everyone seemed pretty happy. I was like, ‘I’m thinner. This has to be healthy.’ But I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t have sex with my boyfriend. I hated my body.”
Even now, she doesn’t remember the exact number of pounds she dropped. What she remembers is that last label showcase. A rep from MTV was in the crowd. And after the gig, with her new body that she hated, Quinn-Broadus was pulled aside and told that the band was tight, she sounded great, but if she could just lose a little bit more.
“I can’t take this anymore,” she remembers thinking.
Days later, standing outside the gym that had become a second home, a bandmate told her he couldn’t pick her up for rehearsal, and suddenly she was screaming and crying into the phone. The breakdown comes, and everyone tells her: Fuck you, you’re an asshole now, I’m moving to Los Angeles.
“We were young,” Quinn-Broadus explains. “We were 21, 22. How is anyone that age supposed to support each other in that way?”
The dream of music was over. She re-enrolled at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and instead of doing a ton of drugs like she did the first time, she went to class. She graduated and moved to East Nashville in 2012, where — with future husband and Royale guitarist Jared Colby — she started writing a genre-diverse batch of songs while she hustled to get a job in music publishing. Nashville was a culture shock for the singer, after living in New York and Boston most of her life. “Everyone was wearing sundresses and cowboy boots, or looked like a Stevie Nicks stand-in,” she recalls. “I was just shocked how different.”
It was over breakfast at Mitchell Deli, six years after her former band broke up, that Mitchell employee and fellow Boston expat and drummer Matt Snow recognized Quinn-Broadus. They set up a jam session, and while Snow wasn’t convinced that Quinn-Broadus’ grunge-tinged tracks were enough to pull him away from other projects, a couple of R&B cuts that she and Colby had written hooked him. The trio picked up Gabriel Golden on bass a few months after that, and a year later Alanna Royale was playing Bonnaroo. In 2014, the now-six-piece band self-released its debut full-length Achilles.
“So here I am in this situation that I never thought I would find myself in again, and I once again feel very much on the outside,” Quinn-Broadus says.
Which is not to say that the pressures she faced with her former band don’t still rear their heads from time to time. Quinn-Broadus remembers seeing photos of local singer Nikki Lane performing in a pants-less spangled one-piece at Sports Illustrated’s “Swimville” event in downtown Nashville last year, a fashion-themed mini festival on Lower Broad supporting the magazine’s annual Swimsuit Issue.
“That was the first thing I noticed about that whole performance.” Quinn-Broadus recalls. “I didn’t care about anything else other than that she was wearing no pants. And [that], to me, is so stupid. It’s ignorant, and it does her no justice as a musician.”
Quinn-Broadus is keeping her focus on the music. Alanna Royale is back in the studio recording new songs they plan on releasing early next year, and in the meantime, the singer’s powerhouse vocals are winning fans over. And they’re not looking at what she’s wearing.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
