Queen of Nashville’s Royal Family, Lydia Brittan left Christian music to chase her dreams, spurred on by tragedy and driven to spread the gospel of the transformative power of music… By David West
“Ever since I was young, I’ve noticed the power that a singer has,” says Lydia Brittan. Born and raised a pastor’s daughter in West Virginia, Brittan grew up surrounded by music in her father’s church. “My brother played drums, my dad plays bass, both my parents sing, my sister sings, so you could say we’re a musical family. I pretty much grew up listening to gospel music,” she says. Staying close to the family business, she started her career in Christian music but found that corner of the industry too restrictive, despite winning the International Songwriting Competition along the way.
“We met with some labels, Warner Brothers and a few others in that genre,” says Brittan. “They were like, ‘We love what you do but could you just like tone down your voice a little and fit into this box?’ Oh no! Listen dude, I’m not about to make myself into this artist you want me to be right now, I’m feeling like I’m starting to find my creativity.”
Instead, Brittan moved to Memphis with her husband, artist Jeremy Simons. While the move has been a blessing for the singer’s career, it was, at least in part, born out of a brush with tragedy when their home in West Virginia was destroyed in a fire. “We’d bought that house on a foreclosure, it was very run down,” says Brittan. “We remodelled it ourselves till it was liveable then continued to work on it while we lived there. The fire happened late at night while we slept.”
The couple only escaped the blaze by jumping out of a window, but they lost everything. “The compounded trauma of having a near-death experience, losing our pets, our home, and most of all for me, almost losing my husband, was what severed my tie to West Virginia as a home,” she says. “We did rebuild that property, but I could never feel at home there, all I could see was the fire.”
Out of calamity came a renewed sense of purpose. “That experience showed us that life is so unpredictable and tomorrow is not promised to anyone,” says Brittan. “I’m not going to say I’m glad it happened to us, but I can, without any reservation, say that the fire was what gave us the courage to go and pursue our dreams.”
Now, the couple live outside of Nashville where they’re building a new homestead, raising their own food, and Brittan has swapped Christian music for rhythm and blues and fiery retro soul, backed by her band The Royal Family. It’s impossible to miss Brittan onstage, with her red hair, rafter-rattling voice, and attention-grabbing vintage style. “Where else does an average person wear vintage gowns these days?” she says. “Living in West Virginia, being a redheaded pastor’s daughter singer is different enough. You’re only allowed so much difference before it’s, ‘Well, she just thinks she’s something…’ I got a lot of that growing up, so I think I was afraid to really wear anything too different. When I moved to Nashville, I was like ‘oh, nobody cares! I can wear whatever I want!’”
After the move, Brittan was invited to open for her friend Ana Cristina Cash at the Acme Feed & Seed, so she dashed around to put a band together, not a problem in a town so abundantly ripe with musicians. In the early days, Brittan was backed by different line-ups, named The Amorous and The Internationals, before she discovered three kindred spirits in guitarist Anthony Castagna, bassist Sissy Dinkle, and drummer Todd Martz.
“I realised I was hiring the same people for every show, and they were beginning to cross the barrier between hired musician and invested member,” she says. “I never thought I’d have this in Nashville. It’s such a hired gun culture, and I never dreamed I would have that camaraderie of a band of friends that works together and invests in my stuff with their time and talents. I was like, ‘these guys need a name’, so they became The Royal Family.”
When not rocking the soul with her regal trio, Brittan can be found fronting The West Enders, a group formed by Royal Family guitarist Castagna to express their country and rockabilly influences. “He said, ‘I want you to come and do some of the Patsy Cline numbers, some Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Wanda Jackson,’ songs I love but that didn’t really fit in with my stuff. Okay, let’s just make it a thing,” she adds. As for her own material, Brittan finds inspiration in her life and the people around her. Her songs can offer a rousing declaration of woe like the bluesy Suffer, they can be seductive and flirtatious like Make You Fall In Love, or she can channel heart-wrenching loss.
“There will be songs that will come to me out of something I went through, I’ll sit down, and it will just pour out,” she says. “There’s a song I’m going to be releasing soon called Then You Were Gone. It was right after my brother passed away, I’d had a dream that he called me, and I was like, ‘You’re not alive, how are you calling me?’ It was so real, I sat down at the organ and just wept and wrote it. It was one of those ones that felt like it had already been written. I was just the vessel it came out of.”
In the finest tradition of the blues and soul greats, there are the songs that unspool tales of broken hearts and love gone awry. “My husband gets a little annoyed once in a while, he says, ‘People are going to think I treat you terribly and that you’ve been through all these horrible relationships!’” says Brittan. “We actually dated in high school in West Virginia, got married at 19 and just celebrated 20 years last June, so we’ve had this dream relationship and a lot of my songs are like, ‘You’ve done me wrong.’ Sorry, babe! I think a lot of that struggle came out of growing up in West Virginia. It is a very depressed area economically, there is a lot of poverty there. My dad was the pastor of a small church, so we always had plenty to eat and a nice house, but there was this air of struggle everywhere.”
There’s still something of the pastor’s daughter in Brittan’s relationship with her audiences. “What I love so much about live performance is that you can be in a room full of people you’ve never met before,” she says, “and I always imagine what they might be going through. Whether they had a fight on the way there, if they have lost someone in their life, if they’re down or having a hard time. Maybe it’s the church coming out in me, but I want to minister to them. I want to bring them out of whatever it is that they’ve been stuck in. I’ve lost quite a bit of family and friends in my life, and I feel the urgency of the need to be in the moment that you’re in because the next moment is not promised. The next day with that loved one is not guaranteed. It just feels like such a magical and incredible experience to be able to transport the audience to a place where they can transcend what it is they’re going through. I want people to feel changed when they leave.”
