Brandie Blaze wanted to make a sonic telenovela. Instead the Boston hip hop champion made an album about her personal pain and triumph.
To follow up her second album, 2019’s “Late Bloomer,” Blaze dreamed up a fictional concept album – a sort of murder mystery that plays out over a set of banging hip hop tracks. The album got a boost when Blaze won a LAB Grant from the Boston Foundation to help her make it. Then the project took an unexpected personal turn.
“As I was writing, I realized that the album started to mirror my life,” Blaze told the Herald. “I was in a relationship that was emotionally abusive… I realized as I was writing these songs that it wasn’t a fictional story anymore. It was about my life and what I was going through.”
“It became this super personal album that I did not intend on doing,” Blaze added.
Blaze put her struggles into her songs. Into her wise and mighty, raw and catchy songs.
Those songs make up “Broken Rainbows,” an LP that comes out April 20 and gets a release party April 21 at Somerville’s Union Tavern. (Oh, and check her on the Boston Calling festival stage in May!)
“Broken Rainbows” survived a thematic overhaul. It survived a sucker punch from the pandemic. But it almost got shelved when Blaze thought she might be done with music.
Blaze had set a December 2021 release date for “Broken Rainbows.” She booked a venue for the release party and announced the show. Then she canceled it all.
“I took seven months off,” she said. “I didn’t perform, I didn’t write any music, nothing for seven months. During that time, I tried to get healthy mentally… I wasn’t enjoying performing anymore. And when that happened I knew that something was seriously wrong because I’ve been performing since I was three years old.”
One day, over half a year later, Blaze woke up and realized she missed it. She dusted off “Broken Rainbows” looking to add to it. The first song Blaze wrote documented her time away. Confronting her trauma, “7 Months” has her booming, “They think that I’m a lamb/[expletive] I’m King Kong.”
From “7 Months” to the hook-filed anthem of self-love “So Free” to the intense meditation on the impact of abuse on “The Things That You Say,” “Broken Rainbows” is an emotional blockbuster. Blaze knows it’s her most personal album, and there were times when she asked herself, “Do I want people to know that much about me?”
But the album is also a sonic blockbuster. It’s more diverse, complex and nuanced than anything she’s ever done. Sometimes she sees that – she calls “The Things that You Say” the best song she’s ever written (and she may be right about that). But in other spots, she’s less sure – she expresses trepidation about the defiant and sweet “So Free.”
“I talk about body positivity and loving yourself, especially as a Black woman, all the time but I’ve never had a record that directly said that,” she said about writing “So Free.” “I never had a song that said, ‘Love yourself! You’re amazing just as you are!’ But it’s actually the song that I’m most nervous about because it sounds so different and I tend to be very aggressive.”
Yes, Blaze can boom with some legit power. But with “So Free” its clear she can do tender and nurturing just as well.
Boston and the world will need to get that sonic telenovela from Brandie Blaze. But right now, “Broken Rainbows” is the album that deserves to be celebrated.
For tickets and details, visit facebook.com/brandieblaze617