We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brooks Huntley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brooks, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

As long as I can remember, I’ve had unorthodox goals for my life. The first dream I ever had was to be a professional baseball player. And not long after, I picked up the guitar. For a while I figured I’d be the first person to ever close out game 7 of a World Series on the mound and then headline a stadium show in the same ballpark the next night as an artist. Needless to say, ‘practical’ or ‘probable’ were never exactly first priority for me when it came to what I wanted to do with my life.

I’ve been in Nashville for about 5 years pursuing a career in music and spent basically my entire high school life chasing the dream too, so I’ve had plenty of peaks and valleys. At 16, I was on a TV Show on ABC called ‘Rising Star’ that didn’t go as well as I’d hoped it would. The following 3-4 years after that were pretty brutal on my mentally as I tried to recover from what felt like a massive blow to my confidence. There were plenty of times in that 4 year period that I considered how much easier and simple life may be if I could just make myself want a ‘normal’ life.

I was watching friends of mine go to college, get jobs and engaged and thought, “that all looks so much easier to navigate. Why can’t I just want that?”.

Ultimately though, I’ve realized the call to a life of art is its own blessing. Being an artist or a creative person and taking that on as your identity gives you a special kind of freedom to not have to keep up with the Jones’. There is no blueprint for what a ‘successful’ life in the arts really is. It’s all subjective. When I realized that nobody gets to define how successful I am as an artist but me, the life I chose as an artist which had felt like half curse/half blessing suddenly felt like simply a blessing. That’s how I feel now.

Brooks, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Plain and simple, I was a product of Guitar Hero. For Christmas when I was 10 years old, I got a Play Station 2 and Guitar Hero III. I loved that game and the songs on it, particularly Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Pride and Joy’. I dug into Stevie’s music and bonded with my Dad over it. Dad plays a little guitar so he and I sat down and he taught me how to play the main riff. I was hooked.

Playing guitar lead me to falling in love with John Mayer, the Eagles, and other great guitar/songwriter combos like James Taylor and Jason Mraz (a shockingly great guitar player).

Over time, I realized songwriting was my real passion. There was no better place to end up than Nashville, TN.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I definitely had to unlearn a lot throughout my journey in music, and quite frankly, I still am. The most important lesson I’ve unlearned in music is that anybody has an expectation for me.
I was a pretty gifted guitar player from the very early stages of learning how to play. I impressed a lot of adults with my talents while simultaneously feeling pretty insignificant around my peers. My 12-13 year old self internalized my ability to play guitar and sing as something only adults would ever appreciate me for, so I gave up on trying to impress my adolescent friends and put my hope in the future: I thought, someday when all my peers are adults, they’ll finally be old enough to appreciate me.

There was a great bit of expectation I put on myself to be a big deal once I became an adult for that reason. I “sacrificed” being cool as a kid for my future adult ‘coolness’.

The last 5 years of my life have taught me that cool is both very subjective and fleeting. The expectation I had put on myself to be a cool adult was misplaced. Music was never meant to supplement my ‘coolness’; it was always just supposed to be something of value I could give to the world in a way nobody else could. That’s the gift. Not the celebration or the admiration of my talents.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I finally figured this one out over the last year of my life, and actually have a song coming out shortly about this.

My grandfather was a great blues piano player back in the 60’s/70’s in Texas. He played with BB King, ZZ Top, and many of the other blues/rock greats of the time that came through Texas. He was a gifted guy. I happen to look quite a bit like he did when he was my age and also seem to have gotten my musical genes from him.

As talented as he was, he wasn’t a very good Father to my Father or a good husband to my Grandmother. He was absent and abusive and left a really big hole in my Dad and Grandmother’s lives.

I got to meet my Grandpa right at the end of his life. He had found Jesus and made an attempt to connect with my Dad before he passed away. He was just healthy enough to play piano on a couple songs I made at 12 years old (the first I had ever recorded) and passed away shortly after.

It was profound to meet a man that by all accounts, I was so much like, but also realize that I didn’t want to live a life anything like his. Sure, I wanted to be a musician like him. But I didn’t want to leave the legacy he left. I wanted to be the great musician, but also the great husband, father, son and friend.

Ultimately my life’s mission is to do what he did, but do it the right way. I want to restore purpose and goodness to my family’s musical bloodline by breaking the cycle of substance abuse and neglect that he started. That’s my life’s mission. Make music and love the people around me well.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brookshuntleyofficial/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrooksHuntley

Image Credits
@anthonyromanocreative – Anthony Ramano @neonleafmedia