Brit Taylor (and Me) on the First Year Of Motherhood
Brit Taylor is a wonderful Nashville singer-songwriter responsible for two of the best, most consistent front-to-back country albums of the past five years; the vocals are flawless, the sound is a well-honed '90s-country-bluegrass-pop blend that, of course, is that amazing sweet spot of too punchy and hooky for Americana and too country for the radio (as it ever freaking was!). We've plugged Kentucky Blue and Land Of The Forgotten in the newsletter, but if you haven't listened yet, rectify that before you read further!
She's also a first-time mom, like me. In fact, our babies were born the same week, right around the end of October/early November of 2025 (Scorpio season!). I only know this because of the adorable pictures she's shared of her daughter Beulah on her Instagram, alongside the requisite show updates and promo. I've been wowed by the graceful way she's managed to stay the course with her music career, which is obviously challenging even without a new baby — I'm struggling with my much easier and fully remote job, ha. Marissa has been a mom longer than I have, and has written prolifically about what it takes to balance motherhood and working in the music industry. But I figured the fact that Taylor and I have been sort of operating in parallel with our tots, and that we're both just about one year in, might make for an interesting Q&A — plus I actually got to bring my little guy to see her when she played in Texas recently (with Beulah in tow!). Read on for some fun music-mom chat…
I wanted to talk with you because 1) we had babies in the same week and 2) you make it look easy! Somehow releasing an epic album (Land Of The Forgotten) just a few months after you gave birth — just how??
I honestly think keeping up with my career has helped me transition into motherhood. I had a lot of friends kind of go through that identity crisis — which is super normal and hormonal and all the things — but I think because I kept doing things that I've always been doing, that didn't hit me as hard. Also, at the beginning of releasing a record, you're just on the computer a lot — or at least I am, because I don't have a manager and I didn't have a booking agent. I was just on the computer or the phone managing the team that was helping me put out the record. Being home with her I could do that, and I think it helped me. I
I had some friends that were like, "I'm taking this mandatory time to do nothing but mother," and I just kind of knew that wouldn't work with my personality. I think I would have hit a deep, dark depression if I would have done that. I'm a Libra too, so my whole life is about balance. I need a little of both all the time.
Did you know you were having Beulah when you started recording the album?
No — we had been talking about trying for about a year before I got pregnant. Then Meg McRee ended up getting pregnant, and I just remember being like, "OK, it is time." [laughs] You know how they say, like, one friend does it and then everybody does it? I feel like Meg set off the alarm for all women on Music Row last year because we all got pregnant. I remember telling Adam [Chaffins, her husband and fellow singer-songwriter], "My biggest fear is running out of time." I mean, I hate that idea because it's very much, like, a societal norm — but it's also very true for women. We do have a clock, it just is freaking nature. I just started getting scared. What if it doesn't work like it's supposed to? What if we have to get some help? What if we have to do IVF? Or it takes longer than we expect? We chickened out in January, and then we tried in February and got pregnant immediately. I was like, "Well, it worked." [laughs] We were thrilled and absolutely terrified. I think parenting comes with all emotions, all the time.
Definitely true. Also however hard you think it's going to be, at least for me, it's been harder. Wonderful, and very challenging.
I have a little farm: I have a dog, a cat, two miniature donkeys and four pygmy goats. We've got chickens. I've got all these animals in this little home, and these three acres that I absolutely adore taking care of. But you know how people are like, "Oh, we'll get a dog first"? To me, that is the funniest thing ever. You can leave a dog in the living room for a few hours, or if the temperature's right, they can hang in the car with a window down while you grab something. You cannot do that with a baby!! No kind of furry little creature will prepare you for a child. I don't care how many of them you have.
Yes, and then the dog actually adds to the difficulty of the baby (as someone who spends all day keeping the baby from grabbing the cat and the dog).
It definitely prepares you to take care of something, but the time…like I never anticipated that. You literally don't have time, period. You don't have one second unless they're napping, but then you still have the monitor on. Your brain is never shut down. We just started daycare last week, which has been a complete nightmare. She just gets sick all the time. We're just getting over it again — she'll go one day, and we're just like, "Gosh, she's sick again." We're all sick. I haven't had a voice since early August, I still can't sing.
Even when she is with someone else and I know she's being taken care of, my brain is still very high functioning. Thinking about, did she eat? Did she nap? Everything that I do revolves around nap and snack and lunch and all of that.
So you find out you're pregnant, and you already have this album in the can. How did you go about strategizing release and baby?
I always make a record and I want it out the second it's mastered, and it never happens that way. "We're too busy to put this out now," etc. I use Thirty Tigers for distribution, and I just knew that I was gonna hand them this project, and they were gonna tell me the spring [of 2026] because that's just how it goes. I knew it wasn't going to be any sooner, at least, and figured that would actually be perfect timing. I'd be able to have her in October — or what should have been November — and then have a few months to myself, and then put out a single, get the record out and be ready for a tour. As soon as I called them though about the timeline, they said, "What about early next year?" I was like, "Perfect, because I'm gonna have a baby." [laughs]
What was your pregnancy like? Personally, I hated being pregnant, and mine wasn't particularly bad…
Same, girl, same. I freaking hated it. Actually, I was on tour with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band when I found out I was pregnant. And then a few months later, I had a small little baby bump and went on tour with them again, and then went on a tour in July where I was just massive. Everybody was like, "When are you due, next month?" And I'm like, "Four months to go, thanks!" I was just so tired. I didn't have a bad pregnancy either, but I hated not feeling like myself in my body. My dad's a martial arts instructor. I've taken karate since I was four, so I've done some kind of physical activity twice a week since then, and I did not want to do anything.
Before I got pregnant, I was like, "I'm gonna work out every day, I'm gonna do this perfect." I didn't move. All I wanted to do was nap, and my feet hurt really bad. That was my worst pregnancy symptom. Adam would just walk into the room and I'd be passed out. That's so not like me. Unless I've got a swing and a shade tree on the perfect day, I'm not napping. It was interesting and traveling, driving a lot on those tours with swollen feet and everything…I don't love being pregnant. I want to be pregnant again, just so I can get it over with.
How are you feeling about balancing that travel with Beulah now? You had her with you when I saw you in Texas, which is so amazing to me!
Well, I'm fortunate — Adam's mom went with me, so we have Mimi helping. I'm so blessed, she's just the best Mimi. She takes such good care of her, and she's so down to get in a plane or get in a car or van. She went with me on the last Nitty Gritty tour all the way to Jackson Hole in a car. I couldn't do it without her, for sure.
But there's a part of it that's just more fun because Beulah's with me. Like, I didn't get on a plane till I was 13. We would take one family vacation a year to Myrtle Beach. We never really went anywhere else. I'm just so excited to show her everything. I already have pictures of her at Crazy Horse, and the Grand Tetons — I know that she won't remember it, but I will, and I have pictures, and I can't wait to take her back already. I get so amped about that because I can't wait to tell her about it.
Is she a mellow baby?
She really is. All my friends have little boys, and they're always like, "How is she so chill?" And I'm like, "Dude, don't even jinx me for my next." We took her to her first birthday party the other day, and there were some older kids who kept taking every ball that she would grab out of her hand. You could see me and Adam look at each other and our throats tighten up wondering if she's going to start crying. Like I'm pissed at the kid and she just didn't care. She's just like cool. I'll grab another ball. My hope is she carries this. She's chill as a cucumber.
Does she have a favorite song of yours, or period?
Since she was born, I would always put it on this Dolly Parton playlist, and every time "Islands In The Stream" came on, if she had been fussing or crying, she would stop. It's still that way. She loves Kenny Rogers.
In other recent major news, I know Kenny Chesney cut a song you co-wrote, "Shot A Car Into Space," on his latest album. The first verse is…about Elon Musk?
We didn't come in thinking, "Oh we're gonna write a song about Elon Musk." I just remember coming in with the idea of the people who complain about boats and stuff, or very expensive hobbies. Like, what's that like? Growing up, my dad was an entrepreneur — we would have nothing, and then we would feel like we had everything, and then it felt like we were on the verge of losing everything, and then we did lose everything, and then we would have nothing again, and then we would have some again. It was always all over the map. Now Adam [who co-wrote the song] and I have this little farm, and we love it so much. "Half an acre and a good dog is plenty enough for me." Even when I think about music now, I'm like, I just need enough to sustain what I have. I just don't want to lose that.
With Musk, we wanted to write about the most crazy thing somebody could do with money, and that just seemed appropriate. Regardless of what purpose it was for (I've now found out through the bazillion comments of pissed off idiots on the internet that he did that for a reason [Ed. Note: Debatable]), it's still a wild thing to be able to afford to do. The song is really just an observation of people and money, and how we all have it and then we don't have it and we spend what we have and push it to the limit.
Is it your biggest cut to date?
Oh yeah. I've had a lot of indie artist cuts and stuff, but I've never had a major cut like this. This is a huge moment. That song was pitched four years ago and recorded four years ago by Kenny, and then there was a record in between that we thought it was going to be on. I had given up on it, because I've had songs on hold with the band Perry. I've had songs on hold with Carrie Underwood. None of them ever came to fruition. I've been in Nashville for 19 years now, so when that happens it really sucks. But it's so perfect because me and my husband are co-writers on that song with Adam Wright — my favorite writing combo. I feel like the song says a lot, and I'm just really proud that that's my first cut. Everybody wants a Kenny cut. I mean, we're right after a Matraca Berg song for God's sakes. That's insane to me. He said in an interview, "Nobody else on Music Row was writing that song." That's one of the things that I really try to do, like do the thing that nobody else is doing…which maybe is why I haven't had a ton of cuts. Maybe that's a bad thing [laughs].
What has it been like to get back onstage and in the public eye postpartum? Obviously our bodies have been through so much in the past 24 months…
Yeah, I didn't anticipate doing some of that album promo with the extra baby weight. Growing up in the '90s when they called Britney Spears chunky…I'm still struggling with it to be honest, and trying to get back to feeling like myself. Like I went to a first birthday party for another kid the other day, and I was comparing myself to the other moms of one-year-olds, which is like complete bullshit. Don't do that. But old habits die hard, particularly when they don't even look postpartum, and I've still got 25 pounds to go.
I mean, I can't even imagine — when the expectation is not only that obviously you're presenting your music on stage for people, but also maintaining a social media presence etc. I'm sure that pressure just makes it extra intense.
It really does, especially like growing up with the stigmas and everything around body image, and then being on the internet with all the comparison and stuff. It's so funny because if I try to think about what I would tell another mom in my position, I would be like, "You take your time, you're on your own journey, you're beautiful." I would get lit up about it if my friend felt that way, but it's me, and…I'm just trying to be more of a cheerleader for myself. Everybody's like, "Oh, you'll take off all the weight because you're breastfeeding." Like, that was bull for me. Some women do, but me, no — I held on to every bit of it.
What do you have coming up workwise?
I'm writing a lot right now. I have a bag of songs that I keep for myself that I think about a lot, and I mean the reality of it is that recording is really expensive, and doing that whole thing is really expensive. I don't think people think about that a lot. I don't know when I'll be able to do that again. I hope that I can do that soon.
But also, The Land Of The Forgotten feels like a destination for me — not as in a destination where I want to quit, or don't have anywhere else to go, because I don't think that's the purpose of life. I don't think there is one destination. You get to one spot and then you go to another. But it's the album that I've tried to make since I moved to town. It's the album that I've dreamt about. It's the sound that I've been trying to figure out — I have worked so hard and have made other records that I love, but it still wasn't the exact thing that I wanted. It's really hard to figure that out for yourself, or it has been for me, anyways.
I do think the aesthetic of it, the way you sort of distilled bluegrass through a kind of '90s country pop lens really works so well. It just sounds great.
Thank you so much. I love it so much that I feel like I can breathe for a minute, honestly. Industry professionals probably wouldn't agree with me, from the outside looking in. But I feel like I've arrived in a creative sense. I have to figure out where I want to go from here. And I'm also just enjoying being a mother.
Do you feel like becoming a parent has sort of changed the way you look at your work?
It definitely has changed, which is a little scary…people freaked out about Hannah Harper [recent American Idol winner, I didn't know - NW] because she's got three kids. There's this stigma of being a mom and in country music, which is nuts, because Loretta Lynn had kids when she came to town, and Tammy Wynette did…it's really stupid. I don't know where all that came from. But my subject matter has changed. Now I'm writing songs about motherhood because I've always written songs about where I am.
I mean, motherhood changes everything. Your yeses and your nos become more intentional, because you're more intentional with your time, and you know there's this little human to constantly think about. I don't know if you feel this way, but having a daughter, everything is through the lens of would I want her to do this? What would I tell her? What would make me proud of her? You put up with less bull because you're like, "I wouldn't want my daughter to put up with this."
