Brett Badner
In this interview, Brett Badner discusses the inspiration behind “where did summer go?”, his independent recording process, musical influences, songwriting evolution, and the creative direction of his upcoming music.
1. Your latest single, “where did summer go?”, captures that bittersweet feeling of watching a beautiful season slip away. Can you take us back to the moment you first picked up your guitar in August and started writing the song?
It was early August 2025, and I could already feel summer slipping away. I wanted to write a song about that dread you get as the season winds down. It was also my first summer after graduating, so there was no new school year to go back to. Instead, I was heading back to the grind without anything new on the horizon, and that made the sadness and reflection hit even harder.
I still have voice notes from August 5 of me working out the guitar chords and trying early melody ideas. It grew from there.
2. You wrote, produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered the entire track in your bedroom. What was the biggest challenge of handling every stage yourself, and what did that creative freedom allow you to achieve?
What I’m proudest of is that every stage of the process is mine. That gives me full creative control, and the song ends up sounding exactly the way I heard it in my head.
The biggest challenge is knowing when a song is finished. When you’re producing on your own, there’s no one to tell you to stop, so I can tweak a snare sound forever or go back and forth between two toplines for hours. Learning to commit and move on is still a work in progress. The same goes for songwriting. I can question a single lyric endlessly, and without collaborators in the room, I don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off or to tell me how something lands in the moment. And, of course, it all just takes longer.
3. You’ve been playing guitar and writing songs since you were eight years old. How has your relationship with songwriting evolved, particularly as you’ve started exploring deeper themes like nostalgia, memory, and the passage of time?
I’ve always written about my own life, and that hasn’t changed. What has changed is that I’ve grown up, so the experiences I’m writing about have too.
4. Your music draws inspiration from artists such as Shawn Mendes, Niall Horan, Conan Gray, and Lauv, while also embracing polished pop production. How do you balance those influences with developing a sound that feels distinctly your own?
What all of those artists share is songwriting that feels personal. You can hear the person behind the song even with big pop production around it. That’s what I’ve taken from them more than any particular sound. My songs usually start on acoustic guitar, or with a lyric idea I’ve written down, so the song has to work when it’s just me, lyrics, and the chords before I start building production around it. From there, the sound becomes my own because I’m making every decision myself, from the lyrics to the final mix.
5. With more than 85,000 Spotify streams across your releases, you’ve been steadily building your audience as an independent artist. What have you learned about connecting with listeners, and what has surprised you most about that journey?
Honestly, I’m still learning. The biggest lesson so far is that consistency matters, and every release builds on the last one. What’s surprised me most is how much a single share or playlist add can do. Some of my biggest jumps came from moments I didn’t see coming.
6. Looking beyond “where did summer go?”, what creative directions are you excited to explore next, and what can listeners expect from your upcoming music?
I’m finishing a new single that I’m planning to release in November or December, and I’m really excited about it. It’s a sonic step forward for me, leaning further into an indie and bedroom-pop sound. In a way, it continues where “where did summer go?” left off. The production is still polished, but it’s rawer and more stripped back.