THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The music of Brigitte Calls Me Baby is equal parts elegant time warp and up-close exploration of our modern-day neuroses. The Chicago quintet emerged in early 2023 and scored a breakout hit with Impressively Average — a sublimely shimmering anthem that shot to the Top 10, setting the band on a swift rise. Now, with their debut LP The Future Is Our Way Out, Brigitte Calls Me Baby ingeniously span genres and eras, merging the lavish romanticism of mid-century pop with the frenetic energy and spiky intensity of early-millennium indie-rock. Centered on frontman Wes Leavins’ hypnotically crooning vocal work, the result is a rare convergence of sophistication and style and unabashed sincerity.
Partly recorded live at the legendary RCA Studio A in Nashville with nine-time Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton), The Future Is Our Way Out also features a selection of songs self-produced by Leavins and his bandmates: Guitarists Jack Fluegel and Trevor Lynch, bassist Devin Wessels and drummer Jeremy Benshish. With its poetic meditations on desire, anxiety and the complexities of impermanence, the album arrives as a potent evolution of Brigitte Calls Me Baby’s debut EP This House Is Made Of Corners.
In choosing a title for the LP, Brigitte Calls Me Baby landed on a phrase that Leavins impulsively scrawled onto a white T-shirt as a teenager and continued to revisit over the years, eventually transforming it into a lush and cinematic pop song. As the album’s opening track, The Future is Our Way Out makes for an exquisite entrée into the extravagant sonic world and heightened emotional landscape inhabited by the band. “I want to be earnest even when it’s uncomfortable, and write unapologetically about things like my intense fear of death,” says Leavins. “The Future is Our Way Out is about that fear, but it’s also about hoping there might be something beyond death, a way out of all the mess and the sadness that plagues us in life.”
Another track touched with the strange allure of tragedy, Pink Palace brings brightly careening riffs and effervescent rhythms to Leavins’ reminiscence of a certain lurid fascination from his childhood. “When I was growing up, my grandma had a book from the ’70s that went into all these different Hollywood scandals, and there was a part about Jayne Mansfield that stuck with me,” he explains, referring to the actress who died in a car crash at 34. “I remember there was a photo of her that was quite pornographic, and when you turned the page there was another photo of her dead body after the car wreck. It was so striking and really left an impression on me, to the point where I’d get the chills anytime I even glanced at that book on the shelf.”
As The Future is Our Way Out unfolds, Brigitte Calls Me Baby offer up everything from the jittery post-punk of Fine Dining to the stark and sleepy serenade of the album-closing Always Be Fine. On Too Easy, the band slip into a moment of new-wave majesty built on skittering guitar tones and darkly throbbing beats, with Leavins’ voice taking on a near-operatic grandeur as he questions the reliability of memory and the durability of love. Meanwhile, on We Were Never Alive, shuddering rhythms and spectral guitar lines meet in a gloriously bleak contemplation of mortality. “Devin wrote the music to that song and I loved how dramatic it felt, so the goal was to match that drama in the lyrics,” says Leavins. “It became a song about how in the grand scheme of existence, the time we’re alive is so brief and insignificant. At some point after you’re gone, when everyone who knew you is gone as well, it’s almost as if you never existed at all.”
Also featuring Impressively Average — encapsulated by Leavins as “a bit of a self-loathing song, about trying to cope with someone’s very high expectations of you” — The Future is Our Way Out endlessly showcases Brigitte Calls Me Baby’s timeless and singular musicality, an element largely informed by Leavins’ eclectic upbringing. Originally from the Southeast Texas town of Port Arthur, he grew up listening to Roy Orbison records at his grandparents’ house next door, while his parents played him new-wave bands like The Cars and Tears for Fears and his friends turned him on to Radiohead and The Strokes. At age 13, Leavins took up guitar and began writing songs of his own, quickly discovering his distinct vocal style. “At first I didn’t like the way I sang and couldn’t really do anything about it, but as I got older I started to appreciate it more,” he reveals. “My whole inclination toward music came from being in this small town in Texas with nowhere to go and nothing to do, and wanting to be understood without having to say anything.”
Upon moving to Chicago in 2016, Leavins immersed himself in the local scene and soon linked up with the musicians who would join him in co-founding Brigitte Calls Me Baby. As the band built up their catalog, Leavins was tapped to take part in recreating a series of Elvis Presley songs for Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic Elvis, which found him crossing paths with Cobb. “Dave and I hit it off right away and started talking about the music we loved, and when we reconnected later he asked me to send him some of the songs I’d been working on,” Leavins recalls. Not long after sharing a batch of demos with Cobb, Brigitte Calls Me Baby set to work on This House Is Made Of Corners, inking a deal after a much-buzzed-about set at SXSW.
Since the release of This House Is Made Of Corners, Brigitte Calls Me Baby have performed Impressively Average on CBS Saturday and taken the stage at NPR’s World Cafe. They have also kept up a relentless touring schedule, routinely captivating crowds with live favorites like Palm of Your Hand (an addictively catchy cut from The Future is Our Way Out, featuring fantastically cheeky lyrics like “I swear I’m not a narcissist / But I am so hard to resist”). “We don’t rely on any antics or smoke and mirrors to carry the show, so everything is raw and real,” says Leavins. “Because these songs are so vocally demanding, there’s a certain amount of gymnastics required to maintain that realness, but I’d never want to modify anything just to make it easier.” Throughout their abundant time on the road, Brigitte Calls Me Baby have felt an intensifying bond with members of their ever-growing audience. “The Future is Our Way Out in particular is a moment in the show where there’s so much emotion given and so much emotion received between us and the crowd,” says Leavins. “It’s so satisfying to have that kind of exchange as a fairly new band; it tells me that the music is doing its work and having a real impact on people.”
For Leavins, one of the most thrilling aspects of connecting with fans is the realization that even his most deeply subjective lyrics tend to strike a powerful chord. “A lot of our songs focus on topics that aren’t widely discussed in rock music, and it feels good to see those songs resonate with others,” he says. “The whole reason I started making music in the first place was to find some kind of unity with a group of people who feel the same way I do — so if can feel less alone and at the same time help other people to feel more understood, there’s nothing more rewarding than that.”
