a quiet chat with pisgah about healing, heartbreak and finding strength through sound
bend to break by pisgah swells like a storm, where heartbreak meets liberation. the london-based, southern-born artist (brittney jenkins) blends alt-rock power with the emotional honesty of americana, creating something both raw and reflective.
written and recorded in her home studio and mixed by austin producer dan duszynski (jess williamson, loma), the song captures the moment you realize you’ve been living in someone else’s story too long. guitars surge, drums thunder, and her voice rises through it all – weary but unbroken.
bend to break is a reckoning turned release, a reminder that pain can be the start of self-discovery. it’s tender, fierce, and beautifully human. so imagine how happy we were when pisgah agreed to answer a few of our questions about the release.
bend to break feels like both a release and a reckoning. what moment or memory first set this song in motion for you?
this is such a great question. the first line that came to me was the first line of the song: ‘hallowed roads slope gently down’. it doesn’t always happen that you get the first line of a song first -often lyrics move and shift into different places as the song develops- so it’s always interesting when it does happen.
i was in nepal, in a small mountain village tucked away in the lower himalaya called bandipur, and looking across this remarkable mountain landscape. i’ve always been drawn to mountain landscapes for so many reasons – the scale, the balance of beauty and brutality, their resilience, and the fact that they tell very old stories about how the earth formed and what it once looked like.
i think the himalayan foothills triggered a memory of the appalachian mountains in north carolina, the mountains i grew up with and one of my favourite places on earth. the appalachians are so much smaller than the himalaya, but it’s only because they’re so incredibly old and have seen so much history pass. that made me think about my own history, the things in my proverbial rearview mirror, that have given me a different vantage point on my life and, in this case, on the breakdown of my family when i was a teenager.
you’ve spoken about growing up around relationships that didn’t always model stability. how did that background shape the emotional core of this song?
it shaped it so directly. my parents divorced when i was thirteen and, as expected, i was very angry at both of them in the immediate aftermath because i felt that by giving up on each other (which is how i felt about it at the time) that they were somehow giving up on me – or at the very least, my chance at having a ‘normal, healthy, stable life’. now that i’m nearly the same age they were when they got divorced, i see it so differently. they weren’t compatible people and their relationship just didn’t work, so the decision came from a place of immense strength and mercy for all of us.
i decided to tell the story from second-person perspective because it allowed me to slip between their perspectives and imagine what it must have been like for them to navigate the end – especially my mom, because she had such a traditional idea of what her family life should be like. i imagined her in that point of suspension between feeling suffocated by a circumstance you know is harmful to you and the freedom that comes once you remove yourself from it, when you haven’t gotten far enough away to escape the devastation yet.
thank you. there’s this southern-americana warmth running through your music, even while you’re based in london now. how does that distance – the ocean between where you came from and where you are – influence your writing?
i really feel like i had to leave the south to truly love and celebrate the south. growing up there felt so oppressive because the wider environment was so conservative, religious, sexist, racist, homophobic – the list goes on and on – and i never felt like i fit. that said, because it’s a place defined by so much repression it’s also a place of remarkable resistance against those regressive forces. some of the most interesting, progressive, culturally-influential art, activism and music in the us has come from my region, and the older i get the more proud of that i feel.
there’s a legacy of artists being exiled from the places they come from and only being able to write about them with affection and care once they leave them. i always think about how the writer james joyce left dublin when he was only 22 and never moved back, but spent the rest of his life writing what were effectively love letters to his city. if anything, it shows that physical presence is only part of really loving a place. sometimes we need the distance to love something more fully and that’s been true for me with the south.
the production feels raw but cinematic, especially with dan duszynski’s touch on the mix. what was the process like building the sound together from your home studio?
one of the things i knew deeply when i started the record was that i wanted to work with a producer from the south, and one that records americana music, because there’s a certain expansiveness in that style of recording that i really want in my songs. so i was grateful to find dan! he’s based in austin, tx, which means all the work was done remotely, and it still blows my mind that you can make records even with an ocean between you in 2025. i built the drums and recorded all the other parts (guitar, bass, and piano) myself. when i sent him the recording i described it as a growing storm across a spacious, flat plain that picks up strength the closer you get to it, and he really took that very gestural guidance to heart when he mixed it! i loved the first mix he sent me, so this one didn’t need any changes.
bend to break is part of your upcoming album faultlines. what story are you trying to tell through the record as a whole – and what does this song reveal about the person you’re becoming through it?
faultlines is all about the emotional disasters that have fractured my life and sense of self, but also about the necessity of going through those things in order to find a stronger sense of myself on the other side.
i’m a tarot practitioner and tend to think about meaning through the cards. when i think of the album, the card that comes to mind for me is a major arcana card called the tower. for anyone who isn’t familiar with it it’s a pretty dramatic image. it shows a tower being struck by lightning, with two unfortunate souls toppling out of the windows against a pitch black sky, signalling total catastrophe. but the other side of that darkness is that all the things that aren’t for you any longer, are holding you back from becoming the person you really are, get cleared away so you can build something that’s truer.
the record has given me the opportunity to catalogue those fractures and make sense of them, and in that i’ve gained a much clearer sense of myself.
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huge thanks to pisgah for sharing, check out the latest release here.
https://www.instagram.com/pisgahmusic/
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