Hurt People - EP

“I've only been writing my own stuff for four or five years now,” rising Tennessee-bred, Los Angeles-based country-pop act Brandon Stansell tells Apple Music. “I didn't grow up thinking I was ever going to be a songwriter. I just always loved to sing. It's very different to write for your own voice, what you can do and how you want to express yourself.” The emotional centre of his new four-song EP is his autobiographical experience as a queer man who encountered homophobia when he came out to loved ones a decade ago. “Country music, at its very core, is this idea of telling stories through music, but for queer people, we've always been told, ‘Don't tell your story. Don't be authentic to who you are. We don't want to hear that,'” Stansell says. “So maybe these queer people that have loved country music their entire lives, but never seen themselves in it, can finally feel some sort of representation in this genre that they love, but also for the straight community that really doesn't know what it's like on the other side here.” Stansell talks through each of the four songs on the project. Hurt People (feat. Cam) “When I heard that turn of phrase [‘Hurt people hurt people’] on Drag Race, it really resonated with me, because one of the things that has helped me in my journey to my path to peace has been to try to look at people around me and just acknowledge that we're all human, and that we are inevitably flawed people just trying to do our best. It has given me the ability to be more graceful than I thought I could be, and more forgiving than I thought I could be. I wanted to tell my story through that lens—an honest representation of the fact that the pain still exists, but that there is peace in trying to understand it this way. Cam came on board once I had a working demo of it. I sent it over to her, not sure she would sing on it. She just sent me a crying emoji back—I took that as a yes.” Like Us “The song came out of hearing Sam Hunt's ‘Kinfolks’ for the first