Brittany Kingery

Not long ago, Brittany Kingery was living and working in the rainy Pacific Northwest, only occasionally slipping away from the office to wow audiences with her incredible singing voice. That all changed with the release of Edge of the Ocean, the debut solo recording of the Olympia, Washington vocalist. The beach-themed album will pick you up by your ears and transport you to Mexico's Pacific coast for an audio vacation with its tropical and Latin-flavored acoustic sounds and its picturesque lyrics about life at the edge of the ocean. At least that’s what it has done for fans of “trop rock” music, the genre that Brittany says she most closely identifies with. She says she’s sometimes referred to her music by that name, but it was a term she and her bandmates thought they had made up just as a shorthand way of explaining what they do. “For me, trop rock is a blend of some combination of rock, country, reggae, island or Latin music,” she says. “We do all of those things, sometimes all at once. But really, if the music takes you to a happy tropical place, it’s probably trop rock.” It wasn’t until after Edge of the Ocean started getting some attention in the trop rock community, Brittany recalls, that she even knew that such a community was out there. “I knew of course that Jimmy Buffett has a dedicated and kind of crazy following, but I did not know that there was such a large community of people out there - beach bums and pirates and surfers and parrotheads - that listen to our kind of music,” she explains. Within weeks of the album release, she was getting word that her songs were being added to playlists at trop rock radio stations, and her first video from the CD, for the Mexico-inspired ballad “Treasures”, had been viewed 10,000 times. Now there are several songs from the CD that are in regular rotation on trop rock radio stations, and Brittany earned a Best Female Vocalist nomination from the Trop Rock Music Association. “Now that really surprised me,” Brittany admits. “I knew I was getting a lot of really positive feedback about the record, but I’m pretty new. So it’s an honor to see my name alongside some great female singers who have been trop rocking for years.” “I really owe a lot to the trop rock DJs who discovered my music because I don’t think I would have found them if they hadn’t found me,” Brittany laughs. “But the whole trop rock community - the radio folks, the musicians, the parrothead organizations - have all been incredibly welcoming to me.” It was especially good news to Brittany that trop rockers and fans, almost as a matter of policy, share her passion for community service and for connecting their music to charitable causes. The “Party with a Purpose” Parrothead philosophy, whereby good times in tropical places are connected with fundraising and community service, is music to her ears. “I make music because I love to make music,” she says, “but I don’t think it would be nearly as much fun or nearly as meaningful to me if there were no one listening and no one being touched by it. I think the same thing is true in life - it’s nice just to be alive, but if we’re not touching the lives of other people in some positive way, we’re missing out on the best part of living. I definitely feel hopeful and optimistic when I hang around people who have figured out that life is about giving much more than it is about getting.” Brittany and her supporting cast, vocalist Derek Harris and vocalist-songwriter Rob Morgan Hill of Game Six, had all adopted the Riviera Nayarit, a sunny coastal stretch North of Puerto Vallarta, as a vacation home away from home, and had been performing periodically in the area since the release of Game Six's 2009 recording "God, Love and Mexico". And not long after the release of “Edge of the Ocean”, Brittany vowed she would no longer vacation in Mexico and instead applied for a visa and became a legal resident. "There's nothing I enjoy more than singing and no place I enjoy more than the Mexico coast", says Brittany. "So it was very satisfying and exciting to be able to celebrate the release of my first album in Mexico. But it was really difficult to leave,” she recalls. She’d been thinking about making the move South of the border for a couple of years, she says, and she couldn’t resist it any longer. “There I was, dreaming and singing about being in this tropical paradise and getting on a plane to go back to work? Maybe someday I’ll go back to nine-to-five,” she says. “But for now, it feels right to be living the life I sing about.” And of course, Brittany and her record company are taking their commitment to the area even one step farther. A portion of the proceeds from sales and downloads of the disc are being donated to Mexico-based charities. The charitable group that was the initial intended beneficiary of the project underwent an organizational and mission change just as the album was released, but Brittany has adopted two local charities in its place - the John Ozzello Memorial Food Bank in Bucerias, and Corazon de Niña in Puerto Vallarta. “It’s remarkable how much can be done with a small amount of money by these charitable groups,” Brittany observes. “These two groups are being run by tremendously dedicated people, and I feel very fortunate to be able to play a small role in helping them to make a huge difference in people’s lives.” "Even though I am just a visitor, I feel a very strong connection to the area and want to be involved in the community," says Brittany, who has settled in to life in the fishing village of Bucerias. "We want to support the people there who are doing the important work of providing housing and education to underprivileged kids and improving the quality of life and economic opportunities for families." Raised in the rural Washington town of McCleary, in Grays Harbor County, Brittany received musical training as a child as a drummer but did not start singing publicly until adulthood. After studying music and performance art at Grays Harbor Community College in Aberdeen, she left home for New York City, where she completed her college education and musical performance training at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan. Not long after returning home from college, Brittany was introduced to Rob and Derek, who were then performing regularly at what they called "Campfire Karaoke," a gig in which amateur singers would perform with live accompaniment. She joined that operation, which performed regularly at bars and casinos in Washington State. After a couple of years, though, the trio took a year-long break from live performance to record "God, Love and Mexico", an album on which Brittany played a supporting role." "We were always thinking in the back of our minds that Brittany was ultimately a solo performer rather than just one member of a group," says Rob. "After we did that record, we started noticing that the people coming out to hear us play live were mostly coming to see her. And we've been evolving since then, to the point that today, Britt sings lead on almost everything. When Derek or I is singing lead, it's usually just to give her voice a rest." Of the eight songs included in Edge of the Ocean, Brittany sings or shares the lead vocal on all but "Shamrock Bar", a song imported from "God, Love and Mexico" and one of a few songs on the CD about Bucerias, the unlikely location of an Irish pub that has since been sold and renamed. (The pub, the song, and its YouTube video had all become icons in Bucerias.) Although she speaks very little Spanish, Brittany sings two songs in mixed Spanish and English and two entirely in Spanish on "Edge of the Ocean", including a hypnotizing, lullaby-ish interpretation of "Cielito Lindo", perhaps Mexico's most beloved traditional song, typically played in a ranchera or Mariachi style. Brittany says she was nervous about the challenge of recording the song. "I am in love with the song," she says, "and I hope that my interpretation of it calls attention to just how beautiful it is. But, for sure, it is a little bit scary to be singing a song that is so revered in Mexico, in a way that it is not typically heard, in a language I don't speak yet." Brittany says she had Spanish coaches with her in the studio for the recordings of "Cielito Lindo" and "El Amor de mi Vida", the other Spanish language song on the album. "I told them not to let me get away with anything," she recalls. "I love singing in Spanish, so it was really important to me to get it right, not just as an artist, but as a matter of respect for the language and the song." Now that she is living in Mexico, she says she is picking up more Spanish, from the television as much as anything, since English is widely spoken in Bucerias. She’s adding more Spanish language songs to her repertoire and is performing at local bars catering to the tourists and the substantial population of American and Canadian expatriates. She’s also begun playing the ukulele during performances. Meanwhile, back in her hometown of Olympia, Washington, the work on Brittany’s sophomore album is well underway. Prior to leaving for Mexico, Brittany spent several days in the studio recording vocal tracks for the CD tentatively titled “Blue”, which she plans to release in July of 2014. For the first time, Brittany will be recording songs that she co-wrote with Rob Hill, along with some cover songs that will surprise some people. “This will be the musical project of my life,” Brittany says. “It will be almost a year from start to finish, and even though I will be in Mexico for a lot of that time, I’m much more personally involved in the production decisions, the arrangements, and of course the songwriting. I think it’s going to be something special.”