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Brittany Ann Tranbaugh. (Photo submitted)
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Pennsylvania is complicated. It’s a land of contrasts, of multitudes, of idiosyncrasies.
I have said this before. I have heard this before. But few people have stated it as eloquently as John Lennon Award-winning singer-songwriter Brittany Ann Tranbaugh in her single “Pennsylvania.”
The folk song is too nuanced to be an anthem. The word majesty appears nowhere in the lyrics.
It offers few comforting illusions about the state where Tranbaugh and some many of you reading this were raised. Instead, it’s about our complicated relationships with “home,” made more so by a pandemic, national politics, and often our own identities.
And it comes just as many of us get ready to head home to the towns and families that made us, where deep stores of memory, emotion, and connected fault lines remain.
Tranbaugh — who was born in Erie and raised in Easton, and who now calls Philadelphia home — will be headed back to loved ones in the Lehigh Valley.
The conversation has been edited for clarity, length, and flow.
PA Local: I’m something of a Pennsylvania boomeranger and I viscerally heard myself in the lyrics to “Pennsylvania” when you sing, “Go back home and make it better/Your folks are getting older/You feel the pulling of the tether/Rent a row home, grow a garden/Get the old band back together.” Then you describe something that I have not felt as a straight, white male: “At a truck stop out by Ligonier/You said I don't feel so welcome here/Shouldn't we pretend that we're just friends?” How much of this is autobiographical?
Tranbaugh: I would say this song is semi-autobiographical. My wife and I lived in Asheville, North Carolina, for two years, and the vignette about being at the truck stop out by Ligonier is 100% true. My wife was like, ‘I don't feel safe here. I think we should maybe hide our queerness.’ I started writing that song in 2015 when the presidential election was going on.
And I know a lot of friends who moved back to Pennsylvania during the pandemic, due to economic forces, so I started writing the song in 2015-2016 really thinking about that election and when I finished the song, it was 2022 and I had the pandemic in mind.
PA Local: So it took five or six years to finish?
Tranbaugh: Yeah, it was just kind of on the backburner. I had it in the Notes app on my phone and I would just sort of like open it up every few months and look at it and chip away at it.
A lot of my songs are like that. They start out as a little seed and hang out for a few years until I know what I really want to say.
PA Local: You're playing a lot of shows — one every few days or so. Is that taxing and what's it like to be, pardon the phrase, an up-and-coming musician here?
Tranbaugh: It's been a big adjustment. I've been playing music professionally since I was a teenager. But it's really, up until this year, been part-time for me. I took a big hiatus from music for a few years and came back to it in 2021.
It's a tough industry. I'm my own booking agent. I'm my own manager. So, the reason you see so many shows is because that's, you know, that's how I make my money.
PA Local: Why the break?
Tranbaugh: I was having trouble writing songs. I was feeling a little creatively stifled, and that just kind of brought up a whole identity crisis because I was always the kid who was a singer, you know. That was always my thing.
I felt if I'm not writing songs and playing shows, who am I? What skills do I have? It got to a point where the few shows that I was playing, I would have panic attacks before them, and I was just like, you know, I need to just step away for a while and try to hone other skills.
In my 20s I worked a bunch of nonprofit jobs. I became a paralegal and I feel it was really good for me to just be, like, ‘Oh, I'm good at other things.’ And it just helped me come back to music in a more gentle and less precious way. And just as a more balanced person. I also worked on my mental health a lot, which was key, yeah.
PA Local: Then what happened?
Tranbaugh: Then I found collaborators who renewed my love for music, and I won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, which was really life-changing.
I won money for that, and I used that money to record the EP that “Pennsylvania” is on and flew my band out to LA, which was super exciting. And then I got asked to go on some tours and I quit my job as a paralegal in February.
“[Working on this project] is an honor because it's my city and as an artisan it's always good to see your designs come to fruition, actually see it beyond your mind's eye."
Ruins along the Elders Run Trail at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, via Pat S. Have a photo you want to share with the whole state? Send it to us by email, use #PAGems on Instagram, or tag @spotlightpennsylvania.
It's true. It may be hard to believe, but the biggest buffet in America isn't in Texas or Las Vegas; it's at Shady Maple Smorgasbord in Lancaster County.
Food & Wine said as much in a 2022 piece about the eatery's 200-foot buffet — capable of feeding up to 7,000 people daily, TikTokers included.
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