By Jacob Coleman
Nostalgia is baked into the Austin Brockner experience. I first saw Brockner live when he was playing as a member of Eli and the Moonlighters on the last day of the Heartwood Music Festival. The band had an early set, at the part of the day when most of the audience was seeking any and all possible shade, and they took full advantage of that sweltering February afternoon. As an artist, Brocker’s forte is this dreamy, soul-infused rock sound. His guitar tones were clean and warm and his voice sounded like honey. His band’s music washed over the audience like a wave, and took me back to the feeling of hot, summer days as a kid.
Despite the nostalgic tones of Brockner’s music, it’s far from a mere pastiche of older sound, nor does he look at the past with rose-colored glasses. On his new single “Sleep Talk,” we hear his easygoing take on modern indie rock mixed with the soul sensibilities of an old Clarence Carter single while Brockner ponders the give-and-take nature of memories and nostalgia. Brockner has no shortage of the ups and downs that memories can resurrect. Ahead of his upcoming EP Dreams, releasing on June 2nd, I sat down with Brockner to discuss those themes of nostalgia, his journey to becoming a full-time musician and overly loud keyboards.
On your new single “Sleep Talk,” you touch a lot on themes of memories and nostalgia. Could you talk a bit about how this new single came to be?
I’ve had really vivid dreams my whole life. I have dreams almost every night and have multiple dreams a night, so you could really say I’m plagued by dreams. There was this one dream I kept having where I’d wake up completely washed and energyless, and the weird thing was that it wasn’t a nightmare. For me, nightmares tend to be scary and life-threatening situations that have never happened in real life, but this dream was a memory. It was done in a dreamlike way, in a random place, the way dreams do, but it was a very painful memory. It kept randomly recurring so I started to play with that idea.
I started binge-watching a lot of video essays on nostalgia around that time, and that’s when it clicked for me. I had this idea that while nostalgia’s a beautiful thing, perhaps if we consume it too much, we don’t know what else it will unlock.
At least in my experience, nostalgia songs and experiences are generally associated with pleasant memories, but it seems that your song explores how that’s not always the case.
That’s the thing, right? It is a beautiful thing and associated with a lot of pleasantries, but as with all things in life, there’s always an ebb and flow. Nostalgia can unlock the unpleasant things as well.
On the topic of nostalgia, you’ve cited legends of soul & blues, like Ray Charles and B.B. King, as being a big part of your musical upbringing. What role would you say those influences have had on your musical career?
For me, they’re the impetus for everything. I grew up with eight siblings and my parents divorced when I was eight, so my dad raised us for a lot of our years. The youngest was about two. My parents divorced, so my dad did a lot of work. Every Saturday, he cooked breakfast and played the same music, a lot of that was your Ray Charles and your B.B. King. That was how I came into music. I wasn’t adventurous in my youth with music, I really just locked onto those.
I vividly remember the moment that music changed for me. I was 17 and listening to one of the Ray Charles albums that I grew up listening to, and the song “Hard Times” came on and just stopped me in my tracks. It was the first time that I was listening to music and realized that it could pull something emotionally from within you and elicit vivid experiences. That song’s about Ray’s mother dying and the hard times she had warned him about, and while I didn’t know about that before, it felt like I was living those experiences with him.
So, those old musicians that my dad loved and passed on to me were so much of what got me to love music. The same can be said of B.B. King and guitar. There was him, The Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton from Cream. Hearing those titans of the guitar world is what made me want to pick up a guitar and be like them, just like so many other guitarists.
Would you those types of bluesy guitarists have had a big influence on your sound?
Definitely, especially as I got older. Digging into Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan really gave me an idea of what I wanted my sound to be. I think on “Sleep Talk,” more so than other songs on the EP, you can hear the Stevie Ray influences on that solo. You can trace all of these guitar titans back further and further, and it almost always comes back to blues and early folk and country.
If you could travel back in time to any music scene in history, where and when would you go?
I’m torn between two answers. I think the most obvious one would be the ‘60s. The Beatles, specifically John Lennon and Paul McCartney but really the whole group, were some of the greatest songwriters ever. So it would be cool to be around when they were hitting their heyday, and also to be there when Jimi Hendrix and bands like his were coming through would be amazing. On the other hand, it would also be cool to see when Mozart was throwing down, that would be really exciting, although I don’t know if I’d wanna deal with everything else in that timeframe.
Your website talked about a big life and career transition as you became a full-time musician a few years ago. Could you describe what that transition was like for you?
It was slow. I had toyed with it for a while before jumping into it. I remember as I was finishing up college, I knew that I wasn’t doing what was right for me. I was making the “smart” move, but a part of me knew deep down that it was not the intended path for me. I knew that I had a love of theater and music that I tucked away because it was time to get the degree, but over the years, that love didn’t go away. It grew.
I was out in Tucson, Arizona for a job and it was the most I had ever been separated from the people I grew up with. All my family, my loved ones, and my girlfriend were all hundreds of miles away. I was truly isolated. Music had always come back to me in times that I needed it, and in that moment, it came back to me fully. I realized that it wasn’t just something I wanted to do, but the thing I wanted to do. I toyed around a little with writing after that, but a year later was what I would call the breaking point.
It was my 27th birthday, and I took some time off from work. I was so disenchanted with my job and where I was in life, and I knew I was missing out on music. It’s a bit macabre, but I was lying there on my bed and thought that if I was given a diagnosis that I don’t have much longer to live, it would eat me up to know that I wasn’t brave enough to do the thing that I knew I wanted to do. I knew that would be a regret, without question.
So, I took a trip out to Marshall, North Carolina, and stayed completely isolated in a tiny home on top of a mountain. I gave myself a challenge where if I could write a song in a day, I would chase this dream. That was the fear for me, that I wouldn’t have what it takes to do this. I did write a song in a day, and I had to keep that promise to myself. That was when I knew that there were no more excuses to be made, and slowly from there, I made the transition. By 2021, I felt that I was ready to leave my full-time job in engineering and give this all I got.
That’s a great story. I know you went to school at UF, so is that what brought you back to Gainesville?
It was two-fold. I came to UF and stayed for about 5 years, and I fell in love with the city. I think because I felt lost in school, it caused me to find places in the city outside of the university that felt like home to me, and I found it better than I ever thought I could. The other part of it was that my girlfriend at the time was still finishing pharmacy school.
There was a double compound since I was understandably nervous when I moved back to Gainesville and was saying, “I don’t know if I should’ve moved here. I can’t believe I moved here for a relationship.” My girlfriend very honestly replied, “You did not just move here just for our relationship. You want to be here, so remember that.” She was right, I did want to be here and there’s such a communal, nurturing sense for music here.
That’s definitely true. Gainesville is a smallish town but it has a very vibrant music scene. I can’t think of any weekend that goes by without at least a concert or two. Would you say that the music scene has had an influence on your music?
It sure had. I wouldn’t be doing any of this if I hadn’t come back to Gainesville, and I really believe that. It was the comfort of this place that allowed me to really dig in and start doing open mics regularly and try this. It let me be vulnerable and afraid. I mentioned that I did theater, and in any of my corporate jobs, anyone could tell me to do a presentation and I could do it without intimidation. This, sharing songs that are so deeply personal to me, was just the scariest thing ever to me. Had I not had the safety and communal sense when I got back here, I don’t think I would be doing this at all. Further, seeing how hard everyone out here worked and put into it have inspired me to always work harder and keep working for it.
One of your recent pursuits that I thought was really cool is your position as a musician in residence for UF Health. How is that experience?
I tell people that I’ve spoiled myself because I don’t think there’s more fulfilling work you could do when you love music and love to play and sing. I can do what I love, do something that I almost objectively know brings good into this world, and get paid to do it. It’s really the golden trifecta, there. It’s just lovely work, and it’s challenging. It’s challenged me in ways that I never could have anticipated. Even taking the music out of it, just getting to be a part of that is worth every bit of risk and every bit of struggle I’ve had to go through to get here. But, as I’m realizing now, I really have put my nose to the grindstone. To be able to go in there multiple days a week, sing for a few hours, meet strangers, and try to know what could apply to the most people, it really sharpened the iron for me.
On top of your solo work, you’re involved in a number of local bands. One of them, Eli and the Moonlighters, recently played at Heartwood Festival. Could you talk a bit about your experience there?
That band is really a conduit for taking the songs I had written and building the sound fully. I had this nagging feeling that my music wasn’t going anywhere but I didn’t have a band. Musicians had told me that they could hear a band so fully in my music. Eli and the Moonlighters was the venture to do that, and I asked my friend, who’s a drummer, if he wanted to do it. That’s the thing with these bands - you have to know that at least one person will be there no matter what, knowing that you’re not going to make a lot of money playing original music. Over the months, we built that up into what you heard at the Heartwood Festival.
It’s been so important to me to reflect on how it was when I started and how it is now after two years of really fighting for it. That’s what I think led me to work with my friend Kevin on my single “Speak Up” and on my upcoming EP, Dreams. Having heard it with this band that I put together allowed me to hear a lot of potential and wonder what it could sound like with a lot of money and a big group of professionals. Eli and the Moonlights was the impetus for all of this.
Just to explain the name, my middle name is Elijah and I go by Eli in my personal life. We were originally the Austin Brockner Band, but I wanted to give some ownership to the other musicians because they were working their butts off to learn my music. All of them had full-time jobs while this was my full-time job, so the logic was that everyone had been calling me Austin all my life but now I go by Eli, and they all had full-time but right now they’re musicians, so Eli and the Moonlighters was a fun way to incorporate that.
And how does the experience of working as a band compare to the experience of working as a solo artist?
They’re so different, and this became so apparent to me after playing this year’s Heartwood Festival. A not-insignificant amount of people talked to me after that show, including my father, who’s not one for many words. He’ll just say, “That was good,” and that’s just how he is. He’s stoic, to say the least. But this time, he told me, “The band’s great, you’re all great musicians, you've got great sound, but what makes me want to listen to your songs is lost in that.”
There are a lot of ways to distill that, but my takeaway was that there’s such a difference in the intimacy of performance between me as a solo performer and me with the band. With the band, it’s big, it’s fun, you want to make it energetic and make everyone feel it. It’s fun and I feel great doing it, and while I don’t want to say that it’s better or worse, there may be an intimacy that’s lost. That’s made me realize how special it feels to perform on my own again, and I’ve dug back into those solo performances recently. I want people to connect with me and really see how much I’m baring my soul into it.
Your debut album, Live At Heartwood Soundstage, came out last year. How was the experience of putting that together?
I don’t know if I’d call that the debut since there was an album at Heartwood in 2020 and a very experimental indie EP called Chasing Sunsets, but it did feel like a debut in the sense that I am so much certain of myself as a musician and how I want my sound to be. That performance felt like one of those evolutions for me. That album was about two years after I did my first performance at Heartwood, which was right when COVID hit, but it was like a night and day difference. I showed up in 2022 knowing that I wanted to share these songs and that these songs feel so important to me and feel indicative of how my songwriting has grown. The only stinky part of me is that I was just getting over COVID, so the vocals were touch and go for me. That's a live performance, though. You’re always battling something to get the best performance.
Do you have any fun stories from performing around Gainesville?
Oh my god, I have so many. I won’t say the venue since I don’t want to get in trouble, but I will say that they’re no longer a venue anymore. We had a show there, and you never really knew what you were going to get with the sound. It was the first time we were playing with the keyboardist for Eli and the Moonlighters, and he’s a brilliant musician. Me and the other guys had already gigged there before, so we knew what we were getting into, but he did not. As we were sound-checking, the keys were just way too loud. Just, so loud. On top of that, the keyboard didn’t have the pedal he needed, so the sustain pedal was just binary. Either it was on, and every note was sustained, or it was off. So he was battling with that, and throughout the show, the sound guy kept inching up the keyboard in our monitor. I’m telling you, he was screaming in that monitor. We could hear nothing but the keys. Me and Ben [the keyboard player] kept looking at each other and kept turning the volume down, and we kept looking at the sound guy. They had this battle for like three songs, so every time Ben hit the keys, he would blow us away and he’d have to turn it down. In the two years that I’ve been practicing and playing with Ben, that’s the only time that I’ve ever seen him upset. He left and he didn’t say a word. We took the show for what it was - we were just playing for a group of our friends - but me and the other guys had a laughing fit afterward. I can’t imagine what it sounded like to the audience, but to us it was hilarious.
What can fans expect to hear on your new EP, Dreams?
These are gonna be my songs in a way that, not to be too on the nose, I’ve dreamed of them sounding since I started this. When I think about all the music that has influenced me, all those powerful bands and big sounds, this is it. This is what I’ve been fighting for. It took years for me to be a confident, competent enough musician to do this, and with the help of Kevin producing and mixing and all the wonderful people and musicians who helped me put this together, this is gonna be Austin Brockner’s music different than you’ve ever heard it. Better than you’ve ever heard it. This is that moment for me. All the hard work and the effort come together to pay off and I can walk away knowing that everything was put on the table for this. To refer back to that moment of having regrets if I was on my deathbed, this is the album that I can say is the proof of what made my music special. I’ve been excited to share this music for longer than I can tell you.
The EP comes out on June 2.
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