Like a lot of dreamers, Brittany Guerin fantasized about being discovered. The singer-songwriter, who goes by the mononymous moniker Britti professionally, would be working her day job at a music store in New Orleans and picture the moment. 

“I never said it out loud, really, but I dreamt of transferring to the Nashville location and then just praying for a serendipitous moment of someone walking in, being like, ‘Oh. You can sing. Why don't you come on tour?’ I was just in the clouds,” she says with a laugh. “Things like that do happen, I guess.” And then she realizes, “Well, I guess something like that kind of did!”

Britti’s path from behind the counter to preparing for the release of her mesmerizing debut release Hello I’m Britti., produced and co-written by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys and out February 2, is sprinkled with the same kind of pixie dust that the album itself has in shimmering spades. 

Gifted with a voice that bridges the distance between delicacy and flint, Britti can’t remember a time she wasn’t singing. 

“According to my mom, I was singing before I could talk,” she says, likening herself to a Disney character. “I would sing throughout the halls of the house, throughout the aisles of the grocery stores, in my car seat,” the Louisiana native recalls. “I was just a little bird, doing what came easy.”

Raised by her mother and grandmother — whom she dubs “brown sugar and cayenne pepper,” respectively — Britti continued to nurture her natural talent everywhere, in the school chorus and the church choir between learning dance steps and soccer plays. “Singing is my passion,” she says, “But, simultaneously, it’s also my purpose.” 

She made the leap to the Crescent City, earning her degree from Loyola in music performance in the mid-‘00s. But that’s when the clock began to slow down on her vision, her diploma collecting dust as she got into a retail grind that was both tantalizingly and depressingly performance adjacent.

“As the saying goes, doubt has killed more dreams than failure ever will,” notes Britti, who spent her time selling instruments and sheet music to people pursuing their dreams while deferring her own. “For this 10-year span, I just stayed in that safe space of just thinking, ‘Oh, I'll get to it. I’ll live my dreams eventually. I'm young.’”  

If singing came naturally, promoting herself did not. 

When a long-term relationship ended just before the pandemic, her former partner’s parting gift was to urge her to pursue what she was clearly meant to do, proving that sometimes the wrong person can have the right idea. “He broke my heart into pieces that you would need a magnifying glass to find,” she notes, but it also set her on a path to creativity for the first time in years. 

“I remember saying this out loud in prayer, ‘What if I actually try believing in myself?’ I had this whole dialogue with my ancestors, my spirit guide, and the divine like ‘What if I try?’,” she recalls.

During a two-month furlough in the midst of the pandemic, Britti began running, meditating and — after buying her dream Martin guitar – writing songs. “I was perfecting these songs at 2:00 in the morning, because there was no time limit because I wasn’t working.”

Except, she was. “I started treating myself like a business and putting myself out there and posting videos at least once a week, and just really building my self-confidence,” she says of early clips singing favorite songs like Sheryl Crow’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest” and Lainey Wilson’s “Rolling Stone.”

The Wilson cover drew out a country A&R exec who saw her talent but understood Britti was a little too left of center for Music Row. Others also expressed interest but didn’t quite have a handle on Britti’s sound. “There were a lot of nights sitting on the floor crying and thinking ‘Okay. These darts are going forward, but they’re not hitting anything,’ and feeling very discouraged.”

Then she decided to cover her favorite Dan Auerbach song “Whispered Words (Pretty Lies).” “I’ve always really enjoyed his writing style,” says Britti of The Black Keys front man and producer of artists as varied as Lana del Rey and Yola. “As joyful of a person as I am, I love a good melancholy song.”

“I was praying every single day that I would find somebody who would be able to hear my voice, see my potential, and have the resources to help me cultivate my dream,” she says. No one was more surprised than Britti that that person turned out to be Auerbach himself. 

“I saw a video of her singing and strumming the acoustic guitar in her bedroom,” Auerbach recalls. “I thought she had an intriguing delivery, and I wanted to learn more. So, we flew her up to Nashville to meet.”

“You know when something feels wrong, and you know when something’s meant to be,” says Britti of the meeting. “This is who I had been praying for.”

On the very day she flew to Nashville, Auerbach says “we instantly hit it off.” The pair began writing right away with Auerbach bringing in various co-writers who he thought would complement the direction the two were heading and “lend an interesting flavor to the album,” including Roger Cook, Bobby Wood, and Pat McLaughlin. “For someone who hadn't done any of this, she took to it really quickly, and we just hit the ground running as soon as we started these writing sessions.”

“I’m sure he’s great with everybody, but we definitely vibe,” says Britti of the locked-in nature of the collaboration. “To the point where I’m just like, ‘Can I write with him until I’m 115, please?’”

She also was thrilled by the speed with which the album came together, and the remarkable group of players Auerbach convened to bring the songs to life. “I felt like I was being heard, seen, and felt. I’m still in awe,” she says of the estimable group which included Jay Bellerose (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Sharon Van Etten) on drums, guitarist Tom Bukovac (Sheryl Crow, Stevie Nicks), keyboard wizard Mike Rojas (Yola, Don Henley) and Auerbach himself among others. 

“I just pick people who I really respect and are very talented and get them in the room together,” says Auerbach of this first-time configuration of players. “Very rarely do bad things happen. They fed off her energy ultimately.”

And while she is a newcomer, Auerbach says Britti was ready. “She grew up in the most musical environment in the world. It’s in her DNA,” he says of her Louisiana childhood. “She knows more about music than she even realizes.”

Britti notes that, indeed, she honed her ear growing up listening to current R&B stations in the car and singing hymns with friends in church. She would delve into blues, Zydeco and Motown with her grandmother and then switch to classical music with her grandfather. An uncle played jazz and schooled her in its intricacies on forays to and from New Orleans. 

All of those sounds and more are evident on the 11 tracks of Hello, I’m Britti., and she is heartened by what she sees as “progress in the world of understanding fluidity.”

“I really appreciate when the artists I work with have a lot of different layers to them,” says Auerbach of the album’s varied moods. “When I got together with her it was clear that she was interested in all types of music. We talked about Sade a little bit, how much she loved her stage presence. And we talked about Aretha’s songs, Blues Brothers’ stuff, New Orleans music, we talked about all kinds of stuff.”

Subsequently, Hello, I’m Britti. features all kinds of sounds, with each track telling its own compact story. The tunes offer a spectrum of emotions flowing from the haze of heartbreak to the electricity of new love to the quest for self-understanding. The moods vary from the appropriately hazy album opener “So Tired,” which finds an exhausted queen searching out her throne, to the spectral psychedelic soul sensibility of “Nothing Compares To You” – which has a lilting Sade-esque energy – to the soaring Dusty in Memphis-evoking “Back Where We Belong.” “I think Dusty in Memphis is always in the back of our mind somewhere, no matter what album we're working on,” says Auerbach with a laugh of the track featuring the crucial couplet “When someone is your rock, and you let them roll away/What else can you do, but everything to make them stay.”

Ebullient horns and strutting blues guitar underline Britti’s swagger on “There Ain’t Nothing” and “Reach Out,” with its giddy, loose-limbed bassline and rollicking mellotron, revels in the ecstasy of being with someone who makes you feel “close enough to heaven that you can stroll in the stars.”

The continuous thread throughout the album is Britti’s unique vocal style. 

“That was everything at first, the voice,” says Auerbach of the instrument that can whisper a lullaby and summon a hurricane. “Every song that we put together; we're trying to frame her voice the best we can to show it off.” 

The springy handclaps and girl group fizz of “Save Me” give way to “Once Upon A Time,” the perfect country-tinged capper to an album from a woman who has discovered the hard-won wisdom that there are no fairy tales, only the joyous work of making your own happily ever after. 

Looking back on her wish to be discovered and come to Nashville, Auerbach says simply, “Sometimes you manifest those things, I guess.”

Britti understands her story is unconventional and does not take it for granted. “I’ve always had gratitude, but what’s that saying? If you have gratitude, then everything else is extra. More and more and more, I’m just like, ‘Wow.’”

She even has gratitude for the heartbreak that informed Hello, I’m Britti. But she’s also careful not to give too much credit either. While she says that partner definitely “lit the fire,” she was the one who took her torch to the internet town square and waved it around, drawing Auerbach’s attention. 

For his part, Auerbach says he hopes people will love the album and come see her perform. “I hope people like it enough to tell somebody else about it. I can see her starting to spread the gospel of Britti.”