PARK COUNTY — For the last 16 years, Blake Brightman, a singer/songwriter in Park County, Mont., has been forging her voice.
“It’s here in Park County, here in Livingston, that like, y’know, I started going to open mics and meeting other local artists," said Brightman, "The more I do it, the more it feels like it was what I meant to do.”
With rock 'n' roll and blues guitar influences, she said music has always been a big part of her life.
"I would play, like, air-guitar in front of my mirror and play like 'House of the Rising Sun,'" said Brightman about her life as a high school freshman, before she began playing the guitar.
It is her adolescent years, according to Brightman, which continue to influence her music today.
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As a teenager, Brightman lost her father, who contracted AIDS related to drug use, her grandmother to mental illness, and her grandfather to pancreatic cancer — causing her mother to mostly disappear from her life in Kentucky.
“I remember just laying on that bed, with that Fender guitar … and just crying over what was my life at the time," said Brightman.
She moved to Montana at 18 years old on a scholarship to Rocky Mountain College, where she said she finished her first song, "Montana Song."
“The first lines to the song, which I still play, is, ‘I don’t want to live anymore, but I’m too scared to die,’" said Brightman, "I felt that way because I didn’t think there was another option out.”
She said music has "saved her life time and time again."
“When I think about 16-year-old me … I wish I could sit her down … and be like, 'Keep playing that guitar,'" said Brightman.
