BRELAND Makes the Most of Unlikely Country Stardom: 'I Belong Here. This Is What I'm Supposed to Be Doing'

You won't find "most likely to be a country star" underneath the New Jersey high school yearbook photo of Daniel Breland, class of 2013.

But BRELAND, country's newest rising star, still points out to PEOPLE, "I did win 'most likely to become famous," and I also won 'biggest flirt." He adds with a saucy laugh: "They work in tandem."

Even as recently as three years ago, nobody — least of all BRELAND — could have anticipated that this 27-year-old musical multilinguist would be making such a cozy home in country at the moment. And yet those two high school titles did foretell a certain destiny, and undeniably, it arrived with "My Truck," his country/hip-hop hybrid that turned into one of 2020's biggest viral hits.

Since then, BRELAND has hardly had a moment to catch his breath, whether he's been pushing out new music to prove (again, undeniably) that he's not a one-hit-wonder, queuing up a succession of star-powered collabs (including his first No. 1, "Beer's on Me," with Dierks Bentley and HARDY), appearing on high-profile awards shows (CMTs, CMAs, ACMs: check, check, check), kindling his own live onstage energy in front of his ever-expanding fan base, or celebrating his first CMA award nomination (musical event of the year for "Beer's on Me").

Arguably his biggest accomplishment so far is Cross Country, his just-released debut album that both embraces and expands the bounds of country. Saying that, however, is still pretty much missing the point. It's also just a 14-track refreshment — 43 minutes of fun, put-it-on-repeat music.

Two years into this improbable country career, BRELAND still doesn't resent defending his place in the genre, even though it's blindingly obvious to him.

"Why country?" says the artist who cut his musical teeth exclusively on gospel, R&B, hip-hop and pop. "Because I really love the songwriting in country music. I'm a songwriter, first and foremost. I've spent most of my free time over the last 10 years writing songs, and I've always wanted to write the best song possible. And the more I looked through different kinds of music, including the music I grew up on, a lot of the songs that really resonated with me as a songwriter were within country music. There's a thing that country writers are able to do in their songs where they just hit you — they just land the thing perfectly — and I knew I wanted to figure out how to do that."

He may have waited until his college years to even discover country music, but throughout his life, there have been signs and turning points that, in hindsight, suggest he was on a singular path to this destination.

Raised in Burlington, New Jersey, he's the son of a state superior court judge (his dad) and an accomplished educator (his mom) who once made a serious run at a career as a gospel duo. They filled their household with faith, gospel music and expectations for their son and two daughters.

"I definitely credit my parents with a lot of my ambition and my drive to think bigger," BRELAND says, "and they never thought within boxes. I've watched them overcome real obstacles … and they've endowed me with all the confidence in the world to be able to accomplish anything."

His family was so immersed in gospel that he didn't really explore popular music until high school. When he did, he drank from the wellsprings — the Beatles, Prince, Stevie Wonder — while beginning to try his own hand at writing. Setting his sights on a music career, he pursued a marketing and management degree at Georgetown University, recorded tracks in his own home studio and sang in an a cappella group.

Why not study music? Even at that age, he says, he understood talent alone was never enough.

"I knew it was a business coming in," he says. "I watched my parents try to get into the music industry as a gospel duo when I was a kid, and what really got them was that they didn't fully understand the business. … This industry demands everything of you. And so I was like, I want to be as strong as I can, not just as a songwriter, not just as a vocalist, not just as an entertainer and a personality. I have to be able to think about myself as a business."

The a cappella group, The Phantoms, offered his entry point into country music when Zac Brown Band's "Colder Weather" was added to their repertoire. BRELAND says he initially balked.

"I was like, come on, we sing a lot of pop songs," he recalls. "And then I actually listened to it, and I was like, oh, this is gorgeous. And then it changed my whole tune."

The Zac Brown catalogue led him in a search of other country treasures, and he quickly discovered Chris Stapleton. "I really resonated with that just vocally, but then lyrically, he was doing this thing, and I was like, wow, I would love to do this," BRELAND recalls. "To me, well-written soul songs and country songs — they're kind of the same. It definitely piqued my interest."

Still, he felt he was being pulled in a stronger direction, and he jumped on a summer opportunity to collaborate with Chinx, an up-and-coming New York rap artist who'd been introduced to BRELAND's R&B hook skills.

"It felt like he was actually on a trajectory where we both would've been able to win," BRELAND recalls.

But one night the songwriter stayed behind to work at the Queens studio while Chinx went off to play a show. Says BRELAND: "He never came back."

The rapper was shot and killed outside the show's venue, the victim of a score-settling. For BRELAND, the shooting shut the door on pursuing a career in any sort of mean-streets music.

"I was like, I'm not cut out for this, and I don't want to be in these situations," he says. "And I took a step back from the New York hip-hop scene and was like, let me reassess and figure out a different entry point."

After college, he found his next opportunity in Atlanta, where he took a full-time corporate job to pay the bills and spent his off-hours writing songs and working under the mentorship of a Grammy-winning R&B producer. The young songwriter was soon on a roll, placing cuts with several R&B artists, but he says the producer actively discouraged him from becoming an artist himself. Eventually, BRELAND says he realized, the advice was more to the producer's benefit than his own.

"[Performing] would take away from the workflow of the songwriting," he explains. "So that was really where he was coming from, and I wasn't aware that was where he was coming from until things started to happen."

Those "things" happened in the tens of millions — the number of streams he eventually racked up on multiple media platforms for "My Truck."

After Lil Nas X's crossover success with "Old Town Road," BRELAND says he wrote his breakout hit one night on a dare from friends. Could he do his own genre-hopping? He may have been driving a no-frills sedan at the time, but he well knew the pickup's sway in country music. He already had an established musical identity on his social media platforms. For some time, he'd been posting cover songs and demo snippets as "BRELAND the pen point guard." (Why the all-caps? "I want people to shout when they say it," he says with a hearty laugh.)

When "My Truck" exploded on TikTok, BRELAND says, he couldn't help but take it as a sign. But then, he'd also been told to be looking for one. A couple of months before, he'd dropped into a neighborhood church on a Sunday morning, and the preacher — a stranger to him — interrupted the service, pointed him out, declared he had a musical gift and said God was about to raise him up to use it.

The prophesy was as powerful as it was unexpected, and BRELAND says he was initially skeptical — until "My Truck" made it feel like it was coming true. "It's happening in real life and in real-time," he says, and he's grown to believe "there is a greater call on my life that I need to treat with a great deal of reverence."

As he worked to capitalize on the newfound attention, he looked to Nashville and saw that, not only were doors standing wide open, but also some remarkable names were beckoning him inside. For starters, Sam Hunt wanted to hop on a "My Truck" remix. Then Keith Urban and Bentley texted, seeking collaborations. BRELAND saw another important sign: the growing number of Black artists, such as Kane Brown, Jimmie Allen and Mickey Guyton, making their mark in what has traditionally been an almost exclusively white format.

"I really felt like I could do this," he says, recalling his decision-making, "and it would be well received, and I would be able to have a bigger impact than I might be able to have if I just pursued a more conventional hip-hop route."

Signed to a label, BRELAND relocated to Nashville during the early days of the pandemic, and he arrived with a not-so-minor issue that he'd never gotten around to addressing: After years of single-minded songwriting and selling himself on socials, he had no solo stage experience. On top of that, he also had a pretty bad case of stage fright, tracing back to childhood.

He starts to call it "incontinence," but there's really no genteel way to put it. "Like at 7 or 9 years old, on a couple of occasions," he explains, "I would get so nervous performing and literally pee my pants. And then for a while, I was like, 'I don't want to be on stage anymore. It makes me too nervous.' I had so much anxiety around it."

Fortunately, the covid lockdown gave him more than a year to figure it out: "I just started looking up performances from a bunch of different artists inside of country music, outside of country music. And literally just dove in. I was like, what are these people doing? Everyone has something different that they do on stage that helps them win over their audience. And I was like, I'm gonna try all of them."

His first live performance, in May 2021, couldn't have been before a friendlier audience, the high school students at his New Jersey alma mater. "I was nervous," BRELAND notes, but he happily reports, his pants stayed dry.

The learning curve was about to get exponentially steeper: Less than six weeks later, his second opportunity to perform was on live network television on the CMT awards, sharing a stage with Guyton and R&B legend Gladys Knight. There were more nerves that night, he admits, but his national audience couldn't have detected them in his polished performance. Every experience since then has gotten easier.

A turning point, he says, arrived this past March when he performed at the C2C festival in London, and word of mouth expanded his audience numbers over a series of concerts. "By the last day that we played, we had a few thousand people packed into the tent, and it was electric," he recalls, "and I came back to the States thinking if I could go to a country that I've never played in before and win them over, I can do this anywhere. Since then, I've felt like I belong here. This is what I'm supposed to be doing."

The confidence is now so plain to see onstage that it's hard to believe he wasn't born to it. Indeed, he exudes the sort of charm and charisma that, in hindsight, that "biggest flirt" title could well have foretold.

"I had to get to a point," he says, "where I was comfortable enough with what I was doing that audiences would be like, "Oh, wow, he's really enjoying himself, and now there's space for us to enjoy ourselves.'"

Creating his first LP came with another set of challenges, and BRELAND set his ambitions high — "I've always wanted to be able to try to reach as many people as possible" — even as he understood his limitations: "I'm probably not gonna be able to win people over on how quote-unquote 'country' I am."

His strength comes in his musical translation skills, an innate ability to seize on the similarities and relationships between the popular genres to create his own brand of music. He calls it "cross country," which is also the title song of the album. It's a name that speaks to the intersections he's formed.

Depending on the album track, listeners can hear a dazzling assortment of BRELAND's musical languages — R&B, gospel, hip-hop, soul, rock, even a little reggaeton — each seasoned with a melody, lyric and/or instrumentation drawn from the country palate. The real continuity, though, is the singer's pliant tenor that navigates each mood and style.

Cross Country is a playground of sound, from the gospel fervor of "Praise the Lord" (featuring Thomas Rhett) to the acoustic eloquence of "Good for You." In between, he takes a joyful ride on "Here for It" with label-mate Ingrid Andress; gets down with Urban on "Throw It Back"; and offers a fresh vibe, within the bounds of radio play, for new single "For What It's Worth." Another standout is "Alone at the Ranch," an aural aphrodisiac ready-made for some frisky horsin' around.

"It's one that I was a little nervous to play for my parents," BRELAND confides, "but they actually really love it, which" — he adds with a laugh — "is maybe even more concerning."

Amid the album's diversity are a couple of surprising samples that will catch the ears of traditionalists: The guitar licks featured in "Natural" are straight from Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", and the familiar first notes of Sylvia's 1982 country-pop smash, "Nobody," offer a launching pad for the rowdy "County Line."

BRELAND quickly gives co-writer/producer Sam Sumser full credit for the Sylvia sample; the artist had never heard of Sylvia or the song before, but he's well acquainted now. "It is a brilliant song," BRELAND says, "and I've since gone through and listened to a lot of her other stuff. She really had a heck of a run in the early Eighties."

No doubt his country music education continues. By now, of course, he knows the mostly unsung but pivotal role that Black musicians have played in the history of country music and that Black roots run deep in the genre. He's eager to add to the history.

"We're in an era right now where there are a lot of empowered Black artists who feel comfortable and confident to share their experiences and to share their stories in song," he says, "and I'm excited to be a part of that movement myself."

So far, unlike most other country artists, the one thing he has yet to learn is a musical instrument. He's adept at Pro Tools, but in songwriting sessions, he relies on someone else to play the chords on a guitar or keyboard. He's acquired both, and they're sitting at home awaiting the time it will take to learn them.

"I would love to be able to play those instruments just to add another layer," he says. "If I could play a guitar, I could control more of the narrative of what I do. But as a performer, I also really love not having anything in my hand other than a microphone."

Determined to make his own way on his own terms in Nashville, he still has acceded to at least one important aspect of the country lifestyle: He now owns a pickup truck. And let's face it, even if he wasn't a Chevy brand ambassador, it would be kind of disappointing if he didn't.

But don't think he's not fully on board, maybe even in a don't-touch-my-truck kind of way.

"I like the vantage point of being up high," he raves with no prompting. "I like being able to throw a bunch of stuff into the bed. I like the space of the cab. It's a luxury vehicle that's also a functional work vehicle. I just like the way it rides. Even if everything failed at this point, I really can't go back to driving a car."