Exclusive Track Premiere: ‘Mirage Dreams,’ Breanna Barbara

ABOVE: BREANNA BARBARA. PHOTO COURTESY OF BRIN MORRIS. 

Queens-based singer-songwriter Breanna Barbara is bluesy with a bite. Her vibrating vocals and brooding lyrics fuse into pulsating, rock-bent songs when set to the strum of her guitar. Here, we are pleased to premiere “Mirage Dreams,” the titular track off of her forthcoming debut LP. The song stems from a difficult time in Barbara’s life but as she explains, she didn’t want to just sing the blues.  

“This one came out of me like a freight train,” she recalls. “I had been playing and writing songs on the guitar for a while but was becoming a little numb and uninspired in the whole writing process. A lot of the songs I was making at the time had been coming from my experience after losing my father unexpectedly to a drug overdose,” she continues. “I could tell something was boiling inside of me, I just didn’t know how to get it out. I knew I was sick of being sad and I was sick of singing sad songs.”

After an all-nighter on a visit to California she felt compelled to go to the studio. Crediting “the desert air or the delirium” with spurring the track along, the lyrics and music arrived in a flood. “The moment this song came out of me I felt like I had finally shed some old snake skin and was ready to dance and scream,” she tells us. “Mirage Dreams” became a signpost for her state of mind and the LP (out July 22 via No Roads Records) as a whole; while it arises out of tragedy it does so with a gleeful vengeance, and in the case of this track, even a howl.

MIRAGE DREAMS WILL BE RELEASED ON JULY 22 VIA NO ROADS RECORDS. FOR MORE ON BREANNA BARBARA, VISIT HER FACEBOOK.