Bri Bagwell

With a contemporary country sensibility marked by honky tonk energy and romantic leanings, Bri Bagwell has deliberately sidestepped Nashville’s conventional routes to fame, functioning without either a manager or a record deal while building her audience through nonstop touring and her own independent releases. Briana Bagwell grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where an early love of music soon became evident. As a teenager she began performing with her siblings and started to picture music as a livelihood. Following high school she relocated to Austin, Texas, and pursued a marketing degree at the University of Texas. Between classes she played local clubs, steadily gaining notice in one of the country’s most active live-music scenes.

Once she finished her studies, Bagwell turned her full attention to music and in 2011 appeared as a contestant on CMT’s Next Superstar. Although she was cut after the fourth week of the ten-week series, the exposure reached a wider public, leading her to issue her first self-released album, Banned from Santa Fe, later that same year. While continuing to tour extensively with her backing band, the Banned, she obtained a publishing contract through Sony/ATV’s Nashville office. Several songs written under that agreement appeared on a seven-track EP simply titled Bri Bagwell, which came out in 2013. That year the Texas Regional Radio Music Awards named her Female Vocalist of the Year, an honor repeated in 2014.

In 2015 Bagwell delivered her second full-length album, When a Heart Breaks, which contained the track “My Boots,” a breakout single across Texas. By then she and her band were performing roughly 150 shows annually, and her visibility had grown enough for her to introduce her own line of yoga pants. Her next studio album, In My Defense, arrived in 2018 and featured the single “If You Were a Cowboy.”