Brynn Cartelli w/ Simone (ALL AGES)

Small towns tend to tell big stories. Those seemingly typical suburban experiences, young love, and childhood memories shape us and, ultimately, connect us. Growing up about 95 miles from Boston in Longmeadow, MA, Brynn Cartelli draws on formative experiences to pen candid, cozy, and catchy pop music. For the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, late-night chats with friends, youthful infatuation, first relationships, and family lore materialize as intimate anthems projected in widescreen like your favorite coming-of-age flick or novel. She approaches the subject matter with a combination of unassuming wisdom and wide- eyed wonder, emerging as an old soul with a new perspective at 18-years-old.

Now, Brynn turns the first page with her 2021 debut EP, Based On A True Story.

“My goal is to take tiny moments and make them feel anthemic,” she affirms. “I want to tell a big story with small details. That’s the core of everything for me.”

“It was so important for me to write on all of these songs. It was about looking inside myself and my world for inspiration. The EP is true to the time, feeling connected to everybody, being in love, and falling out of love. It’s dramatic. It’s innocent. It’s a documentary of the period of my life between The Voice and now.”

“On the EP, there are stories about relationships, my friends, and spirituality,” she elaborates. “I was able to romanticize parts, but all of it focuses on high school.”

In the end, this sort of honesty makes Brynn’s songs forever relatable and real.

“When you listen to this, especially if you’re someone from a small town, I want you to be able to relate,” she leaves off. “Being from a small town, music was my window and connection to people beyond where I’m from. If I can connect in the same way, that’s all I could ask for.”

“I’m always writing,” says Simone. “It’s therapeutic for me, like a muscle I need to exercise every day.”


Such devotion to craft helps explain the breakout 17-year-old star’s prolific output over the past year, as well as the remarkable growth showcased on her addictive new EP, Love Lessons. Written and recorded entirely during quarantine, the collection is a pure rush of dopamine fueled by raw, vulnerable performances and deep, insightful lyrics. Simone writes with a cinematic eye here, capturing the rough edges of modern relationships in vivid detail, and the EP’s arrangements are sonically rich to match, mixing radio-ready pop hooks with indie rock grit and singer/songwriter intimacy. The result is a collection that lands somewhere between Carly Rae Jepsen and Phoebe Bridgers, a buoyant, brilliant batch of earworms exploring the rise and fall of teenage romance in all its exhilarating, heartbreaking transience.


Born and raised in New York City, Simone first fell in love with Broadway as a youngster. By the age of ten, she’d already appeared in a slew of musicals, and by the time she hit middle school, she was writing her own songs and performing regularly in bars and clubs all over the city. With a mix of mesmerizing performance clips and down-to-earth videos documenting daily life, she quickly went viral on TikTok, racking up millions of likes from fans around the world who could relate to both her unabashed ambition and dry, self-deprecating sense of humor.