Jade Brodie is Making Music and Working by Her Rules
Photo: Mike Vanata | Western AF
Written By: Meredith Lawrence
Early in 2021, singer-songwriter Jade (Celeste) Brodie was on her way to a safety certification as a Union Pacific railroad conductor, when she blew past the highway exit and kept on driving. This new job would require Brodie to live mostly out of her truck, sell and board her animals. She was on her way to certify to use the oxygen masks railroad crews sometimes need going through the giant tunnel under Donner Pass (“the big hole”). After being furloughed from the railroad earlier that year, Brodie had been working on a ranch outside of Winnemucca, NV; still, when the call came, she assumed she had to return to the railroad, up until the moment she was supposed to take that freeway exit. Brodie called her boss and told him she wouldn’t be coming back.
“I wanted to work outside. I didn't grow up around horses, but I wanted to learn how to ride them, and I wanted to learn how to rope,” Brodie says. “It's pretty grounding; it's hard work. I've always had physical, blue collar jobs, so I like that part of life; I don't want to sell my soul to my boss or nothing, but I like working physically—there's a purpose, you see the results, it's very tangible.”
Photo: Bethany Johanna Weiss
There’s a chugging rhythm to Brodie’s music inherent from years on the rails, and now horseback. Her debut studio album Horse Money, out late this year, straddles the line between her two careers, both of which feed her musical creativity immensely (she’s already writing her next album, which is more about cowboyin’, working title: The Cowboy Album).
Horse Money opens with a sweet song to Brodie’s horse, “Laura” and all her quirks, but it mostly tells the story of her journey to self-assured independence. On “Making History,” Brodie contemplates the tension between working hard as a woman — she was told she was ‘making history’ as the only woman on a crew — and a home life; often, she’s on the verge of leaving or being left: “Headed Out West,” Walking Out The Door,” “Sunny,” and “Drinking and Smoking.”
Mid-album, with “Split My Tooth,” Brodie realizes she shouldn’t have married her ex-husband (who stars in “Traveling Man,” the following track). An old song at this point in Brodie’s repertoire, it remains important as the first song she wrote that measured up to her singer-songwriter aspirations. Seldom sweet, save for the eerily gold-tinged “Open Roads,” Horse Money is Brodie finding her footing after years of searching.
Brodie grew up in central California — first Petaluma, then Santa Rosa. In the verdant arts communities, she learned to set up art and music shows. To her mother’s Grateful Dead and Cypress Hill, and the Reggae music she sometimes heard at shows with her band manager dad, Brodie added her own discoveries of old blues and country music, found at the local record store. And when, for her 17th or 18th birthday, Brodie’s friend and the record store owner worked to get her a guitar and a set of women blues and country artist compilation albums; she jumped in feet first, writing songs and playing them out within months.
“I probably shouldn't have been playing shows, but I just wanted to play,” Brodie says. “It just felt good, and it was fun, and I set up shows for other people for so long, I just wanted to be a part of it, too.”
Brodie played Santa Rosa’s ample house show options, and a few other local venues — a café, a ‘hippie farm,’ and a community music center. She also took diesel mechanic and welding classes at the local junior college and started applying for railroad jobs, which she heard would pay good money, even though she didn’t finish high school. Brodie applied for every open job and after a year, was hired to work in a roundhouse repairing and prepping locomotives for crews, and lining up consists — the engine lineups that pull freight trains.
When she got a job as a conductor working for Union Pacific, Brodie wrote songs to the rhythm of the train rolling along the rails. On the railroad, everyone Brodie met was working for the weekend, complaining about life, and miserably counting the years to retirement. It didn’t make sense. Her new job took her to Winnemucca, NV, and by the time she was furloughed in 2020, Brodie had land, dogs, and a horse. She’d long wanted to learn to ride and work on horses and found a job working on a local ranch. When the railroad called her back, Brodie didn’t want to go.
“You write a song and it’s a piece of you; it’s a part of you that you’re putting out in the world”
Ranch work is tough and requires a thick skin, but it gives Brodie a sense of purpose and tangible progress. Songs come to her while she’s horseback, now. Though she’s focused on her ranch job at the moment, when Brodie can squeeze in a few gigs, she does and is just pleased to share her songs with audiences.
“You write a song and it's a piece of you; it's a part of you that you're putting out in the world,” she says.
Since she started writing music, Brodie’s gotten married, then divorced; she’s moved states; and found a job that fits well with her soul and outlook on life. Nowhere in her work is it so apparent how firmly she’s living on her terms these days than on Horse Money’s relentlessly-chugging final track, “Asshole.” For much of the album, Brodie sings about her relationships with others, both uplifting and restrictive. But the final track is just for her, declaring her place in the world.
“I work too hard to come home to an asshole,” she sings. “I don’t want to be lonesome, I just want to be free / You can’t hold me back from living / You can’t hold me back from me.”
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