When I was a kid growing up music seemed to be secularized across the country by region.  There was the East Coast sound, the California Sound, Country music from the south and R&B from Detroit – the Motown sound.

If you lived in NYC and swept through your radio dial, basically you heard the East Coast sound. You would be hard put to find a Country radio station in New York City.

I grew up in St. Louis where there was simply Pop music. Back then there were only a handful of musical genres to listen to: Pop, R&B, Rock n’ Roll and Country. Occasionally you might find a Jazz station if the city was big enough. And oh yes, Classical.

Today it’s a whole new world of diversity and complexity. Sweep across the radio dial in NYC today and you’ll hear just about any kind of music you can imagine, including music from countries all over the world. California knows Tennessee Bluegrass, Urban Dance can be heard in Waco, Texas and Alternative Country plays in Motown.

Today there are so many genres, it’s impossible to keep track of them all. There’s Acid Jazz, Afrobeat, Aleatoric music, Alternative Hip Hop, Anti-folk, Arabesque, Avant-garde Metal, Axé, and Australian Pub Rock. And those are just a few of the “A”s. The list is staggering.

New Watchfire Music artist, Briana Nadeau is listed by CD Baby as Alternative Punk. When I first saw that description of her music I laughed out loud. I’ve been listening to the evolution and development of this artist as she produced her first CD for over a year now and though I am fascinated with her sound and especially her talent, I would not label her music as Punk.

The term “Alternative Punk” befuddled me. In fact the basic term “Alternative” was a bit of a mystery. “Alternative to what?”I asked.

Punk bands like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Dead Kennedys were all bands that I liked. I would qualify their music in the beginning as a rebellion and consequently an alternative to mainstream Rock. As punk became more and more popular it became more and more mainstream (probably much to the chagrin of the rebellious punkers). As all music does, it began to evolve.

As the Punk musicians grew older and more sophisticated, the music reflected that sophistication. Example: Out of Punk came The Police – out of the Police came Sting.  There is not a more sophisticated musician on the planet today than Sting – a man whose music bridges thousands of genres.

I spoke to Briana Nadeau about all this. She too laughed when she heard the “Alternative Punk” moniker. But as we talked and as we explored we came to a greater understanding of where she fits in the world today.

Her collaborator, Adam Williams, who basically writes and produces the tracks of her songs (Briana composes the melodies and the lyrics) was originally a guitarist in a Punk band out of Boston called Powerman 5000. He was also a Berklee School of Music guy, so you know he would be evolving in his creativity.

They write together in a different sort of way. In the classical sense there was usually the composer and the lyricist. History is full of these teams. Lerner and Lowe, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Gershwin Brothers, Lennon and McCartney, Leiber and Stoller, Bacharach and David, John and Taupin.

The lyricist handled the lyrics, the composer, the music – except in the case of the Beatles where Lennon and McCartney did both. In fact, they rarely wrote together. “Yesterday” is strictly a McCartney composition and “Ticket To Ride” more of a Lennon song.

But in the case of Nadeau and Williams the boundaries fade. They each bring to their music the best of themselves and it makes for a most interesting collaboration.

In the “Old Record World Days” one would never submit a demo of an artist to a record company with a mixed bag of genres – a country song followed by a rock song, followed by a folk song. The artist had to be specific to a particular genre. The album had to fit a particular bin in the record stores.

Today the rules have changed.

Briana: “I don’t care if someone looks at these songs and says, ‘but these aren’t the same genre’. I put whatever I want to in my songs. I reject the old school attitudes of genres.  Times have changed. I like to think of my music as Pop with soul.  That’s what pulls my music into a unified whole – the infusion of my soul.”

Lets be clear. Granite State, Nadeau’s new CD is a blending of styles – not “a country song followed by a rock song, followed by a folk song”, but instead a mixture throughout of the music of her and her collaborator’s minds and backgrounds. That’s the beauty of music today. The walls have come down. The artists are free to express themselves as they really are – not limited by the rules of their record companies.

Perhaps it’s an alternative to mainstream after all – an alternative to Brittany Spears and Hanna Montana. There’s Alternative Rock, Alternative Punk, Alternative Jazz, Alternative Folk and so on – the music of an ever-changing and ever-evolving world. I’d like to coin Briana Nadeau’s music as Alternative/Alternative – the music of an original.

It makes for an exciting mix of feelings and styles. If you’re confused by all this wordsmithing, just go to her pages on WatchfireMusic.com and give her a listen. The bottom line is that it’s good music. That’s what you’ll find when you listen to Granite State.