Bronnie Caught a One-Way Flight to Nashville. Now She’s Living the Song

There is something rather fitting about Bronnie releasing an album called Sedona Sunrise just months after getting on a one-way flight and moving more than 4,000 miles from the Wirral to Nashville.

The British country-rock artist first wrote the title song back in 2022, drawing on memories of visiting Sedona, Arizona, as a teenager. At the time, she couldn’t have known quite how closely its ideas of taking chances, noticing life’s smaller moments and heading towards something new would eventually mirror her own story.

Then, in March 2026, metaphor became reality.

“I have the song called Sedona Sunrise, and it’s all about catching that one-way flight and looking out for the little things,” Bronnie tells CountryMusic.co.uk. “And now it’s like, I did that in March. I caught that one-way flight to Nashville and I live there now. It’s just an adventure every day.”

It is a sentence that neatly captures where Bronnie finds herself in 2026: a British artist with roots in rock and pop-punk, increasingly at home in country music, and now building a life and songwriting career in the city at the centre of the genre.

Her 12-track second album Sedona Sunrise, released on 10 July, brings those different worlds together. The record includes Tea For Two, which reached No.1 on the UK iTunes Country Chart, and Memory Lane, her first Nashville co-write. But perhaps more importantly, it captures several different versions of the artist who made it.

“I caught that one-way flight to Nashville and I live there now. It’s just an adventure every day.”

Sedona Sunrise Captures Different Versions of Bronnie

Sedona Sunrise might be Bronnie’s new album, but not everything on it is new.

Some of its musical roots stretch back years. The melody for If We Never Met, for example, dates to 2018. Listening to the completed album now is therefore a little like flicking through a collection of snapshots from different periods of her life.

“Different versions, for sure,” she says. “Every time I listen, there’s just different versions of me, which is nice.”

The title track feels different.

Bronnie says that she normally approaches songwriting knowing what she wants to write about. Sedona Sunrise didn’t happen that way.

“I wrote it and I didn’t even know what I was writing about,” she explains. “Normally when I write, I know the plan and everything, but all these lyrics just came out. And it’s kind of the life that I’m living now.”

Sedona itself has been sitting somewhere in her imagination for much longer. She visited when she was 15 during a road trip through America.

“It’s just a place that has stuck with me,” she says. “It’s so peaceful. I love Arizona.”

That sense of peace provides an interesting counterpoint to a career that has rarely appeared particularly still.

Bronnie describes her life as a “journey” and a “whirlwind”, but says that with Sedona Sunrise finally released, she feels more at peace.

The album’s 12 songs document experiences accumulated over several years, while musically continuing the hybrid that has increasingly become Bronnie’s calling card: country sitting alongside rock, pop and traces of the alternative music with which she first established herself.

Ask her to choose just one song to introduce today’s Bronnie to a UK listener and she doesn’t pick the reflective title track, though.

She chooses Own Girl Own World.

“It’s fun. It’s country, it’s rock. It almost feels like an old-school Disney song.”

Finding country by leaving pop-punk behind

Bronnie’s arrival in country music wasn’t the result of a carefully plotted reinvention.

For years she was making pop-punk. She loved the music and had become immersed in that scene, while country remained something she listened to rather than necessarily something she thought she was supposed to make.

Lockdown changed that.

Writing country songs became a side project — something she could do without placing too many expectations on it.

“I was doing pop-punk for years and I loved it, but I always loved country,” she says. “I kinda just got sucked into the pop-punk scene. So it was just a fun aside, writing country songs in lockdown.”

The turning point came not through one dramatic Nashville encounter but through recognising that the music she was releasing wasn’t necessarily the music she most wanted to make.

After putting out her first album, Bronnie remembers feeling conflicted.

“I was really happy that it was out, but it wasn’t the music that, right there and then, I was wanting to release.”

So she started releasing country material “for fun”.

Listeners had other ideas about how seriously it should be taken. An early single reached No.3, while Tea For Two subsequently climbed to No.1 on the UK iTunes Country Chart.

Bronnie laughs as she reaches the obvious conclusion: “So I like country-rock now!”

There was no single Damascus-road moment when country suddenly became home. It was more a gradual recognition of something that had arguably been there all along.

Half of Bronnie’s family live in the USA, she explains, and childhood visits involved American road trips and time around family farms in Oklahoma.

Country wasn’t simply a genre she discovered later in life; parts of its world had been present in the background for years.

So had the music.

Her father played in a rockabilly band, and when Bronnie wrote her first song, Stay, in 2014, she couldn’t yet play guitar. She knew the lyrics and melody, so her dad supplied the guitar. (watch here on YouTube)

Listening to it now produces a revealing reaction.

“It’s so country,” she says. “I didn’t even think about it back then. But yeah, he’s a big influence.”

“It was just a fun aside, writing country songs in lockdown… then Tea For Two was number one. So I like country-rock now!”

How Nashville Is Changing Bronnie’s Songwriting

If Bronnie’s move towards country happened gradually, Nashville appears to have accelerated almost everything else.

She moved to Tennessee in March after securing her visa, although the slightly ironic consequence of finally having a Nashville home is that she has barely had time to stay in it.

“As soon as I got the visa, then I got booked on a million shows in the States,” she says.

The plan is for Nashville to become much more firmly home towards the end of 2026 and throughout next year.

When she is there, the biggest adjustment has been the sheer pace of Music City.

“There’s no time to have a chilled night in,” she laughs. “There’s just a million opportunities and events.”

More significant than the events, however, have been the relationships.

“The friendships I’ve made over there have been amazing,” she says. “I’m happy all the time in Nashville. I just love it.”

For an artist who previously did relatively few writing sessions with other performers and professional songwriters, immersion in Nashville’s co-writing culture is already having an effect.

“I’ve learnt so much just in six months,” Bronnie says.

And there has been another development which might prove especially important to the next phase of her career: other artists increasingly want her songs.

On her most recent Nashville trip, Bronnie says she didn’t write anything for herself.

“It was all songs for other people, working on their projects,” she explains. “That’s probably just one of the biggest compliments, you know, as a songwriter.”

It is an intriguing evolution. The move to Nashville isn’t simply giving Bronnie a geographical base in America or providing a convenient backdrop for a country record. It is beginning to change the way she works — and potentially the kind of career she can have.

Memory Lane, written with Blue Foley and Mason Levi, was her first Nashville co-write and appears on Sedona Sunrise. Now the writing rooms themselves are becoming part of everyday life.

Still unmistakably British

Moving to Nashville can raise an interesting question for any British country artist: how much should you adapt?

Bronnie’s answer, at least culturally, seems fairly clear.

At CMA Fest she embraced the full Nashville experience, heading down Broadway with the clear bag required for the event and, naturally, a cowboy hat.

“I was just loving life,” she says. “That was the most cliché thing.”

But there are limits.

Presented with the choice between Nashville hot chicken and a proper British chippy, she chooses fish and chips — specifically a chip butty.

And there’s one British characteristic Nashville isn’t taking from her.

“I refuse to give up my accent,” she declares.

Apparently people have already wondered whether living in Tennessee might send her home sounding American.

Bronnie isn’t having it.

“So many people are like, ‘Oh my God, I thought you’d come back with an American accent.’ I’m like, ‘No, darling.’ I do my best Mary Poppins accent when I’m in Nashville, for sure.”

It is funny, but there is also something quite telling in it.

Bronnie’s current music works because Nashville isn’t replacing where she came from. Instead, American country, British pop-rock instincts, the alternative music of her earlier career and a family connection to both sides of the Atlantic are being allowed to coexist.

That crossover was on display again this summer. Bronnie returned to the UK around the release of Sedona Sunrise and appeared at Country Calling in Essex, part of a bill mixing major American and international names with an increasingly confident UK country contingent.

“I refuse to give up my accent… I do my best Mary Poppins accent when I’m in Nashville, for sure.”

Album three is already coming into focus

For somebody who has only just released a 12-song album, Bronnie is surprisingly far into thinking about what comes next.

There is already another album taking shape.

And it comes with an admission.

“I’ve always hated on concept albums,” she says, laughing, “because I feel like sometimes I was like, ‘This isn’t even a concept.'”

Naturally, album number three is going to be a concept album.

“This time I’m actually doing a concept album. I’m giving myself the ick, but it’s a cool story.”

She isn’t giving that story away yet.

What is apparent is that Sedona Sunrise feels less like the destination than the point at which several strands of Bronnie’s career finally meet.

The pop-punk artist who wasn’t sure she could “do country” now lives in Nashville. The songwriter who once needed her dad to put guitar behind her first song is now spending Nashville sessions writing for other artists. And the teenager who remembered the peace of Sedona eventually wrote a song about taking a one-way flight — before doing precisely that herself.

There are still plenty of traces of the old Bronnie. Asked to choose between cowboy boots and Doc Martens, the boots win comfortably. But Johnny Cash versus Alanis Morissette isn’t even close.

“Alanis Morissette,” she says immediately. “She’s my queen.”

Perhaps that’s the best explanation of Bronnie’s country music anyway.

It doesn’t require her to leave everything else behind.

Instead, Nashville has given her somewhere to bring all those different versions of herself together.

And for the moment, she seems perfectly happy with where the road has taken her.