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Blanco Brown won’t take another day for granted — because six months ago, he didn’t know if he had another day left.
A head-on motorcycle collision in Atlanta late last summer shattered the singer’s wrists and pelvis, and broke both legs. Brown remembers being pulled from his Indian jacket and Bell helmet as he underwent a 12-hour surgery.
“I started thinking to myself: ‘It can’t be the way I’ma leave this world,’ ” Brown told The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. “You really don’t have control of whether you’re gonna make it or not. You can just fight for it.”
The artist, who launched his genre-blending country career a year earlier with viral hit “The Git Up,” said he could smell blood in the moments after the wreck.
“It ain’t nothing I would wish on anybody,” Brown said. “It’s a scary moment. You don’t know if you’re gonna make it or not. I smelled my own blood. That’s when it all hit me. I got to stay strong through this one.”
More:The next ‘Old Town Road?’ Trap-country goes viral again with Blanco Brown’s ‘The Git Up’
But with a tenacious spirit and will to recover described by those close to him as “miraculous,” Brown began fighting his way back to the recording studio. He’s climbing country charts with top-five Parmalee collaboration “Just The Way” and eyeing summer for more new tunes.
And Brown, who insists on “going even harder” at his burgeoning career, isn’t taking a second for granted.
“I wouldn’t want to put my gift on hold if I didn’t have to,” said Brown, a 35-year-old BMG/BBR Music Group artist. “I’m working through the pain just to make sure that people who are going through what I went through have something to listen to when they go through it.
“Life is gonna keep moving,” he continued. “People are gonna find joy and purpose. Some people are gonna have to rebuild their lives, and if I can be there during that process, that’s all I do it for.”
Brown spent nearly a “miserable” month in the hospital, he said. COVID-19 precautions isolated him from visitors, so he turned his attention to what made sense: music.
He coped with stress by beatboxing to the rhythm of breathing machines and heart monitors.
“That’s the only way I could go to sleep or entertain myself,” Brown said. “I started making tracks. That’s the only way I could rest.”
As he began recovering, messages poured in from Nashville. Labelmates Jason Aldean and Jimmie Allen delivered well wishes, as did Tim McGraw, who sent him one of his signature black cowboy hats.
Fans helped by sending Brown past concert photos and song lyrics. Messages filled with lines from his song “Georgia Power” — “Strap up your boots, get your feelings aligned/ Thank God I’m alive, thank God I’m alive” — lifted the singer, he said.
“Those lyrics actually made me feel like someone was listening, that someone cared,” Brown said. “It makes me feel some type of way. When people take your words that came from God and use them as an example in your life and what you need to implement to get through what you’re going through? That’s the biggest blessing ever.”
Still, Brown wasn’t able to walk for weeks. Things he took for granted, like picking up a spoon to feed himself, became obstacles.
Before the wreck, he had never broken a bone.
“Just imagine. Every day you get up, open your eyes and roll out of bed and just start moving,” Brown said. “I can’t do those things. I get up [and] have to exercise my legs just to make sure they work that day.”
But Brown did walk again, calculating heel-down, toe-up movements that culminated in “a little teary” moment when he began taking steps. Shortly after, he surprised Jon Loba, president of BMG Nashville, with a FaceTime call showing his progress.
Loba’s reaction?
“He surprised me once again,” the label executive said.
“I knew the recovery would be much quicker than everyone including the doctors predicted because I knew Blanco,” Loba said. “His positive nature and his will to work and to make an impact in the world, even days after the accident, was right there and burning bright.”
As Brown walks through recovery, he’s ready to climb into earbuds with a new batch of tunes that blend Southern hip-hop influence with country-pop sensibilities.
If music could smile, that’s what Brown’s 2019 debut release “Honeysuckle & Lightning Bugs” would do. Breakout earworm “The Git Up” caught fire in 2019 on the heels of a crossover country-rap explosion led by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” Backed by a social media dance challenge, the song ascended to No. 1 on Billboard’s “Hot Country Songs” chart and earned platinum certification last October.
Some got a taste of Brown’s music when he collaborated with Diplo on 2020 song “Do Si Do,” and others might have heard him singing “CountryTime” on this week’s Netflix hit, “Ginny & Georgia.”
“The scene was so epic,” Brown said of his Netflix placement. “The writer [Sarah Lampert] inboxed me on [Instagram] and said she loved the song from day one … I told her, ‘That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for supporting my music and cast me for the next season. I’m there.'”
His “Honeysuckle” follow-up continues “the excitement, the joy, the fun” he’s known for delivering.
He plans to release a to-be-determined single this summer, with an album due out in the fall. He’ll sing about “working on my cars to fishing … and just enjoying life, those type of things,” he said — as well as the accident.
“I definitely will be addressing a couple things I felt during this process, and learning how to walk again, but I didn’t change the whole project,” Brown said. “The purpose is still there. The type of music I love to do is going to come first.”
Brown can’t run yet — a staple of his high-energy performances — but he can’t wait for a “therapeutic” return to the stage.
And when that day comes, he won’t take it for granted.
“You wake up every morning and you don’t know how your day gonna end,” Brown said. “You don’t even know if you’ll have an ending. It’s just [about] being prayerful, being prepared and knowing what your purpose is so if it is time to go, you got a better chance of making it somewhere positive.”
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