More Than 'Just a Foolish Brain': In Conversation with Ethan Crenshaw
- Maddie Lainchbury
- Sep 18
- 6 min read
When we meet, Ethan Crenshaw has just wrapped up teaching a guitar lesson at his parents’ home in Knoxville, Tennessee. His bedroom, the same one he grew up in, doubles as a classroom, a studio, and a kind of sanctuary. Scribbled lyrics lean against the wall on a whiteboard, half-finished ideas sit scattered across notebooks, and a guitar rests nearby as though it never really leaves his side. At nineteen, he moves through his space with an ease that belies the layers of thought and care he puts into everything he touches — whether it’s a song, a sleeve he’s hemming, or the chords that have lived in his hands since he first picked up a guitar at a young age.
Music, for Ethan, has always been more than sound; it’s a dialogue with memory. “Even on the radio today… I was just jamming out,” he says with a grin, recalling a local bluegrass hymn that carried him straight back to childhood. It’s those Appalachian roots that become prominent in his music, the kind of notes that feel-lived in. And yet, Ethan is as much a storyteller of the intangible, weaving narrative threads from the world around him in songs that don’t always belong to him, but to his listeners. Learning guitar from his dad, and then teaching himself through John Mayer tabs, Ethan’s musicianship feels like both inheritance and discovery. “Guitar is my lead instrument,” he says, a quiet pride in his voice, though never boastful. Overtime, he’s layered that with years of indie-pop production picked up from watching Dayglow videos, working out of a makeshift studio he shares at his friend Leeland’s house. “If [Leeland] tells me something, I usually am quick to listen to his advice especially” he adds. It’s that balance of independence and collaboration that shapes the way his songs take form, letting them feel like a shared story rather than just his own.
His debut album, Just a Foolish Brain, is a map of that world, each track an exploration of identity, of vulnerability, and of the tension between wanting to be taken seriously and embracing the messy reality of youth. Some songs are bursts of clarity, ways of untangling universal experiences, such as isolation and disillusion, into something almost tangible. His song Goldfish sits at track number three. Written in the tail end of high school, it circles the restlessness of adolescence and early adulthood — the curiosity and quiet pressure of being watched, questioned and expected to know what comes next. As a student, studying “the broadest of majors… [just to get] the major” Ethan explains, he’s never been one for traditional education. "I’m more of a creative,” he says, “I like learning on my own time. I read a good bit, but I don’t love system education.” That drive to learn and live on his own terms bleeds into his music; a desire to veer off the prescribed route and find his own way. Describing that sense of being observed like something in a bowl, while everyone around you is already asking what life will look like for you. The song pushes back, not with anger but with a quiet rebellion — the hope of one day cracking the glass, swimming toward something deeper. It’s a sentiment he wears lightly in conversation, laughing when words fail him, but in his music it lands sharp and true: the confession of a teenager who knew the script and wondered what would happen if he didn’t follow it.
Other tracks, like New Wine, hold a different kind of honesty. Where some songs carry confidence, New Wine is soft at the edges, admitting vulnerability and the quiet truth that sometimes you still need your mum. That thread of longing and of reverting to a place of being held and comforted, winds through the album quietly, revealing itself in small, understated ways. Bravely, Ethan begins the song mentioning his mum — a figure that, as adults, many seem reluctant to admit they still need, sometimes eager to show they don’t, “I thought life might be a little easier and I’d know what I’m doing, but I don’t know if I do.” He only realised after putting the album out how often his songs quietly loop back to her, and that need for comfort and grounding. “Everyone needs their mom,” he admits with a sheepish grin. ‘Don’t call me foolish, I’m just trying to do this right’ – Ethan sings on Tattoo, a line that, on paper, could be flippant, but in his voice it’s strikingly earnest, becoming a mantra for anyone learning to navigate life before the answers have fully formed. For Ethan, it’s the track that feels most like him, the one that admits uncertainty yet carries warmth in its honesty. And his listeners feel it too; he lights up talking about the messages he’s received from fans explaining how they see themselves in his lyrics.
“I think something about Just A Foolish Brain, is how it refers back to how we [seemingly] want to be kids again and be held by our moms.” By contrast, songs like Cloud 6 radiate a lighter self-assurance, the sort of confident cheer that lets him declare, almost playfully, that insecurity doesn’t need to define you. It’s this balance — between uncertainty, humour, and courage — that makes his music feel alive, vulnerable, and intimate.
Ethan’s influences ripple through his work, not as imitations but as echoes reimagined in his own voice. He traces his earliest lessons back to his dad’s guitar playing, then to long afternoons spent learning John Mayer tabs note-for-note. That careful attention to craft gave him an intimacy with the instrument, the kind where a single chord feels like conversation. Later came the influence of Dayglow, teaching him how production could lift a melody into something buoyant. Even the bluegrass of his Knoxville roots has its quiet claim on him, subtly embedded in acoustic, sentimental refrains.
That duality runs through Just a Foolish Brain: restless and questioning in one breath, vulnerable and hushed in the next. A track like Dreamed About You (Since Last Night) carries the tenderness of a journal entry, its melodies circling around the blurred space between dreaming and waking, presence and absence. Phone At Night drifts in the same way — intimate, nocturnal. They sit alongside the bolder moments like Cloud 6 and Goldfish as proof that Ethan is just as comfortable writing the small, fragile truths as he is the defiant ones.
Off the guitar and away from the recording software, Ethan finds grounding in quieter, unexpected forms. The steady patience of sewing, the tactile focus of hemming a sleeve, and the solace of reading scripture or sitting in a book club with friends. Music, he admits, used to be everything. But now, it’s also a business — a landscape of algorithms, streaming numbers and social media traction. Even so, he always circles back to the simplest truth: the act of making, creating something out of nothing but raw joy and an idea: the spark that first captivated him.
Family, too, threads through everything. As the middle of three brothers, he knows the push-and-pull of closeness — the bickering and the solidarity, the moments that shape who you are before you realise yourself. “Maybe one day I want to be perceived like this… a strong adult, ‘don’t call me foolish’,” he says, and it’s clear he’s talking to himself as much as to anyone else. But in his songs, he lets the world in through the nostalgia, the humour and the imperfect moments. They invite listeners to see not just the polished artist, but the boy still figuring things out.
By the end of the afternoon, Ethan leans back, eyes flicking to a whiteboard where his songs are scribbled. Each track represents a feeling he has tried to capture – the imperfections and raw edges only encouraging and underscoring emotion. Maybe in that, he’s found something bigger: a connection and community that stretches from Knoxville to listeners who might never meet him, but who understand the pulse of his “foolish brain” all the same.
Stream Ethan Crenshaw’s ‘Just a Foolish Brain’ on all music platforms now! https://open.spotify.com/album/0OmjwAzJHFwcJm0HztRZg7
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