At Miami Beach’s retro eatery Johnny Rockets, budding songstress Brittany Dowdell, aka Bayje (pronounced “beige”), ponders her dual identities while the greasy bliss of a pile of cheese fries beckons. At the wise old age of 17, the Syracuse native has her stories straight.
“‘Bayje’ is anything work related, while ‘Brittany’ is just a dork from a country town,” she says, describing the tension between her stage persona and her true self. “Bayje has become more like a brand, and I’m okay with that, but when I go home, I want to be Brittany; I want to eat chocolate chip cookies and drink a gallon of milk and run around my friend’s house acting stupid and go to the mall. Bayje can’t do those things.”
It’s hard to imagine why a virtual unknown is already so uneasy with the pressures of fame. Bayje’s music, however, leaves no room for skepticism about her skills.
With tracks like the sassy “Minimum Wage”—think TLC’s “No Scrubs” for a new generation—and the breathy “Wait,” her as-yet-untitled debut proves that this is a talent with range beyond her years. “I listen to just about every type of music—headbanger rock, rap, Mariah, and Whitney,” Bayje says. “My music is R&B, but edgier, because I put in elements of all the music I listen to.”
Bayje grew up obsessed with Britney Spears and sleeping on ’N Sync sheets. “I was a total teenybopper,” she says. Despite her comfort with her middle-American surroundings, Bayje’s mixed heritage (her mother is white and father is black) led to confusion during her tender years. “I’d come home a lot and ask my mom what I was, ’cause I got the white people calling me things, and then I got the black people saying I’m not black enough,” says Bayje. “One day my mom was, like, ‘You’re beige,’ and it stuck.”
Talent manager Bill Herndon remembers the demo she made as a preteen. “When I listened to it, I said there’s no possible way that this singer can be 12 years old,” says Herndon, who immediately signed her to a production deal. “I got her into the studio, and she just flipped off her shoes, and it was like she’d been recording her whole life.”
As comfortable as she is in the studio, after months of recording, Bayje seems ready to go back to being Brittany for a little while. “It’s been really intense,” she admits. Nothing like some milk and cookies to take the edge off.
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