PARK COUNTY – For the past 16 years, Blake Brightman, a singer/songwriter from Park County, MT, has been working on her voice.

“Here in Park County, here in Livingston, I started going to open mic events and meeting other local artists,” Brightman said. “The more I do it, the more it feels like it’s my calling.”

She said music with rock’n’roll and blues guitar influences has always been a big part of her life.

“I was kind of playing air guitar in front of my mirror and playing something like ‘House of the Rising Sun,'” Brightman said of her life as a high school freshman before she started playing guitar.

It is her youth, says Brightman, that continues to influence her music today.

As a teenager, Brightman lost her father to drug-induced AIDS, her grandmother to mental illness, and her grandfather to pancreatic cancer—which caused her mother to almost completely disappear from her life in Kentucky.

“I remember just lying on the bed with the Fender guitar and crying about what my life was like at that time,” Brightman said.

At the age of 18, she moved to Montana on a scholarship to Rocky Mountain College, where she says she completed her first song, “Montana Song.”

“The first lines of the song I still play are, ‘I don’t want to live anymore, but I’m too scared to die,'” Brightman said. “I felt that way because I thought there was no other way out.”

She said music had “saved her life time and time again.”

“When I think about my 16-year-old self, I wish I could sit down with her and say, ‘Keep playing guitar,'” Brightman said.