She’s in a huge Chevy ad. Why is this Charlotte-native singer still scraping by?
Singer Brooke Lee returned to her Nashville apartment after doing some shows recently to discover water on the floor around her dishwasher — and that both it and her kitchen sink were completely clogged.
So until a plumber could come clear them out, the Lake Norman native had to wash dishes in her bathtub.
This is not, perhaps, what “making it” is supposed to look like. Not when you’re featured singing in a major ad campaign for Chevrolet that debuts during the Winter Olympics. Not when streams of your country-pop songs are spiking. Not when you’ve been on tour with Willie Nelson.
And yet, this is exactly where the 26-year-old graduate of Hough High School in Cornelius finds herself — somewhere in the long, murky middle between getting noticed and actually getting there.
“I have my publishing deal, but that pays my bills, and that’s about it,” Lee says. “And when we play shows, we aren’t making a ton. So I’m by no means rich. It’s been kind of funny, because I have the truck from the commercial Chevy gave to me. So I’ve been driving that. Which is sick! But then people see that, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re making it! You’re doing it! And you have this truck!’
“But literally, I had to scoop water out of my dishwasher and do my dishes in a bathtub ’cause I can’t use my kitchen right now. Like, that’s what I come home to. So there are a lot of really great things going on, but I’m still definitely check-to-check.”
To be sure, something is happening for Lee. Her audience is growing. She’s landing opportunities that, even a year ago, felt out of reach. On Thursday, she’ll return to the Charlotte area to headline iconic live-music venue Amos’ Southend for the first time — her biggest hometown gig yet, set just hours before the release of her sophomore EP, titled “Desert Darling.”
As Lee knows as well as any artist who seems to be on the cusp of breaking through, though: In music, momentum is easy to spot — and a lot harder to live on.
‘I wanted to know how I could do it’
It was originally her dad’s idea.
A teacher and longtime multi-sport coach at Bailey Middle and Hough High, Dan LaRotonda had no background in music. But he loved it. And when Brooke Lee (whose real last name is also LaRotonda but who uses Lee as a stage name) was about 13, he started taking her to see live music at bars and clubs around the area.
Places she technically wasn’t even allowed to be.
“I don’t think I was really supposed to go,” she recalls, laughing. “I definitely had huge X’s on my hands.”
In particular, she remembers seeing a show in uptown by Blue Monday, a locally well-known ’80s/’90s tribute band that at the time was fronted by Lizette “Liz” Totillo — who Lee thought “was so entertaining, and had a way of captivating her crowd.”
Before that, music had been something quieter for Lee, relegated to church performances and small-time singing competitions. This was different. This was possibility.
“And from there,” she says, “I wanted to know how I could do it.”
By the time she was 15, she had started her first band, which included a guitarist named Logan Foland (a longtime friend who still plays with her today). They were teenagers performing classic-rock covers for adult crowds — learning on the fly, often awkwardly.
Their first show? “I had a gray sweater on and jeans, and the mic was not turned on,” Lee recalls, “and we were doing ‘Rock and Roll’ by Led Zeppelin, and I was just standing there like a stick screaming it. And at first, the people that would come to our shows were all Dad’s friends that I was kind of raised around.”
She and her bandmates eventually got the hang of it, with LaRotonda booking gigs and building setlists, Logan’s dad handling sound and lighting, and people other than Dad’s friends actually coming to see them play.
But it didn’t feel like the foundation for anything significant — not yet.
The early days were a grind
Lee moved to Nashville at 21, in early 2021, after a few exploratory trips convinced her country was her lane (she knew she couldn’t play classic-rock covers forever) and that Music City was the place she needed to be.
She arrived with ambition and, by her own admission, very little understanding of what she was walking into.
She worked in retail briefly, selling clothes at a Free People store in the mall, then shifted her focus to Broadway — the heart of Nashville’s live music scene — playing late-night shifts from 10 p.m. to 2:45 a.m., sometimes five or six nights a week.
It paid the bills. Barely. It did not feel like progress.
“I didn’t feel like I was getting the exposure that I needed,” Lee says. “And I’m like, How do I get in front of people? It was tough. I called my mom every morning when I would leave — it was, like, 3:30 a.m. — to go home. And I’m like, ‘What am I doing? Why am I here? I don’t understand this business. I don’t know how to get in front of people.’”
On top of that stress, within her first six months, the house she was living in was robbed. She had just performed an all-cash gig, so she had about $2,000 cash in the house; it was all gone. Then the very next day, someone broke into her car.
Back-to-back, it nearly broke her.
“It was just like, I have nothing going on for myself right now, and the money that I did have is all gone, and so that was really, really challenging,” she says. “And there’s been a couple moments — you know, things will happen with family and you’re not able to be there.
“It makes you wonder, like, Is this really worth doing? I’m missing all this stuff that’s going (on at) home.”
She didn’t leave. But she thought about it. Meanwhile, she kept pushing. And after a couple of years of hard work, she started catching some encouraging breaks.
‘How do we capitalize on this?’
The first came in January 2023, when she signed a publishing deal with Spirit Music Publishing and began really honing her “country soul” sound.
Then in 2024, she toured with Willie Nelson, serving as a supporting act for the country-music legend at multiple shows around the country, including Asheville. (They were paired up by the talent agency they’re both signed to, Creative Arts Agency.) The following year, she co-wrote and put out multiple songs that turned heads, including her acoustic country love song “So Beautiful,” which reached 1 million streams; and “Dandelion,” a summery country anthem she recorded with Willie’s son Lukas.
The biggest boost, though, came after Lee caught wind of a unique opportunity this past December: Chevrolet was casting for a national campaign built around a modern version of Dinah Shore’s “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet.”
There were bigger names in the mix. More established artists. She was told she had about a 10% chance.
So from a hotel room in San Francisco, she recorded a rough demo — listening to a track on her guitarist’s phone and singing into her own. “Somehow,” she says, “Chevy picked it.”
She found out just before Christmas. The commercial then was shot in early January — on her 26th birthday — with her holding a guitar and singing atop a 400-foot rock formation in Utah, reached by helicopter, in a re-imagining of the classic Dinah Shore Chevy commercials filmed in the same location.
The first time she saw it, with her band, during the Winter Olympics opening ceremony, she screamed. The second time, she cried. And it did the job, at least temporarily, of elevating her profile. Her streaming numbers on Apple Music and Spotify, she says, jumped roughly 70%.
By her own admission, though, she’s by no means made it. At least not in the clean, cinematic way people imagine.
“All of a sudden you have a social media team helping you out,” Lee says. “And you have PR and everything’s just coming at you so quickly. But the consistent conversation was never like, ‘OK, this is going to blow you up and we’ll go from there.’ It was always, ‘How do we capitalize on this?’ And with me having a (new EP) coming out, ‘how do we use this to help push that?’”
In other words: The grind didn’t go anywhere. It just got louder.
She’s still in the middle
The dishwasher in her apartment still doesn’t work.
“I don’t even know,” she replies, when asked what’s wrong with it. “I’m so blessed to be in such a great location, but I definitely live in a very janky apartment, and everything is always falling apart.”
Lee is willing to put up with it, though, in pursuit of her dream.
And although she still feels the pull of family, especially in times when it really needs to come together — like this spring, in the wake of the death of her step-grandmother — the singer-songwriter says it’s unlikely she’ll ever return to live in the Charlotte area full-time again. That it just doesn’t fit with what she describes as a more free-spirited life.
But there’s more to her stick-to-itiveness than just that. She is convinced her true breakthrough is coming, even if it’s not exactly in the way she hopes it will (i.e. an opening slot on a tour with a major act like Post Malone or her girl crush, P!nk).
“Yeah, absolutely I feel like it’s gonna happen for me,” Lee says. “I am such a big follow-your-peace person and follow-your-gut person. ... The last three weeks have been really tough for me. I’ve been very emotional coming off the adrenaline rush from the commercial and trying to prep myself for this EP and all of this stuff — I feel like it’s been smacking me around a little bit.
“Throughout it, though, I’ve never lost the (feeling that) it’s gonna happen.
“When I was a little kid, my mom used to tell me that — and she still does — but that she had dreams of me singing in front of seas of people. And I’ve just always held on to that really tight, and I just have no doubts. I don’t know what it’s gonna look like or when it’s gonna happen, but I know there’s a purpose behind the rate that it’s going. So I just gotta keep on pushing.”
As she does, she remains in that long, murky middle.
Still washing dishes in the bathtub. Still living check-to-check. Still chasing a level of success that, from the outside, already looks like she’s achieved.
See Brooke Lee in Charlotte
The singer will perform an all-ages show at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16, at Amos’ Southend. General-admission tickets are $19 in advance or $22 on the day of the show, with seated tickets available for $35 in advance (prices don’t include fees). Details: Here.
