BRANDON — Vermont musician Breanna Elaine's new song opens with an unexpected and strangely intimate sentiment.
"I want to look hot at your funeral / It’s what you would have wanted."
The gritty lyrics, which she says were inspired by the loss of a close friend to the opioid epidemic, go on to detail the emotional roller coaster of having watched him struggle and being helpless to save him — and how this feeds her grief.
"'Where the snakes live,'" Breanna said, evoking the song's title, "it's kind of a metaphor for when you're living a dangerous or self-destructive lifestyle, and you're messing with drugs or you're messing with things that are not good for you, that could hurt you. But you're doing it anyways" — hence, the lyrics: "You really like to take a walk through the tall grass / One day you know you’re gonna get bit."
To support the recording of the song and production of the music video, Breanna is raising money through a crowdfunding campaign that donates 5 percent of its profit to Turning Point Center, in Rutland, a nonprofit that helps people in recovery.
"I wanted to attach the bigger meaning, and really make this something that could actually make a difference in the community," she said.
For the crowdfunding campaign, set up through Indiegogo, Breanna aims to raise $10,000 by Saturday. The campaign can be found at tinyurl.com/wheresnakesvt.
The release show for "Where the snakes live" is set for Aug. 17 at Merchants Hall in Rutland, and will be a benefit concert for Turning Point Center. Time and ticket information is to come. Breanna also made special edition T-shirts with art inspired by the song on the front and Turning Point Center's logo on the back, along with information on the center's main fundraising event, Stomping Out Stigma, set for later this year. She plans to sell these T-shirts at her show, as well as at Stomping Out Stigma. Profits from the shirts will go to Turning Point Center.
Michael Daly, a certified recovery coach with Turning Point Center, noted that it's "not every day" the organization gets approached with the idea of such a partnership.
"To be able to partner up with somebody that is setting a mission to raise awareness about the opioid epidemic that we're going through, and the overdoses that are happening, it really hits home for us," Daly said.
Daly also supervises law and emergency department programs and is a group facilitator with Turning Point Center. When reached by phone, he had just returned from a call at an emergency room, where he provided peer support. When a hospital has someone whom staff think would benefit from Turning Point Center's services, Daly and his colleagues are paged.
"And we'll come see them, and that person has the right to tell us either to kick bricks or to sit and talk to them," Daly said. "We're not clinical. We're all peer. When we walk in, we're just in normal-day average clothes, all tatted up, piercings and stuff. It has a sense of comfort for them."
He said Turning Point Center also works with sober living homes, jails, and students who may be struggling.
"They're more willing to open up to us than to a doctor or nurse," he said of the people he serves. "They're kind of shielded, in a way, because they're very vulnerable."
Daly, who is sober after struggling with substance, opiates and alcohol use disorders, would like more people to know about Turning Point Center and organizations that provide similar resources.
"Not everyone knows that there's help out there," he said. "We are like the initial start point, and at the same time, the ending point: We help make connections, whether it's to treatment, to maintenance, to outpatient programs, to doing recovery coaching in the meantime, so they have somebody that has been through the struggle."
Breanna, 27, who goes by her first and middle name, was born in Brattleboro and lived in the town until she was around 12. She is now a resident of Brandon. She met Jeremy Theriault when living in Northampton, Mass., and she, Jeremy and a mutual friend became best friends.
"When I think about what we really did, we kind of just hung out and enjoyed each other's company," she said.
She said the three partied together, and now calls it a "wild time."
"But underneath all that, we really were just really close friends, and close as human beings in our hearts," she said. "And even though we were all a little rough around the edges, it's like, we all saw each other."
She recalls Jeremy being supportive when she was pregnant and after the birth of her son, Elias, now 6. She likens Jeremy and their other friend as having been Elias's "crazy uncles."
"Under all the troublemaking antics, we knew he just had such a good heart and he was such a sweet guy. He was just good," she said of Jeremy. "We had the best time of our lives, just like, hanging out together."
Jeremy Theriault died on April 14, 2022, of an opioid overdose at age 35, Breanna tells viewers of a video on her crowdfunding page for "Where the snakes live."
"This project is very important to me," she says in the video. "I am passionate about supporting people who are fighting to take their lives back from addiction."
One of her favorite musicians, Bow Thayer, will produce the song, and she will record the song with a full band of Vermont musicians in Thayer's studio. She is working with videographer Mason Mashtare and his team, who will direct and film the music video.
The use of snakes as a metaphor led her to the visual of walking through a field of tall grass — trying to catch up with someone who can't be reached.
"You see the back of his shirt, or the bottom of his boot, and you can kind of see him going through the tall grass," she said. "But it's like, I'm trying to catch up to him. I'm trying to get to him. And I couldn't save him. It's too late."
The video also contains a scene in a cemetery, which she notes plays off the song's eerie opening lines.
"It's edgy. It's off-putting. It's uncomfortable. It's creepy, almost, is the vibe that I'm going for," she said. "Because, I mean, this is based on real stuff."
She calls making music her "main coping mechanism" in life, and said she did a lot of writing to help her process the loss of her friend.
Breanna wrote another original song for Jeremy's funeral, where she met members of his family, whom she later asked for permission to attach Jeremy's name to her project. Jeremy's brother, Don Theriault, of Athol, Mass., when reached by phone, said he was moved by the song Breanna shared at the funeral, and could tell she and Jeremy had a close bond.
He said he and his sister gave their blessing for "Where the snakes live" because of Breanna's "real, genuine love for my brother."
"They had a great friendship. So I would do anything I could to support her desire to raise money for substance abuse treatment and awareness in my brother's honor," Don Theriault said.
