Bri Bagwell grew up in a family that kept a special freezer just for frozen hatch green chile peppers.
“Now it’s super famous all over the country, which is wild because that only happened in recent years, but hatch green chile was just always something we had in a Ziploc bag,” she tells Taste of Country.
That’s just one example of all the little memories and details Bagwell cherishes about her hometown of Las Cruces, N.M., especially as she’s gotten older and pursued a musical career that takes her traveling all over the country in her touring RV.
It’s also part of the inspiration behind her new single “Border Girl,” which paints a picture of an upbringing straddled between three different regions: New Mexico, Mexico and Texas.
“Border Girl” was a solo write for Bagwell, and she jokes that she settled on the subject matter because, as someone who’s happily in a relationship, she “didn’t have a lot of heartbreak in my life.”
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Instead, she focused on tapping into her origin story, and out came “Border Girl,” a song equal parts nostalgia for a childhood home, and the fresh appreciation for a hometown that you can only get from spending time away.
“You don’t know how different your hometown is, or how special it is in certain ways, until you experience all these other places,” the singer reflects. “…It was just something I took for granted a little bit: The food and the language, how in certain restaurants, everyone orders in Spanish and that’s just normal for that place.”
Even more than usual, the song’s lyrics were a labor of love. As a native daughter of Las Cruces, Bagwell knew how important it was to do her town justice. She agonized over getting certain details just right, like the line in the second verse, “Under a Spanish spell with an English kiss.”
“I was going back and forth between ‘Under a Spanish spell with an English twist,’ and I was like, ‘That’s not right.’ I landed on ‘kiss’ and I was like, ‘Well, that’s kind of odd, but a little artsy,'” she says.
It turned out to be one of her favorite lyrics in the song.
“I can take some many liberties with my writing right now because I don’t have a label or a publishing deal or a manager even,” Bagwell points out. “It’s just whatever I wanna say, and whatever I wanna write. I can be a little more artsy if I want to, and that’s fun.”
Here Are the Lyrics to Bri Bagwell’s “Border Girl”:
I love a heavy heat, the smell of desert wind / I love a history with some blood on it / I know so much of me is an equal split / ‘Cause I’m in between and I don’t mind a bit
Chorus:
I’m a border girl, from a border town / Where two different worlds meet on sacred ground / Where a map line curves and divides us now / The Southwest curled my heart around / Where I grew up and I’ll go down / A border girl from a border town
I swear I can tell when the wind shifts / That the cartel is kicking up a bit / Just like I can smell rain before it hits / Under a Spanish spell with an English kiss
Repeat Chorus
The Rio Grande still remains the blood that’s running through the veins…
Of a border girl, from a border town / A border girl, from a border town
Repeat Chorus
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