Folk singers often stand solo on stage, but they’re never acting alone. At least that’s how I interpret one of Pieta Brown’s many trenchant remarks in Episode #375 of The String. “Another thing I really love about music is that it's always collaboration,” says the Iowa artist. “The songs themselves, to me, I would say they're collaborations too, right? Songs are not about you or me. They're about that collective force field thing. So I think even songs, even though I'm singing it into being with a guitar, it doesn't feel lonely or to me or of me exactly.”
Brown’s thoughtful tone in conversation came as little surprise given the poetic and pensive colors in her music across a 20-year career, up through her new album Dreamin’ Of. This 10-song collection is a consummate collaboration, featuring two regular sidekicks of Brown’s friend and fellow midwesterner Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Sean Carey (drums) and Mike Lewis (bass and sax).
When Vernon first took a shine to Brown’s music, he invited her to record at his beloved April Base studio outside of Eau Claire, WI. There she made Paradise Outlaw, the 2014 release that’s often regarded as her finest album and which was re-issued as an expanded 10th anniversary edition in 2024.
After various encounters with friends she made in that crowd and after writing a song (“Dreamin’ Of”) that felt like an anchor, Pieta tapped Mike Lewis’s studio Good Harbor in Grand Marais, MN. “Sean and Mike and I met in Mike's basement and started recording, and we got about half the record, I think, in those few days,” she says. “And then we ended up finishing it at April Base, mostly because of Justin's generosity, honestly. It was just like following those channels and those sparks.”
Pieta Brown has been following channels and sparks since writing poetry as a girl growing up in Birmingham, AL (with her divorced mother) and an off-grid home in rural Iowa (with her father, the esteemed singer-songwriter Greg Brown). “Supposedly I was making up songs all the time when I was a little kid,” she tells us. “So there was like this deep early connection, and then all this distance. And there's something about that combination in terms of influencing me as a songwriter that I think did something. I don't really understand it myself exactly, but it definitely made a big impact.”
Despite the artistic birthright, she says that her father’s influence has been indirect, by setting an example of independence and of finding one’s one voice and mode of moving through the world rather than an artistic mentorship. That said, Greg did intervene, perhaps unknowingly, at a time when Pieta had started writing songs as a self-taught piano player.
“He would always show me his guitars - since I was a little kid,” she says, remembering when he showed her a 1930s archtop. “I picked it up, and I kind of caught a little spark. I didn't even know exactly why, and I ended up taking it up to my room that night…And over the next couple days, as I was staying there, these songs started coming out.”
The songs on Dreamin’ Of pare down some involved backstories into linguistic brush strokes that make them evocative and moody more than directly narrative. The title track pivots off of a news interview that Pieta saw with a man who’d lost his child in one of the recent wars. She was inspired by the father’s call for restraint and peace rather than revenge. Overtones of compassion, grace, and humanity are throughout this record, and so is a rich spectrum of sound and atmosphere, which evolved out of her recent experiments in instrumental music, which she has released under the name Sylvee & The Sea. With its sonic aura and its rich language, it should reach fans of Joe Henry or S.G. Goodman.
Pieta has been recording albums like this and touring since the early 2000s, with a consistently acclaimed output and no real fallow periods. She’s worked in film and been called on as a producer, recently by family member Iris DeMent, wife of Greg since 2002. We talk about key chapters, including her relationship with Greg Brown’s musical partner Bo Ramsey, and about the creative upsides of living in Iowa City.
