P
eople who say you can’t go home again might want to consider the story behind Brett Dennen’s latest album, Smoke and Mirrors.
On tour behind his 2011 album Loverboy, the singer/songwriter found himself wearing down, getting stuck creatively and unsure about where to go with his music. He was very much feeling a disconnect.
“Every time I tried to sit down and write, it just wasn’t happening,” Dennen says. “It was just getting to be too much. [It] was like, ‘It’s not working. I’m going to put out a bad album. I’m going to put out a really bad album that’s just not me. I’m going to have to do something different. I’m going to have to go get songs from other artists or something. I really don’t have anything to say because I don’t really know who I am.’ ”
The demands of touring and his career started to weigh on Dennen.
“I’m on tour like crazy, and I feel like I’m still in the middle of that and I don’t know what to say or what to do,” he says. “You start working with people and people’s careers are built around your music. You’ve got fans that are built around you. I got stuck in this cycle of just trying to please people. The times that I would break out of that were the times when I was writing. But with this new album, I couldn’t break out of that.”
It was a new sensation for Dennen. Up until Loverboy, his career and music had been progressing nicely.
A native of Northern California who worked as a camp counselor before pursuing his music career, Dennen’s first two albums, a 2005 self-titled release and 2006’s So Much More, were stripped-back works, which got Dennen tagged as a Folk artist, but also helped him get gigs in Folk-oriented venues and build a grass roots following.
With his third album, 2008’s Hope for the Hopeless, Dennen fleshed out his melodic sound to try to connect with fans beyond the Folk base he had established and perhaps even gain radio play in formats like Adult Contemporary or Pop. He didn’t get a big radio hit, but he grew his audience and successfully ventured into more of a plugged-in Pop sound.
He stretched even further on Loverboy. Dennen added some juice to his sound with songs that were more up-tempo, danceable and consciously designed to inject more energy into his live shows.
Not everyone liked Dennen’s new direction. Reviews were mixed, fans didn’t seem as enthusiastic and Dennen ended up not being able to tour some countries he’d hoped to play.
For the first time in his career, Dennen found himself feeling unsure about his music and his next move as an artist.
He decided it was time to go back to square one. He moved into a home he had purchased a couple of years earlier at the base of the Sierra mountains in California and unplugged from music. Going home, it turned out, helped Dennen reconnect with the songwriter and the person he was before he got caught up in his music career.
“It was the same mountains that I grew up in. It’s really close to my [childhood] home,” Dennen says. “It’s like [I became] the guy that I used to be before I was a musician. I was the guy that I was when I was dreaming about being a musician. I was the amateur songwriter [again]. Like my first album, most of that first album was written up in the Sierras while I was a camp counselor. At night after the kids would go to bed, I’d sit on a rock, look at the constellations and write. This was very much the same thing. I’d hike all day or I’d be in the mountains and I’d ski or in the summertime hike and swim, and sort of not, at the beginning, really know what I was going to do.
“But once I started getting into the rhythm and getting comfortable with not having somewhere to be all of the time, the inspiration came back.”
Songs started to flow again. The problem was Dennen didn’t know what to make of what he had created. While experiencing self-doubt about what he had written, Dennen got a vote of confidence he hadn’t anticipated. Having fulfilled his contract with Dualtone Records, he was an unsigned artist waiting to see what his label options would be going forward.
“Atlantic (Records) came along, specifically this guy named Gregg Nadel, an A&R guy at Atlantic,” Dennen recalls. “He was like, ‘These songs are great, and we’re going to sign you no matter what.’ And of course I had some hesitations about being on a major label, but I also felt like it was time for me to be on a major label because I wanted the chance. I wanted to have the chance to (do) something big. So they came in at a time where I was feeling a little lost. I needed a partner. I needed some encouragement.”
Dennen worked out a two-tiered deal in which he’s signed to indie label F-Stop Music through Atlantic, giving him the attention of a small label, with the promotional resources of a major.
Smoke and Mirrors, the first album released under that deal, spotlights two distinct sides to Dennen’s music. Mainly acoustic, fairly stripped-back songs like “Only Want You,” “Sweet Persuasion” and “Don’t Mess With Karma” capture the more intimate and honest personality of Dennen’s early albums, while “Wild Child,” “Not Too Late” and “When We Were Young” are more up-tempo, breezy and fun. In either setting, the songs are highly melodic, sound unforced and show Dennen in good form as a songwriter.
Dennen’s current tour is an intimate, multi-media affair dubbed “Watercolors: A Special Acoustic Evening.
” Showcasing his other great passion — painting — Dennen created 13 watercolor works specially crafted for each city on the tour. Limited signed copies will be available at the show. ©
BRETT DENNEN plays 20th Century Theater Sunday. Proceeds benefit the nonprofit Fernside, which helps families deal with death-related grief.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2014.