P
ieta Brown’s decision to go into the family business was not one to be taken lightly.
Her father, Greg Brown, is among the most acclaimed and respected artists in contemporary Folk, compiling an amazing 30-plus-album catalog in his five-decade career. If that wasn’t daunting enough, just as Pieta’s musical journey began, her father married Iris DeMent, meaning one of Americana’s most beloved singer/songwriters — and one of her most potent influences — was now her stepmother.
Given her own impressive catalog over the past dozen years — six albums and a trio of EPs — Pieta does not allow intimidation or expectation to cloud her creative process, but she certainly understands her father’s environmental and genetic contributions.
“As I’ve gone along, I feel very close to him, musically and otherwise,” Pieta says from her Iowa City home. “At the same time, a lot of my childhood I wasn’t even in the same household as him. But I was young enough when he was getting going that I watched the full-on struggle; he was living in a shack with no running water and didn’t have any money and was just starting to get a local following.”
Pieta was seemingly born to be a vagabond troubadour. Her unconventional early life consisted of bouncing between homes, her father’s in Iowa City and her mother’s in Birmingham, Ala., accounting for 19 addresses in as many birthdays. She grew up around musicians, without the distraction of television and with her parents’ love and cautionary support. When she first sang for her father, he said, “It’s a blessing and a curse.”
Pieta’s releases have generally reflected her Folk/Pop/Rock influences in a fairly straightforward manner, but her latest album, last fall’s Paradise Outlaw, presents Pieta’s inspirations in a slightly different light. There’s an almost ambient Folk vibe to the proceedings, exuding a Daniel Lanois/Brian Eno atmospheric sheen, and for the first time Pieta plays primarily banjo. “The banjo and my voice get along pretty well,” she says.
The production is once again co-credited to Pieta and her collaborator/husband Bo Ramsey, but she accepts sole responsibility for the sonic shifts on Paradise Outlaw, which features her touring band and guests like Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Amos Lee, arranger/instrumentalist David Mansfield and her father.
“One reason it sounds so different is we recorded live in one big room and it was the right players in the right room at the right time,” Pieta says. “I gave Bo co-production credit because I’m so used to collaborating with him and conversations go back and forth, but it really was my production. I made the calls on the players; they were all guys I had worked with on the road.”
Ramsey has been a critical component of Pieta’s work from the start as backing guitarist and co-producer. On Paradise Outlaw, Pieta’s creative role was significantly amplified, leading to the resultant sonic departures that distinguish the album.
“On my other albums, I’m focused on the songs, I get the fever to record and Bo has made a lot of the musician calls,” Pieta says. “On [2011’s] Mercury, that was a joint effort; on this one, it was pretty much my vision and ideas. In musicianship and ears, he’s been a piece of the puzzle and I always like to give him credit because it’s hard to know exactly where the line is.”
Pieta realized her vision for Paradise Outlaw at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin. Brown had crossed paths with Vernon when they were both in Australia (Brown’s drummer, J.T. Bates, is best friends with Vernon’s bassist) and, after bonding over their mutual Midwest roots, he offered her the use of his Wisconsin facility.
When Pieta began formulating the specifics of Paradise Outlaw, she accepted Vernon’s offer, touring the studio and conferring with engineer B.J. Burton.
“[Burton] was also a big part of the album sounding the way it does; I wanted it to have that really open, spacious sound, and he helped me establish that early on,” she says. “I’ve recorded most of my albums live, but until Mercury, we were all isolated, so I’d be in a booth with my headphones on. I was shocked by recording in one room, where you can feel it. I’m such a sensitive maniac that I really respond to all that stuff in the moment. It’s sort of imperfect in a way, but I like that part of it.”
Paradise Outlaw has been shaped by the chemistry among Pieta and the core players — Ramsey, Bates, Michael Rossetto and Jon Penner, dubbed the Sawdust Collective — a bond forged during Pieta’s extensive touring cycle over the past three years. The synergy that developed among Pieta and her band in the live arena (opening for Mark Knopfler, John Prine, Calexico and Brandi Carlisle, among others) naturally paid major studio dividends.
“They all know me so well, it was fun,” Pieta says. “Some of those songs were very new and a couple were some of the first songs I ever wrote. With this one, I was just like, ‘Fuck it.’ People will criticize albums from the outside as being too slow or too laid back — that’s something I’ve heard — and I just wanted it to be really natural to this moment and have it sound like there’s air and space in it. The world is moving really fast, everybody’s locked in on their screens and everything is going so frenetically. I had this vision of creating a sonic space that was maybe one step to the side of that.”
One of the most important facets of the new album is Pieta’s spectacular songwriting skill, clearly evident on previous releases but elevated to an incredible new level on Paradise Outlaw. Focusing her lyrical attention on love and hope with less poetry and more clarity, Pieta wrote the bulk of the material in a four-month window ahead of recording.
Pieta had started writing two older songs, “Painter’s Hands” and “Rise My Only Rose,” at the dawn of her career, stashing them unfinished in her copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and forgetting about them. She took Howl along on the Australian trip, and the unfinished songs fell at her feet just before meeting Vernon, an accident of almost unbelievable synchronicity. It typifies the kind of organic methodology at the heart of her creative process.
“I have an active mind but I’m not much of a thinker,” she says, with an audible grin. “I don’t think about that stuff. It’s more like getting into a zone and when I step into that zone I let it come in and see what’s arriving. But I don’t think about, for better or worse, anything I do or don’t want to say. It just sort of arrives in some weird, mixed up way.” ©
PIETA BROWN performs Thursday with Iris DeMent at the 20th Century Theater. Tickets/more info: the20thcenturytheatre.com.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2015.
