We first latched on to Pieta Brown back in 2011 when she released Mercury, a brooding, ethereal song-cycle that landed on our Top Albums of 2011 list.
Videos by American Songwriter
Since then, Brown, the daughter of noted troubadour Greg Brown, offered up another solid album — Paradise Outlaw — and toured the country intermittently, navigating the slings and arrows that dog any independent working musician in lo these troubled times.
Her most recent collection, Postcards (which comes out this Friday), was inspired by the highs and lows that attend a songwriter’s life, and it features a who’s who of stellar guest musicians, including Mark Knopfler, Calexico, and Mason Jennings, to name a few.
Stream the album below, and hear what Brown had to say about the making of it:
“One of the sparks for this album of collaborations was a postcard of Allen Ginsberg that I found in a little notebook in my bag after a walk on the beach in Santa Monica, California,” Brown said. “I was staying in a Travelodge and wrote the song ‘In The Light’ there after the walk on the beach. Months later I ended up sending that song to Calexico for an open experimental collaboration through the music from a distance. Each song has its own story of course and each song was its own experiment from start to finish. I couldn’t be prouder to have these songs about love, connection, distance, space/time, motorcycles, war, sex, depression, addiction, and wishful thinking, elevated by the music and open-ness that everyone sent back to me.
Hopefully these Postcards sound like a fringed-out songwriter in a nowhere motel room free-floating with instruments everywhere … it’s after midnight, but somehow you can still see the sun. You can hear her singing and playing a song … and then you start to hear who she imagines playing along. And hopefully it all starts to sound good enough that you want to turn it up pretty loud. And hopefully you like what you hear enough that you send one or a few of these Postcards to a friend somewhere too.”
