In searching for the words to describe the velvet voiced, sultry, indie country singer Pieta Brown I must borrow from Roxette, because ‘Nana nana na, she’s got the look.’
In searching for the words to describe the velvet voiced, sultry, indie country singer Pieta Brown I must borrow from Roxette, because ‘Nana nana na, she’s got the look’, crikey Moses. And more importantly she has got the chops to match. Her music is laidback alt-country with a bit of swing and a bit of soul. Her voice is both confident and fragile, combining to produce a sound all of her own. “I came up with the term prairie stomp to describe my music,” she explains with a laugh. “I first said it tongue-in-cheek but I think there is some truth to it.”
Pieta was raised in flyover country, the Midwest, the heart of America, with endless plains of long grass rippling in the wind, in a house with no running water or furnace; one seemingly straight out of a struggling songwriter boipic. “My dad was a songwriter, music was always right there, familiar and comfortable for me,” Pieta recalls. “So when I was really young it was a real natural, normal thing to play music.
“My great grandfather played the banjo, my great grandmother played the organ, my grandmother played guitar in church, and my uncle Roscoe had a country band, so when I was a little girl there was a lot of family music. It was just normal; it didn’t have anything to do with the music business.
“So I got a dose of that early on and then I ended up living with my mom in Alabama; I grew up with her, she was a single working mother, and something about that separation – as I spent a lot of time alone – music was a way for me to connect back to something comfortable. That was the seeds of it.” It’s like the old saying – if you have an uncle called Roscoe, go into country music, you can’t lose.
Pieta’s first album Remember The Sun, was released back in 2007 to much acclaim and was followed by last year’s effort, Shimmer, recorded by legendary producer Don Was (who was worked with Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, and the Rolling Stones). She’s also toured with Calexico, J.J. Cale, John Prine, Mason Jennings, Ani Difranco and Mark Knopfler. It is an impressive list, but Pieta insists the lofty heights of international touring were never her plan. “It was really weird actually” she confesses.
“When I was a teenager I was a huge music fan, a music lover really, but I can’t remember ever thinking ‘I want to go out and sing songs and get paid’. I did, however, jot down things in my notebook, play the piano; it wasn’t until my early 20s that I picked up a guitar and that’s what set me off on the journey.
“But once I picked up that guitar I became obsessed, and I started playing some songs out in little bars and just followed it as I went along. I never thought ‘I think I wanna do this for a living.’ And that first guitar was a classic too, a real peach,” she grins. “It was a 1930s Maybell that my dad had given me,” Pieta recalls fondly. “It was one of those magic things, you really feel like there are songs in instruments, and that’s how I felt with this. My dad was showing me the guitar and I might have known three chords maybe and not even known the name of them. I just tuned it to my ear and borrowed it for a couple of weeks and I just got hooked.”
But rather than looks and musical lineage, it is the strength of song-writing that makes Pieta’s music so captivating. “I feel that a real good song, something that is going to hold up and last, that has some life in it, has something in it, something in the melody,” she explains. “And that is something I feel like I am getting my mind around, I will probably always be chasing that, it’s a mystery; I don’t know where the melodies come from exactly. The more I go on with songwriting, the more mysterious it seems to me.
“I’ve read a lot of different songwriters talking about writing and I think some people are true craftsmen and they have a process, but for me it is about being open and finding something, maybe a phrase, a lot of times the music comes first, I write with instrument in hand, either piano or guitar.” And she writes the hell out of ‘em. The stunning songstress
PIETA BROWN will be playing her unique brand of prairie stomp at The Northcote Social Club on both November 23 and 24. Tickets from The Corner box office, 9486 1677 or northcotesocialcub.com. PIETA BROWN’s new album One And All is out now through Vitamin Records.
