A Conversation with Pieta Brown  (continued)

PM: It's very perverse timing that I'll be in Mexico when you play Nashville on the 15th of October at the Belcourt. Wow, that's a big gig, the Belcourt Theater. That's beautiful.

PB: Yeah, that is. I played there one time. I opened for my dad.

PM: Wow. How is your dad, if I may ask? How are he and Iris doing?

PB: As far as I know, they're doing great. I haven't actually talked to him much in a while. But yeah, he seems to be doing fine. And he put out a great record last year called Evening Call, that I think is really an excellent record. I think it was last year that he put that out. In fact, that's something that I listen to quite a bit from time to time.

PM: I've got to get on Evening Call, yeah, I don't know about that record.

PB: Oh, yeah, you do. Yeah, it kind of came out in a shadow. But it's really, really good.

[One of our very earliest Puremusic interviews was with Greg Brown, back in 2001. See that here.]

PM: So while we're on that subject of asking about people, tell me about Bo Ramsey and how he's doing.

PB: Well, he put out that blues record--

PM: Yeah, we covered that, and we love it.

PB: --well, gosh, is it a year and a half ago or something, maybe, or maybe a year ago? And he's just now finishing up a record of his own songs. And it's really neat. It's very different than things he's done before, at least from a song standpoint.

PM: Wow, it's like a songwriter record. How exciting. It's more like a songwriter record for Bo.

PB: Yeah, I don't think he's made one of those in about 10 years.

[See our 2006 interview with Bo here.]

PM: Well, I'm so sorry that I'll miss you at the Belcourt. Will you come back for the Americana Conference at the end of the month?

PB: Maybe so. That could happen.

PM: Because if you do, we've been doing more video interviews, and if you guys come back and have a little time, I'd love to do a video interview with you and Bo, and sit down, play a few songs, and just talk off the cuff. It's fun for the readers to be able to watch people they admire on film.

PB: Yeah, I like doing that. I like watching old videos of Sonny Boy Williamson.

PM: [laughs] Absolutely.

PB: I'm really glad somebody made those, too.

PM: It's unbelievable the stuff that you can see now on youtube, the people that you can call up from various decades and just see them doing their thing. It's unbelievable.

PB: Yeah. I actually haven't spent much time on youtube. But I know that you can see all that stuff in there.

PM: In fact, when you mentioned Sonny Boy Williamson--there's an incredible video that came out a couple years ago on Howlin' Wolf. I don't know if you've seen that one, but it is--oh, it's--

PB: Oh, I've heard about it, and I have not seen it.

PM: It's spine-tingling good. I've got to figure out who I lent that to and get it back.

Well, as always, Pieta, it is so nice to talk to you. I know you've got to get on the road. But it's always lovely to talk to you, especially when you've put as great a record as Remember the Sun is. I hope that it reaches some good percentage of the ears that should revel in it.

PB: Well, thanks, Frank. I appreciate y'all's supporting me.

[And if you'd like a second opinion about Pieta's new CD, see the review of it by Michael Ross that's conveniently also in this issue.]

Iowa City photographer Sonya Naumann has a cool project underway that includes Pieta. A visit to thousanddollardress.com would give you the lowdown better than we can here, but briefly: Sonya got married in a thousand dollar dress (her mom bought it for her), and naturally she only wore the dress once. But she's an artist, right? She decided to try to photograph 1,000 different people wearing her wedding dress. Clicking through the gallery at the site (a selection of the dress pictures that Sonya has shot so far), so many feelings arise--about marriage, about women, about life. It's a remarkable series that invites many layers of response from the viewer. All these different people in the same dress, they could represent the thousand facets of one deep individual--or perhaps reflect the thousand thoughts that run through your mind on the morning of the day you go get hitched. The range of metaphoric possibilities is vast. (And by the way, if you'd like to be a participant in her series, contact Sonya here.)

This is the portrait of Pieta that's in the series: