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A Conversation with Pieta Brown (continued)
PM: So is it kosher, is it fair to ask about you and Bo? How is it going? Are you guys more than musical partners? Is it a life thing, or is that too private?
PB: Well, I feel private about the private parts of that relationship. But I feel like Bo and I are soul mates--
PM: That's beautiful.
PB: --and that runs on lots of levels.
PM: Yes. It's amazing what you guys are doing, and you can hear it all.
So, at Puremusic we don't usually do themes, but since this month we have you and Ben Taylor [son of James Taylor and Carly Simon] on the cover, maybe you'd entertain a question or two about growing up Greg Brown's daughter. Were your folks together when you were growing up?
PB: No.
PM: So you grew up at your mom's house, or--
PB: Mostly. They split up when I was really young, so...
PM: How young?
PB: There was some back and forth in the early years, but mostly I lived in the South with my mom as a child, in Birmingham, Alabama. I grew up there until I was a teenager, and then moved back here to Iowa.
PM: So you were in Birmingham until your teens--that makes sense, because there is something very southern about you for an Iowa girl. Yeah, I get that now. And in that space of time from childhood through moving back to Iowa from Birmingham, had you seen your dad much in those years?
PB: I did, yes. I would see him in the summertime. And when I was a young child before we moved down to Birmingham, my dad was a local musician, and he tooled around Iowa. It wasn't until I was kind of pre-teen when my dad started playing on the Prairie Home show and then started touring as I got older. So when I was a kid, it wasn't quite the same as it is now.
PM: Right. Yeah, he broke out later.
PB: He just seemed like a musician. I mean, it was very much about the music, it wasn't about Greg Brown at that time--not that it is now for him, but when I would go to his shows or when I was around the music as a kid, it was very much just about the music.
PM: He wasn't a personality yet.
PB: Not so much.
PM: He is now.
PB: Yes, he is.
PM: But I like what he does with it. A lot of people get really stupid behind it, but he does it justice, he does a really good thing with it.
PB: Yeah, I agree.
PM: How does Greg like what you're up to musically?
PB: Well, he's been very supportive.
PM: He ought to be, it's pretty damn great, what you're doing. But I'm glad he is. I was surprised not to see him appear in any place on this record except in the arrangement of "Little Sparrow."
PB: Well, I put his name in there because I learned that melody and that style of doing that song from him, although I use different words. But I learned that kind of basic approach from him, so I wanted to give him credit for that.
PM: Just the whole way the guitar plays the melody and the voice goes behind it, or the actual melody that you use?
PB: Yeah, both. He does it pretty differently, but there's a similar kind of singing with the guitar and then a similar melody that I'd heard since I was a kid. continue
print interview (pdf) listen to clips
