Dream Music

Pieta Brown had this dream where she saw herself surrounded by images of her Alabama childhood looking for a place to record. And then, there it was – an old barn.
“I got word from [drummer] Chad Cromwell that he had a space and [he] sent me a picture,” Brown explains, on the line from her Iowa City home. “The picture was so like the dream that I got real excited and then everybody was into it and [they] all had the time, so it really happened very seamlessly and very organically.”
First of course came the songs and then, fortuitously, the players that would end up translating those songs for the recording of Mercury.
“Well they came in bits and pieces for sure. Some of them I wrote when I was out on a tour opening for Mark Knopfler and his band, plus there were a few that came right before going and recording. I was kind of mesmerised by this story [her partner and guitarist] Bo [Ramsey] had told me about going to see Howlin' Wolf in Chicago before I was even born. He said that Howlin' Wolf was singing with his mic through an amplifier – there was no PA – and the band was playin' and they were really cooking, like really smokin' you know; everybody was dancin', but it was still quiet enough that you could hear people's feet kickin' in the sawdust on the floor.
“And I was so taken by that idea, especially in this day and age, of things being quiet and playing quietly. I mean I've always been drawn to that, but I got really stuck on that idea of recording that way. So I had this sound in my mind where if I could get my voice to be kind of like the people's feet. That was sorta what I was chasin' and I'd reached out to Mark Knopfler about just running some songs by him and he suggested I reach out to [his bass player] Glenn Worf. I had actually had some other ideas about some players and what I might actually do when recording and meanwhile somewhere in there the dream had occurred.”
So along with Ramsey, Worf and Cromwell – who, as it happens, is also in Knopfler's US touring band – guitarist Richard Bennett, another Knopfler band member, plus multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield (Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash) came on board and Mercury was recorded “live in the barn” – Lamplight Studio in Primm Springs, Tennessee – over three days. Knopfler flew in some guitar for the closing cut, No Words Now.
While Brown has been writing since she was a kid, she came to guitar quite late. “Right on time for me I think, but yeah, definitely, it wasn't my first instrument. I always had a kind of a special reverence for guitars – they seemed kind of like these mystical, magical beings really to me a lot of the time so I was a little wary of getting too close [laughs]. Once I got a hold of the right one, I was addicted.
“Because I'm a generally quiet speaker and quieter singer most of the time, I think singing with the piano was something that didn't always make sense with me, while singing with a guitar is a whole different deal, so it made singing the words feel natural.”