Norfolk
DETAILS
Thu, November 12, 2015
Norfolk, CT
Show: 8 PM
Ticket INFO
Member Presale: 6/16/15 06 AM
Public Onsale: 6/18/15 06:01 AM
Iris Dement with Special Guest Pieta Brown with Pieta Brown
Grammy-nominated country-folk singer-songwriter Iris Dement is bringing her one-of-a-kind voice and gritty songs back to our Norfolk stage. She has shared the stage with legends Merle Haggard & John Prine, and her music has been performed by everyone from Natalie Merchant to David Byrne, and featured in the Coen Brothers Award-Winning film “True Grit.”
Iris DeMent
Connect with this artist:
www.irisdement.com/
Artist Bio
On her transcendent new record, Workin' On A World, Iris DeMent faces the modern
world — as it is right now — with its climate catastrophe, pandemic illness, and
epidemic of violence and social injustice — and not only asks us how we can keep
working towards a better world, but implores us to love each other, despite our very
different ways of seeing. Her songs are her way of healing our broken inner and outer
spaces.
With an inimitable voice as John Prine described, "like you've heard, but not really," and
unforgettable melodies rooted in hymns, gospel, and old country music, she's simply
one of the finest singer-songwriters in America as well as one of our fiercest advocates
for human rights. Her debut record Infamous Angel, which just celebrated its 30th
anniversary, was recently named one of the “greatest country albums of all time” by
Rolling Stone, and the two albums that followed, My Life and The Way I Should, were
both nominated for GRAMMYs. From there, DeMent released three records on her own
label, Flariella Records, the most recent of which, The Trackless Woods (2015), was
hailed as “a quietly powerful triumph” by The Guardian. DeMent’s songs have also been
featured in film (True Grit) and television (The Leftovers) and recorded by numerous
artists. Fittingly, she received the Americana Music Trailblazer Award in 2017.
Workin' On A World, her seventh album, started with the worry that woke DeMent up
after the 2016 elections: how can we survive this? “Every day some new trauma was
being added to the old ones that kept repeating themselves, and like everybody else, I
was just trying to bear up under it all,” she recalls. She returned to a truth she had
known since childhood: music is medicine. “My mom always had a way of finding the
song that would prove equal to whatever situation we were facing. Throughout my life,
songs have been lending me a hand. Writing songs, singing songs, putting them on
records, has been a way for me to extend that hand to others.”
With grace, courage, and soul, Iris shares 13 anthems — love songs, really — to and
for our broken inner and outer worlds. DeMent sets the stage for the album with the title
track in which she moves from a sense of despair towards a place of promise. “Now I’m
workin’ on a world I may never see / Joinin’ forces with the warriors of love / Who came
before and will follow you and me.”
She summons various social justice warriors, both past and present, to deliver
messages of optimism. “How Long” references Martin Luther King, while “Warriors of
Love” includes John Lewis and Rachel Corrie. “Goin’ Down To Sing in Texas” is an ode
not only to gun control, but also to the brave folks who speak out against tyranny and
endure the consequences in an unjust world. “I kept hearing a lot of talk about the arc of
history that Dr. King so famously said bends towards justice,” she recalls. “I was having
my doubts. But, then it dawned on me, he never said the arc would magically bend
itself. Songs, over the course of history, have proven to be pretty good arc benders.”
Bending inward, DeMent reaches agilely under the slippery surface of politics. She
grapples with loss on the deeply honest “I Won’t Ask You Why,” while encouraging
compassion over hate in the awe-inspiring “Say A Good Word.” Album closer
“Waycross, Georgia,” encompasses the end of the journey, thanking those along the
way. As she approaches subjects of aging, loss, suicide, and service, an arc of
compassion elevated to something far beyond words is transmitted. The delicate
fierceness encompassed in the riveting power of her voice has somehow only grown
over time.
Stalled partway through by the pandemic, the record took six years to make with the
help of three friends and co-producers: Richard Bennett, Pieta Brown, and Jim Rooney.
It was Pieta Brown who gave the record its final push. “Pieta asked me what had come
of the recordings I’d done with Jim and Richard in 2019 and 2020. I told her I’d pretty
much given up on trying to make a record. She asked would I mind if she had a listen.
So, I had everything we’d done sent over to her, and not long after that I got a text,
bouncing with exclamation marks: ‘You have a record and it’s called Workin’ On A
World!’” With Bennett back in the studio with them, Brown and DeMent recorded several
more songs and put the final touches on the record in Nashville in April of 2022.
The result is a hopeful album — shimmering with brilliant flashes of poignant humor and
uplifting tenderness — that speaks the truth, “in the way that truth is always hopeful,”
she explains. Reflecting on the lyrics of the song “The Sacred Now” (“see these walls/
let’s bring ‘em on down / it’s not a dream; it’s the sacred now”), DeMent is reminded of
Jesus saying the Kingdom of God is within you and the Buddhist activist monk Thich
Nhat Hanh saying the rose is in the compost; the compost is in the rose. On Workin’ On
A World, Iris DeMent demonstrates that songs are the healing and the healing arises
through song
Pieta Brown
Connect with this artist:
www.pietabrown.com
"There's a lot of love in this album," Pieta Brown says of Paradise Outlaw, her sixth album and fourth Red House release. "There's a lot of love in the songs and a lot of love in the way it was recorded, and hopefully that comes through.”
The level of emotional engagement that Brown routinely brings to her work is evident throughout Paradise Outlaw. The self-produced 14-song set fully embodies the qualities that have already established the iconoclastic singer-songwriter as a fiercely individual musical force.
Recorded at Bon Iver mastermind Justin Vernon's April Base studio in Wisconsin, with a supporting cast that includes Vernon, Amos Lee and Brown's father, legendary troubadour Greg Brown, Paradise Outlaw boasts some of Pieta's most emotionally resonant compositions, and some of her most expressive performances, to date.
Such gently intoxicating tunes as "Do You Know," "Wondering How," "Ricochet" and "Flowers of Love" feature organically orchestrated arrangements that accentuate the insight and intimacy of Brown's lyrics, the understated craftsmanship of her tunes, and the alluring immediacy of her uniquely expressive voice.
Although the Alabama-bred, Iowa-based Brown's quietly riveting tunes and gritty, charismatic performing style resist easy categorization, they've helped her to win a fiercely loyal international fan base that extends to many of her fellow artists.
"When Pieta sings you're aware of something effortless and natural, like rain on earth," Mark Knopfler observed, while Don Was called her "a great singer-songwriter who possesses major star-power magnetism," and Iris DeMent described her as "the best poet I've heard in a long damn time."
Paradise Outlaw showcases Brown's established strengths while staking out fresh new creative territory. "On my last album Mercury, I was recording near Nashville with top-call studio musicians who I hadn't worked with before, and was exploring the idea of craft and trying to hone in on more classic forms than I had previously," she explains, adding, "Paradise Outlaw came from a radically different place. I was thinking a lot about freedom, experimentation, poetry, folk songs, bending forms and voices. I also wrote and delivered half the songs on the banjo, which was completely new for me.”
The project was set into motion in mid-2012, when Brown met Justin Vernon while both were on tour in Australia. As she recalls, "The initial spark for this quest was when the songs 'Painter's Hands' and 'Rise My Only Rose'—both of which I wrote before I ever made my first album—fell out of a notebook onto the floor in a hotel room and landed next to the copy of Howl by Allen Ginsberg that I'd happened to bring out on the road. Later that night, I met Justin and he told me about his studio, and it just rolled from there. It was a fun track to follow, and one link running through it all was this spark that I caught from re-reading a lot of beat poetry, especially Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and thinking about that feverish hunt for freedom, as a human."
Recording in the comfortable environment of April Base, Pieta was joined by a colorful supporting cast that included co-producer and guitarist Bo Ramsey (also the artist's husband) and members of her touring band, as well as guest vocalists Justin Vernon and Amos Lee (who co-wrote and sings a duet vocal on "Do You Know"), as well as legendary multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield, who provides pedal steel, mandolin and string arrangements on the heart-tugging instrumental "Little Swainson," and Pieta's dad Greg Brown, who adds acoustic guitar on her distinctive reading of Mark Knopfler's "Before Gas and TV. The sessions emphasized inspiration and spontaneity, capturing the soulful interaction of a group of like-minded musicians in a big, warm-sounding room.
"April Base and the players had a lot to do with the way the album sounds and feels," states Brown, who played piano, banjo and various guitars on the session. "I went to check out the studio before we recorded there, and I knew immediately it was the perfect place. I dug the room, and I loved the land there. I was also really comfortable with the engineer, B.J. Burton, who was really creative and open to different ways of doing things. There were a lot of unspoken connections going on, which to me is what a lot of great music is about.
"We recorded live, in just a few days, with everyone in one big room, and what you hear on the recording is the way the music went down as it was recorded," she continues. "Growing up around a lot of musicians and artists, I have always felt most at home among them. And that's how I made this recording—surrounded by friends in an underground midwestern goldmine."
The creative restlessness that drives Paradise Outlaw has been a constant in Pieta Brown's life. Born in Iowa, she lived in at least 17 different residences in multiple states during her youth. Her parents separated when she was two, but she grew up surrounded by artists and musicians, absorbing all manner of bohemian artistic influences. By the age of eight, she was writing poetry and instrumental music on the piano, eventually picking up the guitar and merging the two into songs.
"Songwriting feels like home to me," she asserts. "I love songs because at any given moment they can do any number of things—make me feel better, transport me for a bit, open my mind, open my heart, articulate some wild thing I'm experiencing in a way that talking about it can't. It's a lifeline for me, and luckily it's always hanging around. One lifetime won't be enough for all the realms I want to explore. I’m experimental by nature and an explorer at heart, and that's what keeps me chasing the songs."
With Paradise Outlaw documenting a compelling new chapter of her ongoing musical journey, Pieta Brown continues to seek out and conquer new creative challenges.
As Pieta puts it in the album's dedication, "In the preface to a super cool book of photographs of the Beats called Paradise Outlaws, John Tytell says it well: 'The notion of paradise may be one of our ultimate fictions, but it still motivates action in the world. While the way the Beats saw the world made them outlaws, they also shared... a view of art that was unelitist, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian.' That makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like my songs come from the same beat streets and off-kilter countrysides, and the same worlds where peace, love and freedom will always be worth exploring. So to all my fellow paradise outlaws, thank you for the hopeful illusions, the grit, the grace... and above all, the songs and music that carry me through."