Iris Dement with Special Guest Pieta Brown with Pieta Brown

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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

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GENRE

Country / Folk

Iris Dement with Special Guest 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/

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Artist Bio

It was by pure chance that Iris DeMent opened the book of Russian poetry sitting on her piano bench to Anna Akhmatova’s “Like A White Stone.” She’d never heard of the poet before, and didn’t even consider herself much of a poetry buff, but a friend had leant her the anthology and it only seemed polite that she skim it enough to have something interesting to say when she returned it. As she read, though, a curious sensation swept over her.

“I didn’t feel like I was alone anymore,” remembers DeMent. “I felt as if somebody walked in the room and said to me, ‘Set that to music.'”

So she did. The melody just poured out of her almost instantly. She turned the page and it happened again, and again after that, and before she even fully understood it, she was already deep into writing what would become ‘The Trackless Woods,’ an album which sets Akhmatova’s poetry to music for the first time ever.

‘The Trackless Woods,’ DeMent’s sixth studio album, is unlike anything else in her illustrious career. Beginning with her 1992 debut, ‘Infamous Angel,’ which was hailed as “an essential album of the 1990’s” by Rolling Stone, DeMent released a series of stellar records that established her as “one of the finest singer-songwriters in America” according to The Guardian. The music earned her multiple Grammy nominations, as well as the respect of peers like John Prine, Steve Earle, and Emmylou Harris, who all invited her to collaborate. Merle Haggard dubbed her “the best singer I’ve ever heard” and asked her to join his touring band, and David Byrne and Natalie Merchant famously covered her “Let The Mystery Be” as a duet on MTV Unplugged. DeMent returned in 2012 with her most recent album, ‘Sing The Delta,’ which prompted NPR to call her “one of the great voices in contemporary popular music” and The Boston Globe to hail the collection as “a work of rare, unvarnished grace and power.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, DeMent and her husband were raising their adopted Russian daughter in their Iowa City home. When she looked back on her own childhood, though, DeMent sometimes felt like there was some intangible element that hadn’t quite clicked yet.

“Growing up, a lot of what I understood about my parents—and many of the adults in my life that were nurturing me—I understood through music,” explains DeMent, who was born the youngest of 14 children in Arkansas and raised in southern California. “I remember noticing that people seem to be most their real selves when they were in the music. My dad would cry my mom would wave her arms around when they sang church music. So I figured out at some point that there was a breakdown there with my daughter. She was six when we adopted her, and there was a whole culture that had been translated to her in those critical years that I didn’t feel like I could get through to with the tools I had. So always in the back of my mind, I had this sense of wanting to figure out how to link her two worlds, Russian and American.”

Akhmatova’s poetry proved to be that link and more, as it drew DeMent into a remarkable journey through Russian political and artistic history.

“Her whole adult working life was marked by this constant struggle to do her work in the face of the Bolshevik Revolution, World War I, World War II, and Stalin,” DeMent says of Akhmatova. “The estimates are that between 20-80 million people died during those 30 years he was in power. One of her husbands was executed, one died in the gulag, and her son was sent there twice just by virtue of being her son. She often lived in poverty and out of other people’s homes, never owned a place of her own. She wasn’t some elevated star figure exempted from suffering, she was right there in it. All of her poetry came out of that.”

Akhmatova’s struggles weren’t unique for her time in Russia, but her poetry still managed to find beauty in a world of pain and ugliness, which DeMent believes is what makes her so deeply loved by the Russian people.

“I think if you listen to her poems, you can hear all that sorrow and that burden in them,” says DeMent, “but there’s always a lightness, a transcendence somehow, a sense of victory over all that inhumanity that she was living with every day of her life.”

It’s only fitting, then, that the album opens with, “To My Poems,” a short, four-line invocation recorded sparsely and simply with just DeMent’s voice and piano as she sings: “You led me into the trackless woods, / My falling stars, my dark endeavor. / You were bitterness, lies, a bill of goods. / You weren’t a consolation–ever.”

That stark pairing of piano and voice forms the heart and soul of all 18 tracks on the album, which were recorded live in DeMent’s living room under the guidance of producer Richard Bennett and with a small backing band that drifts in and out of the arrangements. The music is firmly rooted in the American South, with timeless melodies that could easily be mistaken for long-forgotten hymnal entries or classic country tunes. “From An Airplane” rollicks with a honky-tonk vibe, while “Not With Deserters” is punctuated by a mournful slide guitar and rich harmonies, and “All Is Sold” ebbs and flows over lush pedal steel. That DeMent can make the work of a 20th century Russian poet sound like Sunday morning on a cotton plantation is a testament to her versatility and depth as an artist.

“I learned from this project that I don’t have just one voice, I have lots of voices, and they’re all connected somehow,” says DeMent. “Something happened on this record because the music wasn’t tied to a place from my past or my family history, but it was linked to my daughter by way of her cultural history. I realized writing these songs that I’m linked in some way to another world, as well, and I can hear it in the music, in the way I sang and the choices I made.”

DeMent is quick to credit Akhmatova (and the translators whose work formed the album’s lyrics, Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin) for the album’s beauty and magic.

“All of the poems, particularly Babette’s translations, just felt like songs to me from the get go,” says DeMent. “The first four or five I did, the melodies came while I was reading them the first time. That still mystifies me. My gut sense is that they were songs, already. I think she wrote them that way, and Babette picked up on that. They flowed like that. I don’t think there’s any getting around that the music was already in the poems.”

There’s no getting around that the music is in DeMent, too. Twenty-three years after her debut, she’s creating some of the most poignant music of her career, bridging two seemingly disparate worlds with every note.

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."