Greg Brown, rambles over to the Lobo Theater – Sat, Feb 27 | :: albuquerqueARTS :: Albuquerque's monthly magazine of the arts

Greg Brown, rambles over to the Lobo Theater – Sat, Feb 27

Posted by E Christina Herr in Music on February 5, 2010

By E Christina Herr

Greg Brown, photo by Sandra Dyas

In Dream City, Grammy nominated singer-songwriter, Greg Brown’s most recent cd release, a retrospective collection of songs travel his internal landscape from beginning to end and back again.

Wandering from subterranean room to room, taking quick furtive glances into broken mirrors, wondering which reflection is true. Perhaps they all are.

“I’m living in dream city, lost in dreams of you, I’m living in dream city, dreaming is all I do, they’re gonna cut off my water, unplug my telephone, if I don’t stop my dreaming I will be out on the street alone,” moans Brown.

He voice veers around tight corners as if the wheels are about to come off. Vocal tones of quiet tenderness, desperate to get where he’s going with hard questions to ask and promises to keep. Rounding up to gospel shout outs learned in the church of his Holy Roller preacher father, he sings and he means it. Musical influences range from old timey tunes with banjo and harmonica to hard drivin’ country blues, alt country and rock and roll – full of tremolo electric guitar and pumping soulful beats.

Brown is an old school romantic, a man who reads books and feels responsible for singing the world into a better place. “Being a songwriter is like being a painter, you have your light colors and your dark colors and you do with them what you can. I think the world in terms of governments, politics, the level of confusion and violence is very dark now but the world is very bright in terms of people who love each other and this life and this world and music is a healing thing,” muses Brown.

Greg Brown photo by Sandra Dyas

Seeing the light reflecting off the sparkling dirt on his windshield, driving to yet another town and another gig. “I am very used to the coming & going by now… it keeps things interesting. I have come & gone from New Mexico many times, my mother & sister live in Silver City, my father lived for many years in Taos,” says Greg.

Born July 2, 1949, he grew up in Iowa in a house filled with banjos, guitars and handmade music. Leaving his hometown at 18 to he carried songs and guitars to the big American cities. Following the folksinger tradition of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, doing time in the hootenannies and coffee houses of New York, before heading west to Los Angeles and moving on to Las Vegas, as a ghostwriter for Buck Ram, founder of the Platters. In 1983 Garrison Keillor, hired Greg as a weekly guest for his Prairie Home Companion public-radio show transforming him from a struggling artist into a national figure.

He now lives back in Iowa, with his, wife, Iris Dement , a singer-songwriter in her own right, and his children. An internet connection subject to the whims of the fierce mid-west winter weather.

Greg’s songs have been performed by Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, Shawn Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter to name a few.

Brown’s latest album, Dream City: Essential Recordings, 1997-2006, collects some of Greg’s most-loved songs as well as previously unreleased songs and live tracks.