Pieta (that's Pee-YEH-tuh...or 'etta with a P') Brown          Mercury 

           Long before launching her musical career, Pieta Brown exhibited a full array of an artist's requisite gifts--an open heart, a poet's ear, a painter's eye, a dreamer's imagination and, perhaps most important of all, a sense of trust in her ability to recognize essential moments amid the relentless deluge of day-to-day experience.

         As a matter of course, those same qualities became hallmarks of Brown's exquisite songbook, a rapidly-expanding collection birthed and burnished over numerous recording sessions and extensive touring--most recently as the opening act on Mark Knopfler's North American tour.

         While weighing options for her next (this here) album--among them, a duo recording with Bo Ramsey or a desert confab with her buddies in Calexico (both swell ideas, btw), Pieta floated some demos past the iconic Dire Straits frontman, whereupon Knopfler strongly urged that she reach out to esteemed studio bassist Glenn Worf.

         At about that same time, she had the dream (vividly recounted in her dedication to Mercury) that ratified the direction of this recording, a vision that beckoned her to the familiar South of her youth--and this is one artist whose receptors are banked wide open to magic, wonder and mysterious ways.

         Mere days after that epiphany, she received an invite from ace drummer Chad Cromwell to record at his Lamplight Studio, a rustic, newly-converted outbuilding nestled in the country between Nashville and Memphis (which is also a pretty fair description of where the balance of Pieta's music has 'lived' all along...).

         "The photo I received of the place was so like the barn in the dream [that] I was rattled," Pieta recalls. "Perfect...I followed the tracks..."

         And so Pieta (a distinctive acoustic guitarist in her own right) and guitarist/co-producer/partner Ramsey hooked up with legendary 'A-list' sessioneers Worf, Cromwell and guitarist Richard Bennett, and--along with engineer Mark Polack--they convened one seriously copacetic combo in the rolling Tennessee countryside to rustle up some Dixie phantoms.

         A second key decision by Brown that would stamp these remarkable sessions was to take advantage of this treasure trove of deep-rooted, chop-laden veteran musicians by recording 'live.'

         In this modern, tech-choked age of AutoTune, mega-track capability, isolation booths and post-session digital 'correction,' live recording (with all hands playing together simultaneously in one room) is rarely even attempted because it demands expert musicianship and quicksilver communication, but the payoff--as evidenced on Mercury--is sounds intertwined in a unified groove that is spontaneous, transparent and thrillingly visceral.

         "It was a radically different experience for me," Pieta recalls. "We were all facing each other in a circle, and the chemistry was there, so the session had this magic, fresh feeling the whole time; it was ultra cool."

         Of the 13 songs herein, "Closing Time" (a slinky, devil-may-care shuffle) and the low-down blues grinder "So Many Miles" were written before Brown's 30-plus shows with Knopfler; Pieta penned the album's lacy, lilting closer "No Words Now" backstage early in the tour right after she got her "first sonic glimpse of the musicianship, music and level of artistry that were all merging in Mark and his band."

         In fact, most of the tunes on Mercury emerged quickly.

         "Glory to Glory," an infectious, in-the-tradition Dust Bowl gospel worthy of Woody Guthrie, magically slipped into her brain-pan while driving solo in California--"I just started singing and the whole thing came out; I played it at a show that night."

         Incredibly, the rest of the beauties arrived much the same way, via what the artist describes as a "magnetic stream."

         "I can barely remember writing them," she admits, "they just landed."

         Rarely has 'automatic writing' been so diverse, inspired and wholly satisfying...

         There's the good-timey country love song "Be With You," the enchanting, atmospheric "Butterfly Blues," the aching ballad "How Much of My Love," the insistent, Bobbie Gentry-meets-Sixties' 'a-go-go' drive of "I'm Gone," the hip-shaking, Lucinda-esque rocker "Blue Rider," and the harrowing breakdown of "Night All Day."

         "I Want It Back" is a stone masterpiece, a center-cut evocation of vintage Southern R&B/soul--complete with Eddie Hinton-worthy guitar--that the likes of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, O.V. Wright or Dusty Springfield would have stood in a long line to record, but Brown absolutely nails it down.

         Of the shimmering, artfully-developed "Mercury" (the disc's first single release), Pieta says, "I knew [the album] was gonna be called that as soon as that song landed. I love that word, and it has to do with a lot of different parts of the songs on the record."

         Indeed, a word whose meanings encompass a blazing, uninhabitable planet, ancient Rome's mythical messenger of the gods, an iconic, chopped-and-channeled hot rod, and a fascinating, beautiful element that's functional in industry and as a temperature gauge, impossibly volatile when uncontained, and deadly when ingested provides a veritable feast for the synapses, and Pieta Brown's were surely ablaze for this luxuriant undertaking.

         Throughout, Pieta's ever-growing command of her diaphanous, pitch-perfect vocal instrument exhibits refined, nuanced phrasing--passionately committed to the message at hand and nestled just deep enough into the band sound to compel the listener to lean into it; the effect is enchanting, hypnotic and reassuring.

          Except for deft accents added by stringed-thing wizard David Mansfield and a writhing, serpentine guitar figure by Knopfler on "So Many Miles," the album was completed in just three whirlwind days.

         In the end, Mercury represents a confluence of Southern myth, mystique and reality, distilled from a combination of life experience, the region's rich, volatile history and indigenous music, poetry and fiction--all of which was poured over five master musicians and gently, lovingly shaken.

         These birds may have flown south to stir up some ghosts, but they came back with a Living Thing...

          --Jim Musser, August 2011  



PRAISE FOR PIETA