An evening of great songs and great voices from two highly literate women with a knack for melody and metaphor.
Haley Bonar writes beautiful music. It is passionate, intimate and urgent. It is clear that she takes great care and pride in the precision and accuracy of her songwriting. She lets you in to her intimate world of slow dances and low lighting. Growing up in Rapid City, S.D., Bonar cut her teeth playing open mic nights and local bars at just 15-years-old. She recorded her first album Haley Bryn Bonar in 2001 before moving to Duluth, Minn. to attend college. While there, Duluth native Alan Sparhawk (of Low fame) heard her at a show and promptly added her to his U.S. tours and released The Size of Planets on his indie label, Chairkicker's Union. She left school and eventually moved to Minneapolis to continue pursuing her career in music. Bonar's latest album, Lure the Fox, was recorded in Cannon Falls, Minn. at the famed Pachyderm Studio (Nirvana, PJ Harvey) in August of 2005 with drummer Dave King (Happy Apple/The Bad Plus), Chris Morrissey (Mason Jennings) on bass and vocals, and a special appearance by Alan Sparhawk (Low). This album has won Haley a slew of richly deserved awards and honors, and airtime across the country:
Won Best American Roots Artist and Lure the Fox won Best American Roots Recording in the 2006 Minnesota Music Awards and nominated for best female vocalist.
"Best Albums of 2006" Star Tribune, City Pages, Pulse, The Onion (12.06)
One of City Pages' "Artists of the Year" - City Pages (12.06)
Best Song of 2006 ("Us") - Pulse of the Twin Cities (12.06)
SPIN "Artist of the Day" (11.30.06)
Voted one of the "Top Ten Best Albums of 2006 So Far" by the Star Tribune and Pulse (6.06)
Haley has a new album due out in March 2008, making this show of especial interest as a potential preview of some of the new material, as well as an opportunity for Haley to stretch out on some old favorites with a bunch of her musical friends.
Pieta Brown's own blend of folk, rock, country and blues has garnered numerous comparisons to musical forbears such as Rickie Lee Jones, Bobbie Gentry, and Bob Dylan. Lyrically and musically poetic, Brown's deceptive simplicity and seductive purity combine to create songs that meet somewhere between the Carter Family and Tom Waits. Pieta's is a voice that demands attention without rattling the cage - soft, seductive, bearing the flickering, genteel ghost of a Southern drawl. You lean into it to get closer, to catch the drift, and quickly discover that this aural voice functions as something of a stealth vehicle for a substantial writer’s voice that’s lean, elegant and - above all - utterly devoid of pretense.
The daughter of two preacher's kids, Pieta spent her childhood in Iowa and Alabama amidst a bohemian and musical family. In her bare-bones Iowa upbringing Pieta was exposed to traditional and rural folk music through her folk-singer father, Greg Brown. Later, while growing up in the deep south of Birmingham, Alabama, Pieta drew on and expanded these musical influences and began writing poetry and composing songs for piano. While still in her early 20s, Pieta Brown picked up a May Bell arch top guitar, released her eponymous first album and hasn’t looked back.
On the sublime ‘Remember the Sun’ (One Little Indian Records, 2007), Pieta Brown continues to ride the upward arc begun with her eponymous debut in 2002 and subsequently extended by 2005’s critically acclaimed ‘In the Cool’. Ambitious, elegantly mapped-out and artfully realized, ‘Remember the Sun’ is yet another high-water mark in Pieta Brown’s mercurial, fascinating career, but fine as it is, don’t look for her to fall into cruise control anytime soon.
”It feels like I figured out how to make a real record,” she says with some sense of wonder, “and so now I have some inner place to operate from. Making a record is always some kind of chase...but maybe I got a little closer?”
Pieta will be performing tonight with long-time collaborator, producer and slide guitarist Bo Ramsey.
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