Some artists polish their sound until it shines, while others leave the stone alone long enough to discover what is buried inside. Pieta Brown belongs to the latter tribe. Her music has never been much interested in standing beneath a spotlight. It prefers the half-light, where things reveal themselves slowly—a melody becoming a memory, a song continuing to breathe after the record has stopped.
That instinct runs through Dreamin’ Of, Brown’s new ten-song album, recently released on Righteous Babe. Produced by Brown with S. Carey and Mike Lewis and recorded in two remote Midwestern outposts, the record is atmospheric without floating away. Its songs move through love, loss, war, addiction, nature and longing, but Brown doesn’t pin them down with explanations. She lets them hang in the air.
“I’m just completely, I’m into it,” Brown says of where she is now. “It feels new, and I feel like I just got going.” That may be the most revealing thing about an artist more than two decades into a recording career. Brown doesn’t speak as though she has arrived. She speaks as though she has found another trailhead.
She has spent much of her life moving. Her childhood took her through Alabama and a succession of homes—”somewhere between, like, 18 and 21 different apartments and houses” before she left home at 17. Later came Iowa, New York, Tucson and the road. Motion became less a circumstance than a way of life. “Everything was always in motion,” she says. “I was always moving from apartments.”
Eventually Iowa became home base, a place where family, songwriting and an unusual musical lineage converged. Her father, songwriter Greg Brown, was part of that world; Iris DeMent entered it, too. Pieta Brown found herself surrounded by songs while simultaneously feeling their pull beyond the borders of home. “I grew up around so much music,” she says. “It’s kind of, for me, it’s like breathing or something.”
She doesn’t describe music as a career she selected so much as a language she learned before she understood she was speaking it. “It’s not something that I’m chasing,” she says. “It’s just something that seems like my way of getting through the world.”
The road followed. Tucson gave her an early place to begin playing shows. New York City opened another door. She remembers her first gig at Sonny’s in Red Hook and the rush of finding herself surrounded by artists. “Going there, like, into a world and sea of artists everywhere was so energizing, but also just reassuring,” she says.
Iowa, meanwhile, remained her refuge—a “good hideout”, as she puts it. Iowa City, with its university and international literary culture, became a portal, while the surrounding rural landscape gave her something less cosmopolitan and more elemental. Out of those tensions came a musical life that has never stayed politely inside one room.
Dreamin’ Of began with a shock. The title song was sparked by something Brown heard or read about a father who had lost his young children to war and, in the aftermath, was urging people toward peace, kindness and respect. Brown was struck not by rhetoric but by the tenderness of the response. “I was completely floored,” she says. “He was just speaking, and it was so in the moment and earnest and real and so tender-hearted.”
She wrote “Dreamin’ Of” soon afterwards. The song then traveled north. Pieta Brown contacted Mike Lewis, who lives in northern Minnesota, and asked if she could record some new material. The answer sent her twelve hours north in the middle of winter, to Lewis’ basement, where she and her collaborators recorded roughly six songs. Engineer Brett Bullion became an important part of the process.
Then another spark arrived from Sean Carey. Carey sent Brown a production demo of “Dreamin’ Of,” the song that had begun with that distant story of grief and mercy. Months later, Brown was outside listening through headphones when the song opened up again. “That was like the next spark,” she recalls.
The remaining pieces came together at April Base, Justin Vernon’s studio outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Brown had recorded there before, and the two locations shared something important: neither felt like an anonymous production factory. They were places. “Both these kind of like remote, Midwestern, outpost kind of feeling places,” Brown says.
That geography seeped into the record. So did the recording method. Brown, Lewis, and Carey worked largely as a trio, cutting basic tracks live and letting the songs accumulate layers afterwards. Jeremy Ylvisaker became one of the album’s main additional voices; Bo Ramsey appears on several tracks; piano and other textures came in later.
For Brown, the difference was liberating. Most of her albums had been made quickly, live, with only modest overdubbing. This time there was room to linger. The songs could remain unfinished long enough to discover what they wanted to become. “It’s more about the song finding the form,” she says, “rather than, this is exactly how this goes, and here’s the math.”
Then comes the line that could almost serve as the record’s manifesto: “There’s no math in it.” That’s where Dreamin’ Of gets its pull. Pieta Brown calls the sound “hypnotic,” a word she says has followed her music for years. She’s amused by it, but she has also deliberately leaned into it.
Hypnosis, in Brown’s hands, isn’t a trick. It’s attention slowed down. Listen to “Laura,” and the song seems to keep existing after its final note. Brown describes that lingering as one of the qualities she finds most compelling in music. “I’m still thinking about it,” she says. That is the territory of Dreamin’ Of: the afterimage, the residue, the thing that refuses to leave when the song has technically ended.
The album’s title is fitting because Brown is fascinated by dreams themselves. She describes herself as “a crazy sleeper” and a vivid dreamer who remembers fragments others might lose before breakfast. Recently she dreamed of standing in a field of enormous orange-red sunflowers with a city in the distance. Then she saw David Bowie. Then another Bowie. Then another. “There was a bunch of David Bowies in this field of sunflowers,” she says.
It sounds like something Bowie himself might have approved of: surreal, funny, slightly alien and impossible to explain without killing it. Brown sees Bowie as a representative of “counterculture creative sparks”, someone who seemed to have arrived from another atmosphere. “I relate to that feeling,” she says. “I feel like a lot of us artists walking around, we’re like, are we like, do we belong here? Is this really what I’m supposed to be doing? How did I get here?”
That alienation isn’t necessarily a wound. For Brown, it can be a source of electricity. She calls herself “the hypersensitive type,” someone who has learned gradually not to fight that sensitivity but to use it. Childhood solitude helped shape it. So did the itinerant life. The trick now is knowing which flickers deserve attention.
“I’ve learned to really open myself up to it instead of fighting it,” she says. That may explain why Dreamin’ Of feels less like a collection of songs than a handful of stones pulled from the earth. Some are dark and uncut. Some catch the light immediately. Others reveal their facets only after repeated handling. Pieta Brown’s music has always had that quality. Like a diamond, it doesn’t need to announce its value. The pressure is already inside it. The roughness is part of the evidence. Turn the stone over and another surface appears.
There is no glitter for glitter’s sake here, although “Glitter Town”, the album’s closer, provides its own luminous turn. The real shine comes from elsewhere—in the spaces between instruments, in the grain of Brown’s voice, in the strange persistence of a lyric after the listener has stopped trying to decipher it.
Brown’s duet with Amos Lee, “Drinkin’ Side”, carries another kind of radiance. Their voices meet without strain, as if two roads briefly become one. “Something freeing happens when we sing together,” Brown says.
Freedom may be the hidden subject of Dreamin’ Of. Freedom from category. Freedom from certainty. Freedom to let a song remain mysterious instead of forcing it to explain itself. Brown has spent more than 20 years following that freedom, through towns and rooms and studios and friendships, through motherhood and touring and the shifting economics of being an independent musician. She has watched the business change and watched digital culture accelerate beyond the speed at which songs naturally move.
She remains suspicious of the machinery. “I don’t like turning on Instagram and playing my song for 30 seconds,” she says. What she likes is older and harder to quantify: making a song, giving it room, listening to a record from beginning to end. “Songs are kind of constantly young,” she says, “if they’re really happening.” That is Brown’s particular trick. She keeps the songs young without making herself sound young. Experience accumulates, but it doesn’t calcify.
Dreamin’ Of is not a career retrospective disguised as a new album. It is another excavation, another stretch of road. The stone comes out of the earth carrying the pressure that made it. Brown turns it in the light. There are diamonds here, perhaps, but not the showroom kind. These are field stones, river stones, dark gems found where the road bends, and the ground gives way. Their value isn’t announced. It is discovered.
If the album is hypnotic, perhaps that is because Brown has learned an old lesson: don’t tell the listener what to feel. Give the song enough darkness, enough light, enough mystery—and let it work on you. Indeed, Pieta Brown sounds less like someone dreaming of somewhere else than someone who has learned how to stay awake inside the dream.