Many friends called me up after I opened for David Rawlings and Gillian Welch to check in on how the show went.  I stayed pretty silent after that night, unsure why at first, I didn’t check in with anyone.  It took some time for it all to sink in.  I battled with the juxtaposition of “they’re just people like me and you” and “holy shit, these guys are really famous.  I used to cover Gillian’s songs all the time…still do!”  I was shy in their presence in the green room at the Cedar, as they and their band seemed to move and dance as one unit while doing simple tasks such as putting their instruments in their cases and making phone calls back home.  They played an incredible show!  A beautiful mix of David’s songs, Gillian’s songs, songs with the entire band, and songs just as a duo.  I was lost in their performance and paused during “Miss Ohio” or was it when David sang “To Be Young” (a Rawlings/Adams co-write), I closed my eyes and threw my gratitude up and out there into the ether somewhat like a grand prayer- I was a part of this!  How do I even begin to talk about that feeling, that gratitude and that amazement?    To tell my friends that the show went really well would be accurate but lacking in complete truth…the show was astounding!  To be a part of such magic was incredible.  I worry, however, about putting too much weight on this one opportunity.  I am grateful for something much bigger than being a part of that one night…I am grateful that night happened for many and happens all the time in other places besides the Cedar.  I’m grateful that we have the ability to be moved by something so simple and wonderful as good music and good company.

Cedar Cultural Center

Minneapolis, MN

opening for the David Rawlings Machine, including Gillian Welch and members of Old Crow Medicine Show!

More details click here

Tickets are on sale now from the Cedar Ticketline (612-338-2674 ext 2), at Cedar outlets (Electric Fetus, Depth of Field, Irish on Grand, Homestead Pickin’ Parlor), or order online at Ticketweb
$20 advance, $22 day of show

I’ve been talking about this forever but now the time has come!  We leave tomorrow, bright and early, from Milwaukee for the Long Haul Bike Tour.  The talented and adventuresome Peter Mulvey headlines this tour and I’ll be opening all the shows.  showdates and milage are listed below.  Peter has a parlor sized guitar on the back of his bike and I’ve got my banjo in my saddle bag…we’re set.

I’ll be audio-blogging from the trip daily or maybe more than once a day.  No written blogs since I won’t be carrying a laptop.  But I’ll update my site when I can.  I’ll post cell-phone pictures to my Facebook regularly as well. In fact, I’ve already posted some pics already from my training rides and my writing time at the cabin in Sheboygan.

Follow along:

~ audio blog… http://howwastheshow.blogspot.com/

check the side-bar for past blogs

~ facebook for pics… www.facebook.com

~ check out the charity… www.bolderoptions.org

a portion of all my CD sales will be going directly to Bolder Options

~ be in touch, ask questions, send the love… briannalanemusic@gmail.com

THE LONG HAUL BIKE TOUR (w/ mileage to show) ::

Peter Mulvey & Brianna Lane to pedal and perform

joined by three fellow cyclists

Wed, Sept 9:  Wealthy Theatre 1130 Wealthy SE, Grand Rapids, MI =40 miles

8:00 PM ~ $10-$16 ~ 616-459-4788 ~ All Ages

Thu, Sept 10:  The Strutt 773 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI =50 miles

9:00 PM ~ $10 ~ 269-492-7200 ~ 21+

Fri, Sept 11:  The Creole Gallery 1218 Turner St., Lansing, MI =76miles

$12 ~ stpconcerts@gmail.com ~ All Ages

Sat, Sept 12:  The Ark 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor, MI  =65miles

8:00 PM ~ $14 ~ 734-761-1451 ~ All Ages

Tue, Sept 15:  The Ninth Ward/Babeville 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY =305 miles

8:00 PM ~ $8 ~ 888-223-6000 ~ All Ages

Fri, Sept 18:  Nifkin Lounge SUNY-Marshall Hall, Syracuse, NY =152miles

7:00 PM ~ open to SUNY campus community only

Sun, Sept 20:  Caffe Lena 47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs, NY =141miles

7:00 PM ~ $14 mbr/$16ga ~ 800-838-3006 ~ All Ages

Thu, Sept 24:  Lizard Lounge 1667 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA =171miles

8:00 PM ~ $15adv/$18dr ~ 617-547-0759 ~ All Ages

Fri, Sept 25:  Club Passim 47 Palmer St., Cambridge, MA

7:00 & 10:00 PM ~ $18mbr/$20ga ~ 617-492-7679 ~ All Ages

Sat, Sept 26:  Iron Horse Music Hall 20 Center St., Northampton, MA = 101miles

7:00 PM ~ $14adv/$17dr ~ 413-586-8686 ~ All Ages

The Music Box Theater

Minneapolis, MN

doors at 8pm

Equal parts send-off party and fundraiser with Brianna Lane & The Navigator’s Club, and special guests including Javier from HUD, Saturday, August 15 at The Music Box Theatre.

Local singer/songwriter Brianna Lane is about to join Signature Sounds recording artist Peter Mulvey to pedal their bicycles 1,100 miles from Milwaukee, WI to Boston, MA.  The two will be playing a dozen dates at theaters and clubs alike, in an effort to promote health and wellness, and two-wheeled adventures, as well as raise funds for organizations that promote the same.

The Farewell & Bicycle-Tour Benefit Show will give Miss Lane the push she needs to embark on this leg-powdered tour and send her off with big Minneapolis love.  All proceeds go to Bolder Options, a local non-profit organization, which focuses on mentoring youth through running and cycling. For more information, visit www.BriannaLaneMusic.com. To learn more about Bolder Options visit www.BolderOptions.org.

Greg Brown’s voice breaks my heart right in half and soothes me as I look for the glue to paste it back together again. His lyrics send me spinning through memories of love lost and time spent traveling and searching for god knows what. He often sings of simple things…watermelons, preserves, cars, and my homeland, the Midwest…romanticizing daily life with a sense of gratitude and grace. Brown sings fearlessly about women with both gentle love, like that of a Paul Simon song, and gritty lust, think Tom Waits. He doesn’t paint himself to be a good man but I still want to believe that he is decent and simply battered down by loving too much and walking through life with deep desire.

There are so many Greg Brown songs to choose from as he edges on having 30 records to his name. “China” was my introduction to his music at summer camp in 1997, found on a mix tape littered with Ani DiFranco and Dar Williams’ songs. “Hey Baby Hey” has extreme sentimental value to me and I’ve been known to cover that as well as “Lord I Have Made You a Place in My Heart”. I always come back to the lesser known, “Brand New ’64 Dodge” one of his most simple songs which is found on his 1994 release The Poet Game.

“Brand New ’64 Dodge” is a snapshot of a small moment in a boy’s life when everything was so damn simple yet so close to being complicated by his imminent adulthood. Lyrically Brown touches every sense…the visual of the quintessential sixties family in the car together, the new car smell and the smell of autumn leaves, the sounds of the asphalt and the gravel crunch and kids playing football. Brown also lets you in on small and intimate details of each of these character’s lives without bogging the listener down with emotion and without even getting close to telling you how you should or could feel about this family. This boy has a girlfriend, the girlfriend has a retarded brother, his sister gets car sick on occasion, and his father is a stoic man. Greg Brown so cleverly signs… and dad looks like he might smile.

The melody is true to the lyrics and stays so simple, never reaching any epic moment of raw emotion. More melody can be found in Bo Ramsey’s four note guitar riff that is so tastefully placed at the end of each verse, acting as a refrain. There is no chorus, no real story line, and the rhyme scheme is straight forward. The power of this song lies in its abundance of simplicity.

When I fall in love with a song I fall hard and with grand loyalty. I know that I am in love with a song when it makes me pay attention to the way I breathe and forces me to play it over and over again. The sense of nostalgia that “Brand New ’64 Dodge” gives me makes me breathe more easily and I typically smile, just a little bit, upon each listen.

each of these local artists
will cover one song by another
local artist…

Ashleigh Still
Jasper Lepak
Jim Walsh
David Bruise
Mayda Miller
Eliza Blue
Martin Devaney
Brianna Lane
Dan Isreal

Hosted by Brianna Lane & Jim Walsh ]]> http://www.briannalanemusic.com/may-shows/feed/ http://www.briannalanemusic.com/southwest-journal-remember-the-name-brianna-lane/ http://www.briannalanemusic.com/southwest-journal-remember-the-name-brianna-lane/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:58:56 +0000 Brianna Lane http://www.briannalanemusic.com/?p=264 Remember The Name: Brianna Lane
By Jim Walsh
Southwest Journal
March 6, 2009

One of the best things to happen to the Minneapolis music scene this winter was when Brianna Lane (nee Melford) slipped on the ice and broke her foot. As a result, the normally hard-touring folk songstress was forced to the sidelines and into the local clubs. And, although we feel her pain, it’s been a treat to regularly bear witness to her easy charm, gorgeous voice, and songs such as “Porchlight Song,” “Stranger,” and “Birds,” because it’s a good bet that when the snow melts and the cast comes off, the Kingfield-raised product of Annunciation grade school and Holy Angels high school will be outta here.

“I have to tour, I just have to,” says Lane, cuddled up with her crutches on a couch Monday night at the Kitty Cat Klub in Dinkytown, which — from the “Positively Fourth Street” painting on SE 4th St. and 13th Ave., to the Varsity Theater where Bob Dylan’s “Renaldo and Clara” got its premiere, to the enduring specter of Dylan’s old hang the Purple Onion – is haunted by the former Bobby Zimmerman and the road he took out of the Midwest. Refreshingly, the 29-year-old Lane knows very well the wanderlust, if not the Dylan catalog.

“I was always a questioning child,” she says. “My mom was a flight attendant all her life, my dad was a professional musician, and an addict, and a taxi driver, and a factory worker, and a trucker. My [road-restlessness is] probably in the genes.

“I’ve been on the road non-stop since I started. I graduated from college, got a job as a part-time music teacher and said, `This is bull—-. If I’m gonna do this, I have to do it now. I lived in my red truck, crashed on people’s couches for a year, and criss-crossed the country.”

This night, sitting across from Lane on another comfy couch is Chastity Brown, copies of her stunning new CD tucked under her down jacket; while on stage and singing her achy-quirky heart out is Ashleigh Still—two more rising stars to have emerged from the suddenly fertile hotbed of impressive local female singer/songwriters that includes Jaspar Lepak, Aby Wolf, Jen Markey, Suzanne Vallie, Mayda Miller, Eliza Blue, and many more.

Lane, in true folk and anti-folk fashion, is an all-for-one-one-for-all kind of artist: She books her own tours, hauls her own gear, makes her own CDs, and is quick to champion other songwriters (“I just got back from the New Folk Alliance in Memphis and John Elliot was amazing, probably the best thing I saw there”) and help out others in any way she can (as we chat, touring Canadian folk outfit Po’Girl is crashed back at her house – the same house she grew up in with her mother, and which she now shares with her budding musician girlfriend, Heidi Johnson).

“My plan was to stay in Minneapolis the whole winter and whole spring, but I can’t do it. I love it, but I want to see things, experience things, and meet people. Random-ass people. But the messed-up thing about me breaking my leg is that I have gone out more than ever before.”

Such is the lure of live music and a community that nurtures it with open arms and eager ears. And, in Brianna Lane’s case, those ears are rewarded with something that taps deeply into the human condition and all its romance, love, lust, drinking, art, music, and the shared experience of being alive in these hard, soft, and in-between times.

“The reason why I started listening to music more closely is because I needed to know that someone felt the same way as I did,” she says. “I’m such an emotional girl, and I was so depressed, and I go through all my bouts of depression all the time, and so when I was young, I naturally got into chick-centered folk rock. Feeling-based stuff. But then it transferred into this sense of universalism: `We’re all people, and we all feel this [crap].’”