Brianna Lane

I was recently asked to write a piece for State of Mind music magazine’s monthly column entitled “Song in My Head”.  This section comes to readers by various songwriters musing on one of their favorite songs.  I was immediately drawn to “America” by Paul Simon but realized that past month’s writers also loved Paul Simon songs.  Here’s what I ended up with… (slated for print for the June 2009 issue)

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.

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].’”

The girl who wants to be a back up singer joins the guy that wants to be a side-man.  Harbor Collective is my new americana old-time project with Cahalen David Morrison.  We posted all of our spring tour dates on myspace - the Midwest thru Colorado to the Southwest (where I’ve never toured before…so exciting).