Love and death and a lying, thieving criminal or two

Enduring connections to family, friends, memory and place shape the groove that growls and whispers in Greg Brown’s songs. The molasses voice, the tempered twists of tale, the gentle humor and that heart—a heart brimming like a slow river after a summer rain—draw you into his circle, to sit a while, to remember.

Brown’s new release, The Evening Call (Red House Records, 2006), is deceptively simple from package to play. There are no credits other than “Produced by” for his longtime co-producer Bo Ramsey. To find out that his youngest daughter and her friend snapped and assembled the sparely arranged photo gallery, I had to ask. And there are no liner notes beyond a single paragraph: “To Bob, I build a fire and stare into it, to be with you …” it begins. And ends, “When we gather round, you are there by the fire. So don’t be so lonesome now. We hold you in the circle. Hunker down. Lean in. -GB” 

Bob is Bob Feldman, the friend with whom Brown launched Red House Records in the early

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80s. Feldman became a legend in his own right, producing some of the finest acoustic recordings in the industry and creating an American roots scene institution before he succumbed to cancer at age 56, a year ago last week. That’s Brown’s age, too (and mine), which is enough to give one pause.

So there’s darkness here, but dumbstruck, dumb-luck love as well, that finds the singer waking up with “joy tears on my face.” Four years into marriage with song maker Iris DeMent, the songwriter is clearly a happy man. “When you start your singing, honey/ the heavens open up with grace.”

When they wed, Brown had just built a home on his maternal grandparents’ old place in Iowa, and DeMent had just bought a home in Kansas City. He told me, “A couple of years ago we adopted a little girl out of Russia who’s school age and we spend a lot of time in Kansas City these days, but I get up to the farm when I can.”

Seeds of rebellion

One of the simple but deeply rooted songs in the new collection is “Mighty Sweet Watermelon,” a warm reminiscence in the way of “Canned Goods,” from Brown’s 1983 collection, One Night.

“Oh, that little watermelon song,” the writer remarks. “I was walking around my farm one day and started singing about the watermelons, just thinking about gardening in that same dirt that grandma and grandpa did. It was just a walk-around song. When I got up to the house, I wrote down the words.”

From watermelon to pumpkin to grandparents to “Sunflowers dancing like my daughters do/ Life gets old, love makes it new/ Come on down and meet us in the garden.”

But the modern world intrudes. In “Cold & Dark & Wet,” Brown speaks of broken love, outsourced jobs like wild geese “that all went flying overseas” and the grim prospects so many post-NAFTA Americans face. “She found a new man on the Internet/ Wham, I’m spam and it’s cold, dark and wet.”

Asked if he’s plugged into the digital world, he answers, “Those things are so ubiquitous these days, cell phones and computers are part of the fabric of our lives now, so that stuff gets in there a little bit.” Allowing that cell phones make a touring musician’s life easier and that guitar-peddling Web sites are dangerous temptations, he reflects, “The good side [of the new technology] is the ease of communication, and I think a lot of people are communicating with each other who never could. The down side seems to be that people are not communicating with the people right in front of them as much as they used to because they’re all on their laptops and cell phones.”

“Treat Each Other Right” is as political a song as Brown has ever recorded. When I asked about its provenance, the otherwise mellow-toned singer erupted.

“I think we have an administration of criminals who should all be in jail. If not before, after Katrina happened, we should have rounded up the whole batch of

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em in prison where they belong. The whole Bush administration is a nightmare. These people are cruel and indifferent and don’t give a s**t about America. They’re liars and thieves. It’s shameful that we let those guys in there.”

And about the song itself, he added, “I have my doubts about political songs sometimes, but in this case, I had to write about it

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cause I think it’s just been a horror show and it ain’t over.”

Brown’s last show at The Grey Eagle was SRO and this week’s return will doubtless be a reprise. He says he may sing an unrecorded political tune, “Oily Boys,” that he performed recently on Mountain Stage, and will likely do some songs from the new collection. But he doesn’t work from set lists.

“It’s rare that one song doesn’t lead into another,” he explains.

And it’s a rare audience that isn’t eager to be led.