Pieta Brown & Jeffrey Foucault at Cedar Cultural Center

The daughter of two preacher’s kids, Pieta Brown’s early upbringing in Iowa was in a rural outpost with no furnace, running water, or TV. There, she was exposed to traditional and rural folk music through her father, Greg Brown, the now beloved Midwestern folk singer. But Brown’s parents separated when she was very young and by age 8 she moved to Birmingham, Alabama with her single working mother. Pieta spent a very disjointed childhood living in 17 different residences between Iowa, Minnesota, and Alabama. While living with her mother in Alabama, Brown began writing poetry and composing instrumental songs on piano which planted the seeds for both following the family musical tradition and carving her own fiercely independent path.

BLOOD BROTHERS, the much-anticipated follow-up to Jeffrey Foucault’s critically acclaimed 2015 album Salt As Wolves (“Immaculately tailored… Sometimes his songs run right up to the edge of the grandiose and hold still, and that’s when he’s best… Close to perfection” – New York Times; “Pure Songwriter, simple and powerful” – Morning Edition, NPR) is a collection of reveries, interlacing memory with the present tense to examine the indelible connections of love across time and distance. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote that technique is the proof of seriousness, and from the first suspended chord of ‘Dishes’ – a waltzing hymn to the quotidian details of life, which are life itself (‘Do the dishes / With the windows open’) – Foucault deftly cuts the template for the album as a whole, showing his mastery of technique as he unwinds a deeply patient collection of songs at the borderlands of memory and desire.