“So I guess its just the show-after-show and city-after-village that I am looking forward to, playing and singing for folks that showed up, and being ever so grateful that they did.” “It’s still a wild idea to me that I would be invited to play in all of these countries,” she said while prepping for the trip. “When we (Devon Gray and I) played on Jools Holland last September, things just blew up for me,” she says, attesting to what Douglas Adams called “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.” More succinctly, that’s the way in which each new big step builds upon the last and sets the next one up.Īt the outset of that tour, Brown told me for an interview on some other blog about the thrill, the disbelief and the overwhelming whirlwindiness, that comes with the realization that countless strangers have grown to love and believe in your music: The time she spent in Europe was a time spent building even more connections, like the one that landed her performing on BBC2 as a musical guest on Jools Holland’s program, Later. Going into her third European tour, Brown noticed her momentum was still picking up, and her audiences were growing as robustly across the pond as they were back home. “That goes the same for the warm welcome I have received in parts of Europe,” she notes. After those songs started getting play, I would look out at an audience and realize that it was more than just my friends coming to shows, that these were actually crowds of folks I had never met.” She had some followup success with the songs “Solely” and “Leroy” as well, and soon she was noticing that things had changed. From there, her name slowly spread to households everywhere. But, in a way, that might seem to run counter to general expectations surrounding independent artists: Although she’s taken a step away from the big business end of things, her audience and renown still continued to grow.īrown first broke into the mainstream, after years of hard work and seemingly endless nights spent playing for any small coffee shop crowd who would have her, when the single “After You” hit heavy rotation on Twin Cities radio station 89.3 the Current. She’s had a lot of time to let that indie aspect to her recent work sink back in, to immerse herself in it. It’s quite humbling to ask fans for financial support like that… and I was freakin’ blown away by the response!” Folks know how much it cost, the hundreds of hours recording, and the emotional ups and downs. “However,” she adds, “with Kickstarter backing, the focus is a shared experience of the artistic process it removes the veil. “The main difference for me,” she says, contrasting Kickstarter and label backing, “is that, with a label, the focus is on the success of a business transaction, which can feel a bit removed from the heart of things, the music.” For that, she would need funding, which she got via a successful Kickstarter campaign. Although some aspects of the new project would evoke her more homespun origins, it would also be the most ambitious endeavor of her career. (Although she put out several early releases on her own, it was the 2012 album Back Road Highways, released on the Creative & Dreams Music Network, that really broadened her place on the map.) Two years after the release of Back Road Highways, Brown announced that she was planning another release on her own. Tags : Ani DiFranco BBC2 crowdfunding Jools Holland Kickstarter labels labor performers songwriters the Current touring working artitsts 1Ĭhastity Brown has been working steadily on a new album for some time now, having taken a reprieve from the world of music labels and the various corporate concerns therein, choosing instead to revisit her indie roots.
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