By Claire Dietz
Greg Brown is a singer/songwriter hailing from the Hacklebarney section of Iowa, and anyone familiar with the area — or perhaps even with Iowa in general — can tell. In his song “(I Sure Hope the) Tornado (Don’t Come)” he sings about, well, a tornado. “Snaky clouds are boiling in the rambling west/Fist beats through my ribcage/Gonna tear apart my chest/I sure hope the tornado don’t come.”
Brown will be in town to perform at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Englert, 221 E. Washington St.
Though the images evoked might be dramatic, for Brown, lyrics are but one of the factors he considers when writing a song, and they are far from all-consuming.
“I don’t think about it a lot except when I’m doing it, really,” he said in an interview with Kim Ruehl for “The Bluegrass Situation.” “Generally speaking, I write a lot of stuff that doesn’t work out, trying to find my way. Once I hit the groove, sometimes I’ll get quite a few of them over a period of a month or two. Then I just kind of let it go till it comes back again.”
Unlike many artists who rely on the lyrics to give the rest of the song its overall shape, the composition process starts elsewhere for Brown.
“It starts with what I’d call the pulse, or the heartbeat, or whatever it is, of the song,” he said in the interview. “It’s not words. It’s a pulse, really, a groove. I’ll start from that, and oftentimes there’ll be a few snatches of words. They’ll either suggest the melody or vice versa, but it’s really the pulse I hear.”
Yet, he said, it isn’t a rhythm. It’s the life of the songs.
“That’s what I first feel and hear, then I go from there,” he said in the interview. “Once I get the pulse going, though, things fall into place. I don’t use a pen and paper. I’ll just sit there and make a lot of sounds, then it’ll come, the lyrics of the tune. It’s kind of like being a sculptor to me. You’ve got this chunk of rock, and you hack at it till you get down to what you’re trying to get at.”
The song, at the end of the day, is about helping people get through this tough life, Brown said.
“We don’t know where we came from and we don’t know very much, really, about what’s going on,” he said in the interview. “Life is hard, but music and songs have always had that capacity to help people get by in this life. They sure have helped me, and I think they’ve helped a lot of people.”
Brown doesn’t wonder about the “life of the song,” though, or how far it will go. Instead, he sees each piece of music that he creates as its own, autonomous entity, capable of fending for itself once it leaves the confines of his studio.
“Really, with songs, you write something, and you don’t have to play it a whole lot of times to realize it either has something going on in it or it doesn’t,” he said. “As far as what happens to songs on down the line, I just send them out into the world and wish them the best.”
Txgx
MUSIC
Greg Brown
When: Saturday at 8 p.m.
Where: The Englert Theater, 221 E Washington
Admission: $30-33
