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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Close to home


Singer-songwriter Greg Brown, known for his laid-back, intimate concerts, comes to the Bing Crosby Theater on Thursday. Photo by Sandy Dyas
 (Photo by Sandy Dyas / The Spokesman-Review)

Greg Brown is difficult to pin down. A singer-songwriter who’s been performing for nearly 30 years, his songs have been covered by Carlos Santana and Joan Baez, and yet he remains a relatively obscure musical figure. His deep, weathered baritone voice has been heard alongside public radio legend Garrison Keillor, as well as college radio legend Ani DiFranco. He has traveled throughout the country, worked in New York and Los Angeles, but chooses to live on his grandparents’ hilly, wooded farmstead in southeast Iowa.

The farm is a place that Brown, who spent much of his childhood moving from town to town, calls home – a theme that appears frequently in his music.

For example, it’s the setting for the song “Canned Goods,” a celebration of the simple pleasures of life in the form of the home-canned vegetables from Grandma’s root cellar:

Ah, she’s got magic in her – you know what I mean

She puts the sun and rain in with her green beans.

“It was a decent life back then,” he recalls.

Another popular Brown song, “Spring Wind,” carries that message forward to the next generation:

Oh, I’ll dance with you when you’re happy, and hold you when you’re sad,

and hope you know how glad I am, just to be your Dad.

Those songs of home and family aren’t just nostalgia, Brown says, they’re a blueprint for a better way of life.

“I do believe in the value of community, of people helping each other out and knowing each other,” he says. “And I do feel that sense of community under pretty major assault.”

While Brown occasionally writes songs that are overtly political (“which usually aren’t very good songs,” he says), he prefers his social commentary to be more subtle. The trials faced by the characters in some of his songs are often allegories for problems faced by our society as a whole.

He is nonchalant about his songwriting, which he describes with metaphors such as a breeze blowing through the window, or a radio playing in his mind.

“I think I just live like anybody else, and once in a while a group of songs comes out of it.”