“Pieta would just nail her vocal takes while she played live in the room with all of us, and I’d say, ‘How are you doing that?!’” “The recording process was eye opening for me because it was so different from the way I’ve worked in the past,” says Carey. The players heard the songs for the first time in the studio, forcing them to rely on their gut instincts and to react to the tunes (and each other) in real time. This time around, though, Brown leaned into the power of human connection and physical presence. A sprawling release featuring remote collaborations with friends and mentors like Calexico, David Lindley, Mason Jennings, and Carrie Rodriguez among others, Postcards explored isolation and distance in the creative process, with songs written alone in hotel rooms around the world and recorded piecemeal like an international game of telephone. That approach stands in stark contrast to the way the Iowa native recorded her last album, 2017’s Postcards. We were all fully present in the moment with these songs, and we recorded each of them in just a few takes.” “You lay all you’ve got on the line, and that’s where a lot of the energy in this album comes from.

“When you’ve got a pile of songs and only a few days and nights in a studio, you go into a hyper-focus,” reflects Brown. Due out this fall on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records, Freeway is Brown’s most experimental collection to date, but it’s also her most confident and direct, an honest accounting of bittersweet endings and hopeful beginnings, of painful loss and traces of liberation in the aftermath, all captured here with a raw spontaneity and fierce self-assurance. Brown cut the album live in just three days with an all-star band that included Carey, bassist Mike Lewis (Bon Iver, Andrew Bird), and guitarist Jeremy Ylvisaker (Andrew Bird, Alpha Consumer), and the resulting recordings reflect the foursome’s seemingly telepathic bond, a deeply organic chemistry fueled by a shared passion for emotional exploration and sonic discovery. Carey, Brown’s lush new album, Freeway, is an utterly mesmerizing collection, a delicate yet forceful reckoning with change that’s marked by the push and pull of unabashed intimacy and a slow-burning intensity. Recorded at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio and co-produced by Bon Iver drummer and acclaimed solo artist S. I’ve been hovering at a crossroads, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.” “The songs mirror so many transitions: in my musical life, in my home life, in my creative life, in my country. “This record marks a major shift for me,” says Pieta Brown. Listen to 'Ask For More' and 'Morning Fire' here

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