Pieta Brown’s Dreamin’ Of Leaves Its Songs Open to the Dark

Pieta Brown has recorded for more than two decades, but her new album Dreamin’ Of does not sound like a settling of accounts. Released on Righteous Babe, the ten-song record was produced by Brown with S. Carey and Mike Lewis and recorded in two remote Midwestern outposts. Its songs address love, loss, war, addiction, nature, and longing, though Brown tends to leave interpretation open rather than pin the material down.

The album’s title track began with an account of a father who lost children to war. That grim starting point sets a serious frame, but Brown’s approach remains atmospheric rather than heavy-handed. She describes the work with little self-congratulation: “I’m just completely, I’m into it. It feels new, and I feel like I just got going.”

Brown’s sense of motion has deep roots. Her childhood moved through Alabama and a long series of homes before she left at 17, and later years took her through Tucson, New York, and Iowa City. Music, she says, has never been a chase; it was “my way of getting through the world.” That feeling runs through Dreamin’ Of, where steady craft, geographic restlessness, and an ear for half-seen emotion converge without demanding resolution.