Iowa based singer-songwriter Greg Brown enjoyed a long career as a musician, releasing 30-some records and playing countless live shows. Brown softly retired in 2019, but he continues to write the occasional song, to play the occasional show.

Brown’s most recent project is the publication of a book, Ring Around The Moon: A Songbook. (“It was somebody's idea, not mine,” Brown insists.) The autobiographical retrospective contains short essays of recollections and musings, along with a scrapbook’s worth of photos, plus sheet music, lyrics and chords for 40 of Brown’s songs. Following the April 30 release of the book, Brown visited Radio Heartland’s Mike Pengra for a conversation about Brown’s foray into publishing. Listen to the conversation and music using the audio player above, and read a transcript below.

Interview Transcript

Edited for time and clarity.

Mike Pengra: “Worrisome Years” is one of my very favorite Greg Brown songs, but I say that about all Greg Brown songs, because he's one of my favorite artists and every song that I play on Radio Heartland is like, "That's my favorite!" And I'm so lucky to be joined in the studio today by Greg Brown. Greg, welcome to Minnesota Public Radio.

Greg Brown: Thank you very much. It's nice to be back.

Mike Pengra: Good to see you again. So Greg is here because there is a new songbook out, it's called Ring Around The Moon: A Songbook. And it's almost like you wrote an autobiography. But then again, you're a songwriter, and so what's in the book is a lot of songs. The lyrics are there. The chord progressions are there. There's some great notes, some great pictures, some family shots and little stories you wrote. Tell me about the book Ring Around The Moon: A Songbook.

Greg Brown: It was somebody's idea, not mine.

Mike Pengra: Yeah?

Greg Brown: Some years ago, somebody said, "Hey, why don't you do a songbook?" And I thought about that, and it was a slow process; I was not in a hurry. I gradually picked out about 40 songs. Then I looked through, found some old photos. And then my friend, Mei-Ling Shaw, who lives in Iowa City, she was the editor. She put all of it together. She's really great at what she does. So the book wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Mei-Ling. But I kind of enjoyed it after a while.

Mike Pengra: Yeah. You recently retired from the road.

Greg Brown: Whoa, hold back now. I'm 74, and I retired at 70.

Mike Pengra: OK, so no more touring, no more singing.

Greg Brown: You know, after I quit, then the pandemic started. And that year, I did quite a few online benefits, you know, singing and recording poems and things like that.

Mike Pengra: Yeah.

Greg Brown: You know, just maybe a year or so ago, or a little more, I decided I wanted to do just a couple gigs. And so I ended up doing two nights, I think up here.

Mike Pengra: At the Cedar Cultural Center.

Greg Brown: At the Cedar, and then I did two in Iowa City, where I live. And that was it.

Mike Pengra: Yeah. What made you decide to write this book? Put in all together? 

Greg Brown: Well, I had, unfortunately, a couple of times over the years, I had said, "You know, maybe I'll do songbook someday." And so people kept asking me, "Hey, when is this songbook coming out?" So I finally got around to it.

Mike Pengra: So a songbook, not an autobiography?

Greg Brown: Oh, no, not at all. A lot of the pieces I wrote were things from my life. There was a little piece about going to New York and a piece about my grandparents' places in southern Iowa and southern Missouri. Things like that, you know? 

Mike Pengra: Yeah, I mentioned a little earlier that this is not considered an autobiography. But when I look at this book, and when I read the little things you've written about growing up a preacher's kid and writing songs and writing poems, this is very autobiographical. Your songs! 

Greg Brown: Oh, yeah, I think it is. I would agree. Most of the pieces I said that I wrote. And the songs vary, you know? There's some of them that are out of my life and some of them out of other people's lives, too — I hope I'm not the "Poor Backslider." Yeah, the songs are quite a mix of things. But the pieces were mostly little pieces of autobiography, I guess that's what you'd call them.

Mike Pengra: When I think of your songs, to me, are they all autobiographical? They're all true? I mean, you really were in the minor leagues, right?

Greg Brown: Well, they're certainly not all true. But I mean, they're a real mix, the way songwriting worked for me. You know, there were people, like, the "Poor Backslider" is based on somebody I knew. And quite a few of my songs were like that. Some of them, like "Daughters," or the one I wrote for Grandma, "Canned Goods," those were obviously right out of my life.

Mike Pengra: Yeah.

Greg Brown: You know, I learned a good lesson when I was quite young. I had written, maybe when I was 22, I wrote a song called "Ella Mae." It was about my dad's mother. And I never thought about playing it in public because it was about my grandma, and I thought nobody's really gonna relate to this, you know? And then one night I did play it, and well, everybody liked it and said it reminded them of their grandmother. So that was a good lesson; I realized that if you're writing something out of your life, write it as true and well as you can and chances are other people will [like it].

Mike Pengra: I feel like all of your songs I can relate to, even though I don't have the same experiences, but they're so — is it Midwestern or something? You just kind of reach into my memories. 

Greg Brown: You know, I think one thing you try and do when you're a songwriter is to make room for people, so that the song, if you hear a song, you feel like you've got a place for it, you know? You can relate to it. And so I always kind of tried to do that.

Mike Pengra: Yeah. Do you miss it? You must be still writing songs, even though you're not...

Greg Brown: I still do some writing, and once in a while, I write a song. One thing I learned when I quit was that for me, writing and performing, and recording, those were all of a piece. You know, I'd write a song and then I would either record it or take it out and play it. You know, it all kind of worked together. And once I stopped touring, I didn't feel the push anymore so much. Plus, I mean, I was old as the hills by then anyway! Muddy Waters always said you stop writing songs at 55, I think. And that didn't turn out to be true for me, but I think with me, it was mostly just because I'd stopped doing this thing I had done: touring. And around that time, I decided not to record. So yeah, it just kind of eased away.

Mike Pengra: Some friends and I have a saying, and maybe this is from somebody else, but, "You don't stop playing music because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing music."

Greg Brown: That's a good one, too. Yeah, I still play, and I always like to jam.

Mike Pengra: I'm talking with Greg Brown about his new song book. It's called Ring Around The Moon: A Songbook, and it's got pictures of you as a younger man, your family. It's got stories about, as I said, as you talked about moving to New York, about your life. It's very interesting to look at. I love how there's pictures of your actual scribbles on the page of you writing the lyrics and stuff like that.

Greg Brown: Yeah!

Mike Pengra: There's one picture on there, it's a shelf with a whole bunch of notebooks on there. And I've got to think there's got to be a few songs in those notebooks somewhere.

Greg Brown: Oh, yeah. There are. There were. That [photo] was taken down in the barn, which is where Iris [DeMent] and I lived for a while. My grandparents sold — it wasn't a farm, exactly — but we had a bunch of woods down there and built a house. There was an old barn which I fixed up and I used that when I was writing and stuff like that.

Mike Pengra: Yeah, there's pictures of that, I think.

Greg Brown: Yeah, there were a lot of old notebooks down there, yeah. Sometimes, you know, I'd look in one of those old notebooks and find, like, I found a song just looking through a pretty, old notebook, it was called "Tenderhearted Child," and I looked at it and I thought, "Oh, this is pretty good." So I ended up putting that one on the next record. It was probably 15 years old at that point.

Mike Pengra: Did you start writing songs when you were young? 

Greg Brown: I wrote poems from the time I was little tiny. And I think by the time I was 15, I was writing songs. My girlfriend moved away. Maybe I was 14. Anyway, she and her family moved down to Florida. And my heart was broken. And so I started writing a song about it. And about three weeks later, they moved back, and my song wasn't done. I didn't know if I should finish the song because my heart wasn't broken anymore. And I don't remember what I did.

Mike Pengra: It's hard to write a song about heartbreak when your heart isn't broken anymore.

Greg Brown: It is, yeah! But yeah, my mother's family were very musical and there were a lot of jam sessions at their place. My dad's folks are more storytellers, and when they got together, they would tell stories about snakes and things like that down in the Ozarks. But my grandpa played banjo, my grandma played pump organ. Everybody played something, and that was my first experience of playing with people.

Mike Pengra: When did you write "If I Had Known"? And is that a true story?

Greg Brown: Most of it.

Mike Pengra: Did you really catch a five-pound bass?

Greg Brown: No, it was probably about two-and-a-half or three. But you know, when you're a fisherman, the truth is not really a consideration. But yeah, those stories, most of that was true. That would have been written, I think, around the time of Down In There, which probably was maybe in the early '90s. I'm not sure.

Mike Pengra: Greg, thank you for coming in.

Greg Brown: Oh, my pleasure. It's good to see you again. 

Mike Pengra: Good to see you. And I'm happy for your book, Ring Around The Moon: A Songbook. Enjoy the rest of your life, I hope to see you again very soon.

Greg Brown: I'll try! Thank you very much.

External Link

Greg Brown – Ramshackle Press site