Seth Avett of the celebrated folk-rock North Carolina band The Avett Brothers sat down for a very special Q&A with the legendary Iowa singer-songwriter Greg Brown. Seth recently released Seth Avett Sings Greg Brown, a tribute to the interviewee himself. We’re thrilled to welcome Greg back to The Cedar stage — post-retirement — for a special weekend of sold out shows, December 16th & 17th, 2022.
Enjoy a discussion between the two artists and learn about Greg’s lengthy touring career, parenting, and everything in between.
Greg Brown: Where are you, Seth?
Seth Avett: I am at home [in North Carolina]. It's a beautiful thing, isn’t it [being home]?
Greg Brown: I've gotten pretty used to it. But yeah, I like it. Yeah. I don't know what you would do, if you didn’t.
Seth Avett: How much did you tour when you were touring heavy, Greg?
Greg Brown: When I was the young guy – like around the time I left the Prairie Home, I toured a lot. You know how it is. I have to tour and go around. I did all that, and I would say, at my peak, I would guess I was doing maybe 180-190 shows a year, something like that. And then I just gradually slowed down. By my last few years, I was doing maybe 40 shows a year.
Seth Avett: Yeah, that's a much healthier number, isn’t it? We tried to be pretty purposeful about getting ours to a more reasonable place. Probably for the first 10 years or so it was more towards that first number.
Greg Brown: Yeah, yeah. That's what you got to do, really.
Seth Avett: Yeah, but then during that time, you miss every wedding and funeral and birthday, all that stuff. Was that difficult for you in those earlier years?
Greg Brown: The main thing I remember is by the time I had two young children that was hard. I can still see him standing there when I would come in the door and they're both doing this thing [raises arms up]
Seth Avett: Golden, it's golden. I'm still in that place now.
Greg Brown: It's hard. That was hard for me with the girls but I had to work, right? The one thing I told myself is when I was home I did a lot of things with them. We were always doing stuff when I was home. The most I ever toured would be maybe two-two and a half weeks. I always made sure I'd come home after that. It just got too long after that.
Seth Avett: I know from knowing you and knowing your music I think anyone could deduce that you have a lot of interest that would lend themselves to a person who lives on the homestead. This is someone who has things that you have to be home for, if you're gonna attend to the garden, you can't leave it in someone's hands. Was that part of your changing [touring]? Obviously the kids, but did you also have a yearning to be involved in more of the homestead?
Greg Brown: Definitely. I just wanted to be home more and do all the things you can do when you're at home. I always tried to balance out touring with being home, and that balance changed a lot over the years because I could afford to be home more. I didn't have to go out quite so many times. But I love playing. I love the gigs – the travel and stuff got old after a while. I wanted to make sure I quit when I still was feeling good about going out and playing, when I felt I could still go out and do a reasonable job playing and singing. I didn't want to be somebody up there and people would say, “Greg, you know…?”
Seth Avett: Because they might not say it. They might not tell you.
Greg Brown: Right, well, they might not tell you. Also, the other thing about me is I really liked performing. That was the hardest skill for me to learn, but I had to learn how to perform. I know some musicians that have to perform, even if they don't feel right, they just got to be out there. I wasn't one of those people. I didn't have to be out there lying. I enjoyed it. It was a good job, but I didn't have that thing where I was like, “Oh, I gotta be on stage.”
Seth Avett: You said you had to learn to perform, how did you do it?
Greg Brown: In bars, I went all around the country when I was a kid. At 18, 19 I started out in New York and moved around. Then I quit when I was about 22. I didn't like what I'd seen from the music industry. I came home and stayed. I didn't play at all for about three or four years. Then I gradually started up again, and I just played bars around town, I played bars around the Midwest. It was a good way to learn. When I would play the Mill, the old joint here in town I used to play, you did four sets a night. The first three, you’d have absolutely nobody listening to you at all. It was just a roar in the bar. Then the last set a few people would stick around, you can actually play some songs, but I was very shy. It took me a long time to relax and just play and just, you know, go out there. I didn't even look at the crowd my first two years. There was a bust one night at a bar in Mount Vernon, Iowa. They came in and took a bunch of kids.
Seth Avett: A bust? Meaning like a police bust?
Greg Brown: The cops came in and drug a bunch of people out.
I gradually learned to relax, and I did this great program here called the Touring Arts Team, which was run by the Arts Council. You and I might have talked about that before. The way that thing worked was the Arts Council put together a group of like, eight artists or so, a painter, a dancer, a photographer, a musician, and we went around to tiny Iowa towns. They had to be about 1000 people or less. We taught classes for two days, and anybody could come to them. They were in parks and churches. That really eased me up on performing because I was out there with just all ages, from grandparents to babies. I learned to just relax and sing and play.
Seth Avett: So you stopped playing because you didn't like what you saw in the music business, and then when you came back, it seems to me that over the decades like through Red House Records it seems like you've found a way to sidestep or somehow figure out a way within it. How did you go about doing that when you got back into performing? How did you keep the music business out of your periphery?
Greg Brown: With the music business thing, if you're living in Iowa, they are a long ways away. I started my own label, because I had written a group of songs, and I want to record them. I sent my tape out to a bunch of labels that were around back then. They all said, “Are you touring much?” I said, “Well, no, but the idea is if you put out a record that would help me tour.” It seemed like a catch 22. I went to the bank and got a loan and put out an album called The Iowa Waltz. I managed to sell all the copies I got. That started Red House Records.
Seth Avett: It's funny, I have a copy of The Iowa Waltz on cassette in my drive a ‘92 Ford pickup truck, and it has a cassette player in it. I got the cassette on eBay, and it's still in the plastic. So I'm gonna break that open this Christmas for myself. The other thing I thought about was, when you started getting back into performing it and allowing yourself to relax in it, did the storytelling side of your performance develop at the same time?
Greg Brown: That started out with the Touring Arts Team. The way that thing worked the first night, all of the artists would do their thing, like the painter would display their paintings, the dancer would dance, and I would sing a few of my songs. I got into the habit of telling a story as I went. That's what started me on that. I realized for people, especially in those little towns – that they didn't have a lot of context to just listen to a song. I felt like it would help to tell them a bit about writing the songs. I was going to be trying to help them write a song, which we would do the second night.
Seth Avett: Since you and I last spoke, there's a question I've been dying to ask you. It's come up a couple of times in interviews that I've done about the record I made of your songs. When we were hanging out, we're sitting in your backyard, and you described yourself as someone who has always been good at poking around, right? I took that to mean you're good at letting the day come to you. I admire it for one, Greg. It also makes me wonder, were you always like that and if you were, then how did all these records get made? How was it possible?
Greg Brown: I was always pretty much like that. Even when I was a little boy, I was like that. I would be outside with my friends and my dog most of the time. That's what's making the records. I think I owe Bo Ramsey a lot for making records. The first few records I made, we just would go in the studio and turn on the machine, and I'd run through the song that that'd be it, whatever happened. But Bo was really into making records, so I started working with him. Maybe by my sixth or seventh record, he really got me to slow down, and I really think that it is something that was important. You should pay attention to those people telling you to slow down. That changed things, and we're spending three days making a record which to me was, I couldn't even believe I was doing that. I enjoyed it. I got to where I enjoyed making records. We lucked out by having a very good engineer up in the Twin Cities, a guy named Tom Tucker, who was originally from Iowa who had moved up there and become Prince's main engineer out at Paisley Park. We had a really good studio to work in, we had a really good engineer. Tom won a lot of those awards. I can't think what they're called for the sound quality of the records — AudioFile [Earphones] Awards. Tom got a lot of those awards. After that, the whole thing just seemed to run together for me. I was writing songs, and I was touring a lot. Then maybe once a year, roughly once every year and a half, I'd have a new batch of songs go and make a record in three or four days. That's one thing I really noticed when I quit is people would ask me, “Are you still writing?” I realized that I'm still writing, but not nearly as much, because that whole thing worked together for me.
Seth Avett: Right, you write, then you record, then you tour. Then it starts over again. It all works together. It blows my mind to think of three days as a long time to work on a record. I love that I would love to get that in my own life.
Greg Brown: We did very little overdubbing. We did some of the big keyboard parts or something or somebody would come in at a different time, but mostly we just would go in and record pretty much live. I tried this deal where you are isolated, and you're singing a scratch vocal. I just couldn't do any of that stuff. My vocal performances were always better if I was just singing with the band. I was not a perfectionist of that sort, either. I've wanted the thing to have the feel. That's all I really needed: does it feel good? That was my only real question, and then if there was a bad note, or this or that, it's like, [waves hand].
Seth Avett: I gotta tell you, Greg, I really wrestle with that. It’s inspiring to hear you say that, because it's a concept that I'm aware of. I've experienced it, but I tend to overthink that side of it in terms of perfectionism, and versus just playing the song a few times and picking the best one.
Greg Brown: I don't think that's a bad thing. I think people work in different ways. For some people that strive for technical or emotional perfection it’s just natural. For instance, my wife, Iris, she's like that. I've known singers that would, didn't know how to do a vocal track 30 times and then ended up using the first one. She's not like that, but she is a lot more aware of all that.
Seth Avett: It definitely seems, though, that there is a great benefit to treating a project a little more non-precious, like, in the process. Because that again can be a trap for me sometimes. With my son, I think he's got a streak of that perfectionism, as well. He's seven but he'll be making a drawing, and he'll make the first line, stop, erase it. Since it's him, and it's not me, I'm like, “Come on, just just roll with it. Let it go.” But then when I turned that back on myself, I'm the one, you know, making a mark and then erasing and making a mark and erasing.
Greg Brown: I think they're just different kinds of people. I'm friends with people that the one way I can tell when I'm meeting somebody, is if there's a picture, and it's just a little bit crooked, or anything like that, it's just something a little bit off that I would never notice but they do and they go fix it. That's just the way some people are. I don't think you can fight them anymore than you can fight whatever they’d be the other way.
Seth Avett: It takes all kinds. Speaking of that, relating to the precious and non-precious, and I don't even know if this is answerable. I want to reference in “The Poet Game” – again, there's millions of examples like this and there are many, many examples in your songs – but in “The Poet Game,” there's this line: I walk out at night to take a leak underneath the stars/oh yeah that's the life for me/There's Orion and the Pleiades/and I guess that must be Mars/all as clear as we long to be. The top of that line, I walk out at night to take a leak underneath the stars is a perfect example of a challenge that I have where I can tend to compartmentalize poetic language and conversation. I feel like if I were writing that line, I would have been reluctant to use that line because I felt that it would be too conversational or something. But I love that line, and it's very profound to me, and I just wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about language in songwriting. What has been your approach and your philosophy with what's game to be taken out of your normal life of talking and put into a song, into lyrics?
Greg Brown: I don't feel like I'm very aware of all this, but I would say that I lean towards more conversational speech. I'm trying to think of some of my songs: We traveled Kansas and Missouri spreading the good news. That's something that you might say. I think a lot of my songs are written in that way occasionally. I will try writing in a more formal way. I just wrote a song not too long ago that was inspired at least partly by William Blake. I will go down and gaze upon the ruined fields that lie. Now that's more poetic, but sometimes a song seems to call. “Wash My Eyes” I would say leans more towards a more formal style. Wash my eyes/that I may see yellow return to the Willow Tree/open my ears that I may hear the river running swift. That's more of a poetic thing. I run the gamut because some of my newer songs I wrote before I quit. One of them was called “Closer.” It starts out, People in there sold cars driving across the Golden Gate/Heading home or to the bars/Guess which one they'll get too late/I don't know/I don't care/I don't worry/No wonder where I don't know/I can't see how this whole thing came to be. I was writing goofy, goofy songs like that, where nobody has to feel too worried or scratch your head or anything. It just depends on the song, I guess. From the time when I was a little boy, I always enjoyed poetry and I read a lot of it and admired what poets could do with language.
Seth Avett: The Songs Of Innocence and Experience [album]? That's a really interesting example for me, partially because I had already spent a little time trying to work a Mary Oliver poem into a melody, and then I discovered that record, and I listened to it heavily for a few weeks and had no idea what the source of the lyrics were. Which is interesting, because it's highly poetic, but it made sense to me in your canon of writing.
Greg Brown: You know, my mother was an English teacher, and she'd read those Blake poems to me when I was pretty little. To tell you the truth, that's about the only album of mine I ever worried about. Most of my records, I went in there, gave them the best I could, hoped they were okay, and forgot about it. But with the Blake record, I had the feeling I bit off more than I could chew. I was standing on some pretty high ground, and I was really worried about it. I thought, “I shouldn't have done this.” Then it occurred to me, I wasn’t gonna hurt those songs. I was gonna do zero damage to those songs and the way it turned out. It was not a real popular record, but I got a lot of letters from teachers around the country who had been trying to teach Blake and had a hard time. They said that album really helped them when they put it on. I mean, they're called Songs Of Innocence and Experience, right? Blake apparently improvised new tunes for him all the time. Michael Doucet, who plays fiddle on that record, he's from the band Beausoleil, and he was a Blake scholar before he became a musician. He actually handled some of the Blake manuscripts at the British Museum. He's one that told me, “Oh, yeah, Blake, he played guitar, and he made a tune,” so that made me feel a little bit better about it.
Seth Avett: Well, I have a little bit of experience interpreting a great poet, so I can appreciate the nerves. Luckily, the poet I was covering I felt was pretty friendly – or he tricked me into thinking he was friendly.
There’s a couple of things I really wanted to ask. How does the fact that you're from Iowa come through in the records? Like what characterizes the rural Midwest artistically? Is there something aesthetically that is noticeable, that's observable, if you're from Iowa? Is there something woven through the music in your mind?
Greg Brown: I think there's some Midwestern quality. I've often thought that one thing that makes American music so great, is for a long time, it was very reasonable. We had the country blues, and then the urban blues, and we had cowboy music. We have the old English tradition, and Scottish tradition, and Irish ballads all through the country where you're from changed by America. That, to me, is so powerful. I love the fact that you can listen to Muddy Waters, and you're here in Mississippi. To me, that's a great strength of American music.
When I think about Iowa, I think more of the musical traditions, which are along the southern tier counties in Iowa. That’s all coal mining country. It's not the big, endless fields we have up here [in Iowa City], it's wooded and hilly. They mined coal down there and a lot of the people that moved in there like my grandparents, parents, they came from Virginia and Kentucky and North Carolina. They came across the country, and my grandpa worked on the railroad, ran a sawmill but that culture, whatever you want to call it, that way of living that was being lived down there in southern Iowa. It had a great deal of music in it. I grew up with my mother's folks. We had jam sessions all the time as a little boy and fiddle players, banjo, mandolin. My grandma played the pump organ, and everybody came over to the house and everybody was playing a lot of old tunes from the South or the Southeast and some more Civil War songs my grandma would sing to me. All that music and the style of cooking too. If you get just a little bit farther north and you get into a lot more German, Swedish, the Northern European [heritage] there, and it's a different diet and it's different music. In southern Iowa, I saw a lot of fighting and a lot of drinking and a lot Irish down there, in other words. I grew up surrounded by that music and that life. There's actually a guy who's just passed not long ago, named Art Rosenbaum who lived in Athens, Georgia for many years, but Art used to live up here. It was a great folklore; it's one of our best ones. He was a great painter too, by the way, a really good painter. He taught at the University for years, but they wouldn't give him tenure, because he was a musician. They didn't want a banjo player, I guess. Anyway, Art ended up moving down there and at some point came back to Southern Iowa and brought a film crew with him and a guy had a radio show. They did a lot of recording with that music down there and made a little film about it. It was a real strong vein of music down there in that area. I come right out of that.
Seth Avett: Well, you don't want those banjo players getting tenure, right? I can tell you gotta keep that from happening. On a previous point you made – I was telling a friend the other day who has a friend who has a son named Fulton. I was telling him about Blind Boy Fuller, who was from Durham, which is only a couple hours from here. His real name was Fulton Allen, and it's interesting how a lot of that music is not forgotten, but it's not common knowledge. You know? Even the Mills Brothers, who I'm a huge fan of, they sold 50 million records and people don't know who they are. People younger than 50 don't know who they are.
Greg Brown: Yeah, that's very true. That's the way that all goes.
Seth Avett: There's a bigger lesson than that, I'm sure. Can you speak a little bit about these sold out shows at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis.
Greg Brown: All I know that happened, Seth, is I had at some point a couple months ago come across an old CD that Bo and I made called Live at the Big Top. It was a live CD from our show at the Big Top Chautauqua up in northern Wisconsin. I listened to it, and I thought, “Man, that sounds pretty good. I hadn't heard a recording of me and Bo since God knows when. I thought, “Wow, it sounds pretty good. Maybe we should do a gig or two.” It just was a lark. I'm not doing a whole lot, and I wouldn't mind doing a couple more gigs. So we booked one show in Minneapolis. We booked one here in Iowa City, and that was it. And then the shows sold quick, so now we're doing two nights in Minneapolis and two nights in Iowa City, but that's it. I'm not starting [touring] again or anything.
Seth Avett: Be careful, Greg. Be real careful. Don’t be sending any of these promoters and these venues mixed messages. They're gonna be knocking on your door.
Greg Brown: I thought it would be a very low key thing. I thought we were just doing two gigs in the Midwest, you know?
Seth Avett: I know people are super excited. I'm very excited about it. I was thinking about retirement. It's an interesting thing, because when I've talked to people about you, and I’m making the record that I made – not to keep bringing it back to me – but it has been an introduction for some folks anyway. They asked me about you and about your music. Inevitably it comes up that you're retired and I've realized that people in general don't think of musicians as people that retire.
Greg Brown: A lot of musicians don’t retire.
Seth Avett: Right, that's true. It’s not as regimented as some jobs where it's like, “Okay, after this many years, you get to retire.”
Greg Brown: A lot of musicians don't live long enough to retire.
Seth Avett: That's a really good point. It hadn’t crossed my mind, and that's a little dark, but you're exactly right. I've known some of them. I think it's an interesting place, coming from the creative or the creative arts. What thoughts might you initially have had, if you were talking to somebody who was earlier in their journey, because I feel like when we talk about retirement, we’re more or less, celebrating the evidence that somebody saw it through in a way – like someone really went all the way with it? “You did this for 40 years.” If someone was looking at these upcoming shows, In a way, it's a celebration in a way of the body of work, not just going to a show. So that being the case, what might you say to someone who may be struggling, who is a little earlier in their journey? How do you sustain and make it manageable? To do a lifetime worth of work, especially in the creative world? Because you're saying, you and I have known many that were in the creative world, and they were self destructive. It's almost like those things could go together.
Greg Brown: Something was going on in there. I think retirement is an odd word, I never used it. Unless somebody asked me, and I had to come up with a word. Somebody at the Englert Theatre [in Iowa] called them retirement gigs. Well, I retired three years ago. I really think of retirement as a two way street. You’re playing, you're working, you're doing your work, and to keep doing that your work has to work. You have to be able to go out, you have to be able to get some gigs, you have to be able to stand being on the road, not everybody can. It's a hard life in a lot of ways. When the time comes, and all of a sudden, I'm going to play a club or a theater and it's half full, well, that means it's time to stop. I left that up to people to let me know when to stop going out there. If you're recording and doing all those things and not that much is happening, well, that's a sign that maybe it’s not working. People will quit or be forced to quit, but I had done it for the better part of 50 years. I thought, “You know I really enjoyed that, and I lucked out.” I always felt like I lucked out, because after the age of about 30, I was able to make a living doing what I like to do. I just enjoyed the job. One thing I really liked during the time I was touring, is that I did a lot of benefits. I did a lot of benefits for rivers and for nurses groups, and I really enjoyed that aspect of this work where you can take that and give back to the community. That was important to me to be able to do that. I went until I thought, “Okay, good enough. I think most people know when it's time to hang it up. Not everybody does. I've seen musicians out there playing. It seems to me that maybe it might be time to go home. It's not for me to say, but I think most people will have a feeling about when to quit. Either the crowds say, “Hey, don't bother,” or you yourself will say it.
Seth Avett: I’ve got one last question for you here, Greg. Is there anything – I have a feeling I know what you're gonna say here – but is there anything with these last shows, with these being post retirement shows – is there anything you want out of them or anything you want to do differently than you would before?
Greg Brown: I'm just hoping I can still get up there and go through it. Bo and I have actually been rehearsing with our friend Dave Moore, who's a great harmonica and accordion player. We've actually rehearsed which is a new feeling, because after Bo and I had played for quite a few years, we really didn't have to rehearse anymore. But it's been three years since we've done a show. I just went through and picked out about 30 songs – just intuitively. I threw in a couple of the newer ones I've written —“Laughing River” and a lot of the songs that I enjoy doing. I didn't think about it too hard. I think these songs will work well together, I hope.
Seth Avett: I'm sure they will, and that makes a lot of sense to me, Greg. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for the shows, and yeah, don't forget to have fun.
Greg Brown: Oh, yeah, we will. We will do that. Thanks again for recording those songs, man. It's really just a beautiful record, and I was extremely impressed with you and musicianship, and you're a good graphic artist.
Seth Avett: Thank you for saying that. Greg. I really appreciate you saying that. It was an honor. It was an honor to study the songs, and it was a real pleasure to share them and having you give me the stamp of approval. That means a lot to me.
Greg Brown: Well, that's great. I hope I get to see you again before too long, Seth.
Seth Avett: We've got to figure it out. We need to go fishing. I need that fishing lesson, then we'll pick up some guitars too.