BB Spotlight | Colleen Brown
BB Spotlights feature Edmonton individuals that intrigue, inspire, and interest us and will be published throughout the year. Photography by BB Collective. Written by Fiona Dempsey.
Small-town raised singer-songwriter Colleen Brown has had a love and passion for music for many years now. After two years of rediscovering her passion and developing a new perspective, Colleen’s future looks brighter than ever. Returning to Edmonton after a lot of travel, recording her latest album and falling in love with her partner and fellow musician Elijah Abrams, of the comedy duo B&Steve, we were lucky enough to sit down with Colleen to find out more about the “National treasure in the making,” (Edmonton Journal).
The first thing that hit me when Colleen Brown walked into Iconoclast Koffiehuis was her magnetic smile. It was evident from the start that chatting to her for the next thirty minutes was going to be like chatting to a friend you’ve known forever. Armed with fresh cups of coffee we began talking about everything, from where her love of music began, her most recent album, Direction, what she loves most about Edmonton and granola, yes granola. Having grown up with a classical piano and vocal background, Colleen always had a love for music. Yet, it wasn’t until she was a teenager she realized she also had a love of performing, “Performance wise, I actually remember very specifically a moment where I decided it was the thing for me and it was at choir camp as a teenager and there was this huge storm and we were singing the song Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. That moment, something happened to me, something hit me and I felt kind of a spiritual experience, probably my first real spiritual experience and I thought ‘music - this is the shit, this is the stuff’.”
However, writing her own songs didn’t come until later. Having always considered herself a visual artist, Colleen saw writing music as a way to express her creativity on another palette. Nonetheless, her visual artistry still found a way to creep in, “I had one of those pens with lots of different coloured inks on it and I wrote line by line in different coloured ink and the sections were all laid out beautifully.”
Colleen started playing piano at the young age of six and has taken up a few more instruments along the way, from the clarinet in grade seven, to the guitar and bass when she joined The Secretaries, “We had no idea how to play any of our instruments when we first started playing in that band. It also was really intimidating to play instruments around people who were really good. I went to music school [Grant McEwan] and there was all these opportunities to jam out and play new instruments and everything but I was frozen in those situations, I couldn’t do it in front of other people.” That was until she joined The Secretaries, “It was a safe environment with a couple of other women who were pretty novice like me.”
Growing up with a conservatory and classical background in piano and vocals, the idea of discipline in music wasn’t new to Colleen and it wasn’t until she began attending Grant McEwan that Colleen discovered you could be both disciplined and experimental. “Getting to Grant McEwan there still was a lot of discipline but we were also encouraged to do things that were not technically perfect all the time. I was really pushed outside of my classical upbringing and classical technique.” For Colleen it was the people that made her experience at Grant McEwan a great one, “I was forced to be in a band and I realized I liked it, I wanted to do more of it.”
Colleen’s most recent album, Direction, is filled with honest and hauntingly beautiful songs about ones personal growth. Having teamed up with some amazing musicians like Joel Plaskett, Raymond Richards, Frank Fiser and Taylor Kernohan, it was inevitable that the album was going to truly showcase Colleen’s talent. However, the initial recordings of the album came from a place of therapy for Colleen, recording demos in her attic “To get through some stuff and work through some personal things.” Recording the album in the way she did, across multiple locations and with some amazing artists was something truly special to Colleen, “Coming from a place musically where I felt totally empty for a long time, I shouldn’t say musically, as a person I was really lost. Music always kept coming, it’s always been there.”
It wasn’t until Colleen began travelling that the album started coming together, recording her tracks in multiple cities, “I ended up recording in a bunch of different cities because I was travelling or kind of searching as a human for what was next, what my direction was, what I needed to do with myself. It wasn’t planned, I just kept kind of grasping at straws and it kept leading me to places.” One of those places being Los Angeles, something that was not planned, “My parents have a house in Phoenix, Arizona and I was super depressed and I didn’t know what I was doing with my life after the last album. I was in a low place, so I went there over Christmas just to be alone. Then I found out Father John Misty was doing a show in LA and a friend who happened to be working with him got us tickets to the show so I was like ‘Oh, okay I guess I’m going to LA’ and then I just hung out, ran up my credit card bill, met people and that led to going back and recording with Raymond Richards.” Recording in Halifax with her musical idol, Joel Plaskett, was also a strange yet brilliant coincidence. “I had just done a show in Brad Creek in Southern Alberta and I stayed at a hotel in Cochrane and it happened to be the same hotel he was staying at. He had just done a show in Calgary or something like that, so I ran into them at the breakfast buffet and I like tracked him down in the parking lot after which was kind of creepy of me, I know. He actually had heard of me when I introduced myself in the parking lot, it wasn’t a total stalking scenario.”
No matter how much she travels, Colleen always finds her way back to Edmonton, a city she has loved for a long time, “I love the people, its cliché and everybody says it but there’s something about the people here. A lot of the artists I know are not superficial, they’re digging deep musically and lyrically. I really appreciate that, it’s something you don’t see in every city.” It’s not just the people that have Colleen infatuated; it’s also the “dark underbelly” of Edmonton, the cold and sometimes tough environment forcing you to be truly connected with yourself. For the Edmonton music scene there was something Colleen said more than once, “world class.” Naming theatres like the Myer Horowitz and the Winspear as some of her favorites. However, there was one thing that needed to be covered about her shows, the fact she sells her homemade Granola alongside other merchandise. “I like making granola, I like baking, it’s kind of a therapeutic thing for me. I just started doing it because I needed some kind of merchandise to sell, CDs were declining, I was selling fewer and fewer of them and I realized people would come up and talk to me at the table if I had something of that nature. It kind of snow balled, more people came up and talked to me, they wanted to talk about granola, they wanted to talk about food and I think if you can have a conversation with people about something besides music you actually get to know the person a lot better.”
Having interviewed Colleen on the Monday morning after the news broke of the late David Bowie; I was oblivious when I brought up the topic of musical influences. “Well shit,” was the first thing out of Colleen’s mouth, “This morning I woke up and the first thing Elijah said to me was ‘Bowie died’ and for the whole morning I’ve been trying not to cry because I don’t want to be all red eyed and red faced when I get to my photo shoot.” With a quick laugh Colleen began to explain why he meant so much to her, “David Bowie really was one of my first ‘Holy shit I want to be in a Rock & Roll band’ influences. He’s one of those people who’ve stretched the creative limits and today is more proof of that, like an album beyond the grave, thanks a lot David Bowie, hate that guy, no love that guy. Having a bit of a hard time with that one right now.” As for other musical influences, names like Joanie Mitchell, Carol King and The Pretenders were thrown out also. To lighten the mood after reminiscing about the great musician that was David Bowie, the phrase “guilty pleasure” was tossed around. What is Colleen Brown listening to right now that she wouldn’t want you to know about? The answer: Justin Bieber. “Elijah will turn them up as soon as they come on the radio and obviously they’re on the radio constantly and I can’t say I’m not into it”.
Having been in the music industry for a number of years now, Colleen has been given a great amount of advice. The most important piece she has taken away was from a professional bassist in a commercial band that has had huge success, however Colleen remained forever classy not naming the band. The biggest piece of advice he had to give her was simple, “All of that is BS. Don’t get too worked up about people getting excited about you, a standing ovation is cool, it’s great people are into you, and I kind of know this on my own too, but it’s good to be reminded every once in a while that you shouldn’t let others opinion of you affect you.” Colleen’s advice she would pass on is just as simple and just as powerful, “Book gigs and just go and do it.” When asked about the future, Colleen had the same response many of us have, “I can see short term.” With shows booked across Western Canada up until March 12, a new project called Major Love which will be out sometime this year and sees her teaming up with Scenic Route to Alaska and Jesse Murphy of Jesse and the Dandelions, Colleen has a lot going right now, as she is also recording music as a duo alongside her partner Elijah. Colleen perfectly sums up a future of vast possibilities, “March 29 we’ll be in Ontario and we’ll see what happens [next].”
Make sure you visit www.colleenbrownmusic.com to stay up to date on her latest news, listen to her music, and to find out where you can see her next.