Logo
ISSUE #35.30 • MUSIC •

Rachel Taylor Brown Sunday, June 7


She finds inspiration where she can: the Catholic Church and comic books.

Share: | Permalink
Email | Print | Rate It! | 0 comments
Recently in "Music"

November 18th, 2009
Clublist Spotlight • A Better ’Stache0 comments

November 18th, 2009
CD Reviews: MarchFourth Marching Band, Curious Hands0 comments

November 18th, 2009
Meth Teeth Sunday, Nov. 22 | Making the best of this bummer called life.0 comments

November 18th, 2009
Primer: Girls0 comments

November 18th, 2009
Sparkle And Fade | The rise and fall of Everclear and The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.0 comments

November 11th, 2009
CD Review: The Dimes | The King Can Drink the Harbor Dry (Pet Marmoset Records)2 comments

November 11th, 2009
Finn Riggins, Friday, Nov. 13 | Finn Riggins ditched the big yellow bus, but it’s not about to ditch its home state of Idaho.0 comments

November 11th, 2009
Kelly Blair Bauman Monday, Nov. 16 | Kelly Blair Bauman sees Portland burning, and he’s got the midlife-crisis folk to soundtrack the destruction.0 comments

November 11th, 2009
Primer: Saul Williams0 comments

November 11th, 2009
Living The Dream | Portland’s Dirtnap Records just stumbled into its 10th year.2 comments


BY CASEY JARMAN | cjarman at wweek dot com

[June 3rd, 2009]

[FREE-SPIRIT POP] Rachel Taylor Brown has gotten used to people calling her music “weird.” It doesn’t really bother her anymore, even if she disagrees. “It doesn’t sound that weird to me,” she says from a booth at Dots Cafe, a favorite haunt near her home in Southeast Portland. “I think a lot of it is just plain listenable.”

And she’s right: Brown’s discography is packed with gems, from the otherworldly ballads of 2006’s Ormolu to the key-changing choral pop of her 2001 solo debut, Do Not Stare. But the discs themselves are so eclectic and unpredictable that describing Brown’s catalog demands another word. Weird, it turns out, is an easy one.

Of course, the songwriter has never done things by the book. Her roots as a musician reach back further than she can remember, to a childhood as the sixth of seven rambunctious kids from Boring. Brown’s siblings picked up instruments to keep themselves entertained, and she would toy with the family piano as a child, pretending to know what she was doing as she fumbled with the keys. Piano lessons came at age 6, but she hated those, and upon entering the University of Oregon School of Music, she was one of the few students in her class who couldn’t read sheet music.

Things would eventually work out for Brown, who married her college sweetheart, then found work with Northwest classical choirs after moving to Portland in 1990. But it took a nervous breakdown in the mid-’90s, combined with encouragement from friends, to get her publicly performing the original music she’d kept quiet for years.

Brown’s first two albums, Do Not Stare and 2005’s Jonah Days, balance the songwriter’s own aesthetic—generally an adventurous and dissonant style of balladry—with her various bandmates’ more pop-oriented leanings. But 2006’s Ormolu takes her in an entirely different direction: Brown plays aching, stripped-down piano songs reminiscent of Randy Newman and Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys. It’s haunting and gorgeous material for which Brown gives a lot of credit to producer Jeff Stuart Saltzman, with whom she has worked on her last three albums. “Jeff was the first person who really only let me be myself,” she says. “I had a great experience working on my first two CDs, but I felt like whenever one of my weirder or more dissonant ideas would come up, I’d have to fight for them.”













icon Story continues below

advertisement

advertisement

Brown’s latest full-length, Susan Storm’s Ugly Sister and Other Saints and Superheroes, is one of her weirder ideas. But the loose concept album’s songs are engaging both musically and thematically, from a Nine Inch Nails-sounding fetishization of St. Fina’s self-inflicted misery to an operatic and surprisingly sympathetic look at Galactus, the world-eating giant from the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer comics. “It just kind of tickled me, Galactus having a midlife crisis and wanting a son,” she laughs. Revealingly, that was her approach to the entire album—she just thought saints and superheroes were fun to write about. It turns out when Brown, who says she doesn’t actually listen to much music, follows her own muse wholeheartedly, the resulting material is more than just listenable, it’s fascinating. And yeah, maybe a little weird, too.

SEE IT: Rachel Taylor Brown plays Mississippi Studios on Sunday, June 7, with Ages and Leigh Marble. 8 pm. $12. 21+.

 

Rate This Story
5 average/8 votes

 
read all 0 comments | add your comment
 

RECENT COMMENTS ON “Rachel Taylor Brown Sunday, June 7”

 
 
 





Recently in Willamette Week
December 31st 1969Washington State | The Canada of Oregon has it all—a Stonehenge replica, a longboarder's concrete wet dream and dark, damp underground lava caves. Vive les rocks.
December 31st 1969Oregon's Outer Edges | Crater Lake. Hell's Canyon. Wallowa and Steens mountain ranges. Hell, yeah.
December 31st 1969Central Oregon/High Desert | No rain, plenty of snow, obsidian flows and great local beer. The folks from the real eastside know how to unbend outside.
December 31st 1969Great Cascades/Columbia Gorge | With plenty of room to roam—and hot springs for your weary feet—it's the place to ramble and relax for the weekend.
December 31st 1969Willamette Valley | Monks, tracks, tubing and wine make the fertile strip a virile place to play.
December 31st 1969Stumptown | Tons of public parks, an extinct volcano and nude beach volleyball to keep you jolly. Get out and collect those merit badges, without leaving the city.
December 31st 1969The Coast | The beaches are public. You own them. Go play—hike in the old-growth forests.
December 31st 1969Cycle Tour 101: Your on-bike guide to Highway 101 | To ride the greatest bike route in Oregon, you need to get out of Portland.
December 31st 1969Doggin' It | What happens when a Portland running club jogs with pooches from the pound?
December 31st 1969Over the Edge | Sam Drevo will paddle yr ass.