Minneapolis City Pages Awards Chastity Brown Best Folk Artist!

Bio

She’ll put a spell on you. Sweet as molasses and woodsmoke, clear and burning as summer sun, Chastity Brown casts magic. Her voice brings you to the crossroads with every turn, warms, comforts and challenges you. She is the inheritor of Leadbelly, Nina Simone, Bonnie Raitt and Roberta Flack. She is past, present and future. She is fire, earth, air and water. She’s a natural.

Throw all the genres and hyphenates together you want to describe her – gospel, roots & soul, jazz, blues & country – they are all right, and also not enough. Chastity channels songs that are borne deep in the American bone, the hunger, desperation and confidence that runs through our times. Coming from Tennessee to Minnesota, touring the country, she has had half her own lifetime and million lifetimes gone before to concoct her powerful sound. Ignite it all with love, and the rest is rapture.

Recorded primarily at the venerable Helsinki South studios in Nashville, Chastity returns to a return to Southern warmth with a roster of heavyweight studio musicians backing her up. Among them, bass player Anton Nesbit has credits such as Mavis Staples and BeBe & CeCe Winans to his name and organist Blair Masters has performed with Garth Brooks. Also on Back-Road Highways is guitarist Robert Mulrennan of No Bird Sing, who plays with Chastity in her live band. Chastity pulls from a diverse cross-section of talent for her live shows, playing with percussionist Michael X, keyboardist deVon Gray (Heiruspecs) and bass player Jef Sundquist (Hildur Victoria), resulting in restless, electrifying and completely enveloping performances that never want to stop and linger long after the last note has quieted.

Back-Road Highways is the best yet from Chastity. Opening with the slow, pulsing insistence of “House Been Burnin”, a cry out for our needs, she follows it up with the rocking blues of “When We Get There” and the plaintive, moving roots of “Solely”. Chastity turns it all around and brings out the joys and sorrows of love with the enormous, pleading, “Say It” balanced with the sweetly ecstatic “After You”. Throughout Back-Road Highways, Chastity sings it all out, gives us all a reason to keep on going one more day.

A talent like this doesn’t appear overnight. It takes travel, it takes guts. It takes chance, work and luck. It takes love. Get ready to love Chastity Brown.

BACK-ROAD HIGHWAYS INFORMATION

Produced and Mixed by Paul Buono
Creative and Co-Producer: Chastity Brown
Executive Producer and Co-Producer: Fred Cannon

Recorded at:
Helsinki South – Franklin , TN
Studio 24 – Nashville, TN
Stone Room – Franklin, TN

Mastered by Bill Wolf of Wolf Productions in cooperation with Grammy Award winner Greg Lukens
Additional Engineering – Steve Bishir

All songs written by Chastity Brown (Creative and Dreams Music Network Publishing/Chastity Brown Music
Publishing/BMI)
“House Been Burnin” – co-written with Paul Buono (Creative and Dreams Music Network Publishing/Chastity Brown Music Publishing/Pollen Days Publishing/BMI)

Chastity Brown – vocals/guitars/piano/banjo/harmonica
Robert Mulrennan – electric guitars/ backing vocals on tracks 2,4,5,7,8,9,10,11
Paul Buono – bass/guitars/programming/backing vocals
Blair Masters – B3 organ/piano on tracks 1,2,4,7,9,10,11
Bernard Bell – drums on tracks 2,4,5,7,8,9,11
Anton Nesbitt – bass on tracks 2,4,8
Kyle Whalym – bass on tracks 7,9,11
Julia Johnson- violin track 3

Album design and photographs by Lily Rachles www.lilyrachles.com

Photographs of Chastity Brown by Alexander Zoltai www.alexanderzoltai.com

Press and Reviews

Emotions run the gamut with this record, with questions and longing, hurt and desire, being answered with love and warmth at the end of the journey.

—C Bret Campbell, Middle Tennessee Music

Brown’s voice is rich and butter-smooth, and her songs have a soulful, often melancholic blues-folk sound with accents of jazz, country and even classical touches.

—Susannah Schouweiler in Music, St. Paul

Chastity Brown is an old soul in a young body, with a gut wrenching sound that bridges generations with its originality and combination of diverse rhythms and genres, including blues, folk, country, pop and gospel that twist, turn and meld into something else.

—Generational Soul: Music Musings for Modern Times by JAS

Her music is forged through an intelligent commitment of soul, blues, and roots influences, each discernible in individual tracks, but what gives Brown her strength and elevates her far above her peers is the palpable emotion she invests in her songs and performances. Brown is not just a folk artist, she is a poet, one who pours every ounce of her life and feeling into her music, one who is impossible to ignore. Her past, her struggles, and her wisdom are scattered throughout her storyteller’s songs, folded into lyrics sung in her dark honeyed voice.

—Minneapolis Best Folk Artist – Chastity Brown – Best Of Minneapolis – City Pages

“Back-Road Highways” reviewed in Twin Cities Daily Planet!

“Soulful acoustic artist and Twin Cities icon Chastity Brown, singer-songsmith-guitarist, has everything it takes to go national. Including an incredible new album, Back-Road Highways (C & D Music Network). … With melodic structure bordering on hypnotic. Vocals, beautifully raw-edged, leaning less on power, more on subtlety (make no mistake, Chastity Brown still can sing her way through a brick wall). Back-Road Highways is a career hallmark. The fine fun of “After You,” a rollicking blend of gospel, calypso, and country-western, stays with you long after the song’s been sung. “Solely” haunts, an eerie bluegrass-tinged ballad. “Could’ve Been a Sunday” is a trademark masterstroke. This song captures Chastity Brown’s quintessential attribute, soul-searching grit and grace.”

– Dwight Hobbes, Twin Cities Daily Planet

Chastity featured in the Twin Cities Onion/A.V. Club!

“Attempting to succinctly categorize local songstress Chasity Brown’s boldly style-blurring tunes invariably challenges any music critic, and is likely to leave them either tongue-tied or spouting off invented-on-the-spot subgenre nonsense. (“It’s sort of R&Bluegrass music, kind of an alt-soultry thing going on.”) The simple truth is that pigeonholing Brown’s wide-ranging and joyously eclectic tunes is a fool’s errand, and it sort of misses the point. Recorded in her native Tennessee, Back-Road Highways, Brown’s fourth album, manages to confidently marry the sounds that made both Memphis and Nashville landmark music cities. Even on Brown’s glossiest countrypolitan tunes, her voice aches with raw emotion, while her forays into gospel and blues possess a surprisingly accessible melodic sensibility. The end result is the best of both worlds.”

– Rob Van Alstyne, The Onion

Chastity is featured in this week’s print edition of the City Pages!

“And there are plenty of entry points. The album’s opening track, “House Been Burnin’,” is a sultry, deep, red southern torch of a song, where Brown flaunts her blues influence. “If You Let Me” incorporates a slow-burning electric organ for a heady gospel sound..”

–Natalie Gallagher, City Pages

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