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He sees his work as a producer as getting out the way. “I try to be invisible and objective, I bring a point of view, but I’m con- cerned about ego and try to get out of its way. If I’m trying to help them get out of their own way, sometimes the best advice is play badly! Then maybe we can produce something that objectively has a reason to exist.”
Ultimately he says what he’s really interested in is “really strong songwriters with a strong point of view, that are literate. Not as opposed to illiterate, but that are poetic.” Adrian from The Good Ones, he says, is an amazingly good songwriter. “If he was writing in English and grew up in the right place in America, he’d be one of those modest but successful songwriters like Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams or Vic Chestnutt,” (with whom Brennan has worked). “But Adrian’s considered ‘world music’, though it’s roots music! The sec- ond record really, really sounds like late ’70s metropolitan country, the way they play guitar, the way they fingerpick. They’ve never heard that stuff, for me it’s almost nostalgic but it’s not retro.”
Recording The Good Ones was the result of Brennan’s first field trip to Africa, when he went with Delli whom he’d met in LA whilst he was mixing a record and she was studying documentary film-mak- ing at UCLA. Delli was going to Rwanda to film her mother’s reunion with a friend after the 1994 genocide. Delli’s eloquent photo graphs of her work with Brennan feature in his only autobiographical book and his only one about music. How Music Dies (And Lives) is an engaging, panoramic read packed with personal observation and thought-provoking soundbites. He takes a pop at lazy unthinking assumptions, their underlying politics and popular culture, always with humour – and always pointing to brilliant music that happens anyway, if only we could get hear it for all the pap.
H
e gets annoyed by the assumption that if a song’s not in English we can’t ‘get it’, saying that he’s often moved by a song even when he doesn’t understand the words as he’s recording them. “With The Good Ones, when we did the first record it was close to the ’94 genocide, the country was much more unstable, you felt palpa- bly things could go awry at any minute, we were really moved by the songs but didn’t have any idea what they were about, it could have been hate speech! The first song Marilena’s mother translated was the first song we recorded. Called Sarah, it was beyond any- thing we could have imagined, about a woman with Aids aban- doned by her family, friends and lover.”
It’s not surprising to learn that in his work his focus is capturing the emotional truth of the artist in the moment rather than its cul- tural or historical context (though to some extent that’s always pre- sent in the sound). Nor is he hung up on where the song comes from, finding that pre-occupations of this kind have led to false assump- tions being made about the artists he works with. He cites an annoy- ing encounter with a New Zealand ethnomusicologist who refused to believe that The Malawi Mouse Boys had not been playing Lady- smith Black Mambazo on a loop.
Like many musicians I talk to, Brennan believes in the possibility of parallel invention, citing studies of whale songs. He thinks songs might already exist on some level, and perhaps “Some people just have a strong antenna. They catch the songs, there’s that moment…”
Sometimes a person might never be able to pick up another song. “But if just once for three minutes they transform someone’s life, it’s worth it. Great art happens within you. I’ve seen it happen with true musicians and even more with non-musicians given the chance to express themselves. Would they be able to create a body of work, go out and play for 90 minutes? No. I think we should go back to the revue idea. Get 20 people; they all come out and kick ass for ten minutes then leave.”
Brennan is nothing if not prolific. With six new releases and How Music Dies (Or Lives) out this year, he has two more releases coming out next year. For him, music is about freedom. And it means freedom to the artists he works with. It’s probably one of the reasons the women danced him and Delli out of the prison once the record- ings were done. And like them we should all celebrate as Brennan goes about realising his childhood dream and making such a positive difference to the world.
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