In the year when the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Milwaukee Brewers 6-3 in the World Series, on the morning of the U.S.General Elections, Brie was born in Crown Point Indiana to two happy parents, and one mostly happy brother. Six months later, they packed up their belongings and moved to Spain, where Brie spent a happy childhood…traveling through Europe in a blue Volvo with her family.
Returning to the great Midwest in her early adolescence she one day picked up her father’s guitar and built her first song out of four chords and a general frustration of her transient life. As her songs grew in number, though not always in complexity, she moved with her family to Michigan, finished high school and recorded her first record. From there her early twenties were spent making music with friends David Vandervelde, and the late great Jay Bennett…who instilled in her the beauty of analogue recording, magical recorded mistakes, and how to properly mic a guitar. She wrote and sang and taped and sang, with help from friends and many road trips in a Volvo with her mother through the Midwest patches of soy bean and corn fields, smoking Spirits and listening to her mom’s alto harmony singing, “a man…a man needs a maid”. Brie drew from Neil Young, Dylan and Fleetwood Mac, played air guitar to Red House Painters and fell asleep to Hope Sandoval’s lullabies. She read theology, argued with everyone, and drank entirely too much wine. At 24 in the spirit of the Pioneers she headed west for a year of education among veteran musicians Joe Kennedy, Evan Slamka, Inara George, Mike Andrews and Benji Hughes…playing among them in the colorful scenery of SilverLake, where she ate Empanadas that tasted like Spain. But at last, like a moth to flame, she returned to the Great Midwest, where there are changing seasons and endless skies, broken down barns and grass eating cows, long hard winters and summer ales on porches with friends. And there she lives now, in a south facing house, making music, baking bread, and a living a happy and generally quiet life.
