Suzie Brown
Biography Suzie Brown
Suzie Brown
Threading the needle between timeless songwriting and modern folk, Suzie Brown reflects on matters of the heart with the intimate, piano-based album Songs Worth Saving. Brown is an expert on such matters, as a longtime songwriter and as an Advanced Heart Failure/Heart Transplant cardiologist in Nashville, TN. The album was written somewhere between her shifts at Vanderbilt Hospital and her responsibilities as a mother of two; the result is an album about knowing yourself and questioning everything else, featuring contributions from pianist Jano Rix (The Wood Brothers, Gabe Dixon) and raw, live-in-the-studio performances from Brown herself.
Songs Worth Saving marks the latest release from an award-winning musician who has earned recognition from the NewSong Music Competition, Independent Music Awards, and International Songwriting Competition, while also appearing in Forbes Magazine, People Magazine, and the long-running television program CBS This Morning. She nods to the folk artists and soul singers who came before her, but Songs Worth Saving is undeniably personal, too, filled with reflections of a woman entering middle age while exploring themes of motherhood, aging, self-discovery, acceptance, and the never-ending pressure to have more and be more.
"Mothers and Daughters" contemplates the timelessness of love through multiple generations. "Rising" is a gospel-inspired protest song written in the wake of George Floyd's murder, and the message it delivers about resilience, resistance, and the promise of social change still resonates today. "I Know You Know" is a fed-up letter to the patriarchy, with Brown demanding"all things I shouldn’t have to ask for" over Jano Rix's double-fisted piano chords. "More" finds Suzie singing about an insatiable world obsessed with excess. The album closes with "Songs Are My Tears," a swooning, soft piano ballad in which Brown sings a love letter to music itself.
Brown and Rix previously collaborated on Almost There, Brown's full band 2014 release. For Songs Worth Saving, Brown wanted to break free from the safety of overdubs and retakes, craving a more stripped down, unadulterated and vulnerable sound. With Rix at the piano and Brown at the microphone, they tracked the 12-song album entirely live over three whirlwind days at The Wood Brothers studio in Nashville, TN. Impromptu background vocals by Crystal Bowersox, Rix, Brook Sutton (who engineered the album), Billy Harvey (who produced Brown's previous two albums) and Patryk Larney (who filmed the making of this album) filled out "More" and "Rising" at the 11th hour on the last day of recording. When the dust settled, they'd created Songs Worth Saving— a boundary-breaking folk album that's every bit as diverse as its creator.
