Brett Dennen 'Brett Dennen' album

Brett Dennen’s songs seem to float on a cloud of unfettered joy. His music cocoons the listener in warmth, parlaying a vulnerability and almost youthful innocence contrasting startlingly with a songwriting maturity rarely found on a debut album. Dennen boasts a natural voice and an often funky guitar style that draws as equally from rhythmic world music as it does from more melodic Western genres.

To categorize Dennen’s music would be doing it a vast disservice: he’s an extraordinarily gifted singer-songwriter, a folk musician, and his music often crosses over into jam territory. But he is none of these specifically, although all could be used to describe elements of his music. Dennen may be set to initiate an entirely new genre category with his self-titled album, which, after an initial independent release through the Southern California-based Three Angels and a Saint label, will now see national distribution this summer via FLAGSHIP Recordings and Fontana Distribution.

Perhaps the most influential thing in shaping Dennen’s artistic vision and facility was his home schooling. His mother taught him at home into his teens, and he said from this he learned at a very young age to be comfortable with art and creating. “My mom helped me to not feel that art was something I had to buy or something I had to learn how to do or something that was hard to learn,” Dennen recalls. “When I went into public school, I found that most kids were extremely separated from art and music. I was never told I couldn’t do something.” The Oakdale, California native picked up the guitar at the age of 12 and a round of lessons left him mostly frustrated. “I never did well in that situation. I always did better when I was self-taught and didn’t have to imitate a teacher. It got to a point where I was getting nervous before lessons and it wasn’t fun.” As soon as he quit lessons, the ease and enjoyment returned to the music and he continued to teach himself the instrument. “I consider myself to be more of an ear musician than a musician that is trained in the traditional sense.”

He spent summers growing up attending and then working at summer camp, and he credits the time spent playing and writing songs around a camp fire as very being important to his musical development. “I think something I try to do in my music is to hold that feeling and that space of being outside near a camp fire – that is something that is very magical to me – and I think that is probably the reason I chose to play the acoustic guitar and write acoustic-based songs.” After college, he met his manager-to-be, Leslie Merical, at a friend’s house in Santa Cruz, CA and after hearing some of his songs, she prompted him to come to her studio and record them. Together they recorded the debut album and released it under her Three Angels & A Saint label. “It was all very organic and happened at a really good pace,” he remembers. “It has been building and building since then. She gave me the space to find out who I was as an artist.”

When singer Perla Batalla invited Dennen to take part of her set at a Martin Luther King festival in Ojai, California last year, he created a buzz in town that spread to a long-time music industry local Denzyl Feigelson, who had managed Ladysmith Black Mambazo and served as tour manager on Paul Simon’s “Graceland” tour. He was enthusiastic about Brett and offered to help get his music out to the public, hooking Dennen up with iTunes, and, perhaps most importantly, he put Dennen’s newly pressed album in the hands of influential KCRW DJ Chris Douridas, who started spinning tracks from the album on Valentines Day 2004, and has continued to play them repeatedly. This led to airplay on other KCRW shows,as well as airplay on WXPN’s World Café. Says Douridas about Dennen’s disc: “He's the unsigned artist of the year. Rarely does music come along so unadorned, so pure in spirit, and so eloquently written. ‘Desert Sunrise’ generated more phone calls than anything I've played all year.”

Dennen’s continues to gain a name for himself with plenty of touring, his 6’5” stature and shock of red hair giving him a larger-than-life appearance, and his baby face lending him an innocence and vulnerability that also comes across in his music. Audiences from CA to NY get “it” and respond passionately. “I used to go up on stage and just be completely vulnerable,” he says. “They could feel the open-heartedness and could take something away from it. But I think it doesn’t work if you give your heart away too much, so I don’t do that anymore. I’m vulnerable, sure, and I put my heart out in front of the audience, but I just open it up for them. I tap into the joy of performing so it’s reciprocal immediately.” This interaction seems to feed the audience, and leave something good behind for Brett.

He’s influenced heavily by the music he learned to play his guitar to: Bob Marley (“for his melodies”), Bob Dylan (“I love his imagery lyrically and the timelessness of his songs”), and perhaps most importantly, Paul Simon (“my biggest musical inspiration”), and you can hear nuances of some of his other favorites, a la Joni Mitchell’s often-percussive guitar playing, which he co-opted and turned into his own unique style. Even though he uses the terms himself, calling his music “folk nouveau,” or “world folk,” can be a bit of a misnomer, because, as Dennen readily admits, “My music is in the folk category in the sense that it is down-home, acoustic music with a positive message, but it’s not folk per se. My music is music with a tradition and music with an acoustic sense. I say folk in the way that Ben Harper could be considered folk.”

In addition to being a gifted musician, songwriter and performer onstage andon disc, Dennen also funnels his artistic muse through an entirely different medium: pastels and watercolor painting. The cover of his debut album features his artwork, and he has shown and sold his paintings in California galleries.

As an artist who hopes to eventually be able to make a difference in a social activist sense, Dennen is well on his way through his involvement in the Mosaic Project (www.mosaicproject.org), of which he was one of the founders. The project is an outdoor school in California that is held twice each year and draws fifth grade students from three different schools in three different income areas to come together in a forum for peace education. Dennen serves as a music program director with the Mosaic Project, for which he has developed a curriculum and has written a number of songs which he teaches to the students. “Students come and learn how to build peaceful communities and how to resolve conflicts in a non-violent way. They learn about stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, bullying, teasing, empathizing.” A CD of the songs from the program has brought additional attention and needed money to the non-profit program. “I’m very pleased to be a part of it,” says Dennen. “It’s something I’ll always have and always come back to.”

Dennen feels audiences and fans seem to appreciate his authenticity and his honesty as a performer. “I feel like I try to be real, I try to be who I am naturally,” he comments. “In writing songs, I go through a process where I write like somebody else and then have to throw it out and it do it my own way. People always say they don’t get to hear this kind of music anywhere else. I’m not trying to sound like everything else on the radio, and I’m putting something out there that is very positive.”

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