Brennen Leigh’s ‘Prairie’ home companion
“Don’t you know I’m from here? Though I’ve been gone for a while,” Brennen Leigh asks on the kickoff track of her album “Prairie Love Letter.”
The “here” is Moorhead, Minn., a town briefly referenced in “The Big Lebowski” and the place where Dairy Queen’s Dilly Bar, soft-serve ice cream coated with chocolate, was dreamed up in 1955. Moorhead is on the line between western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. It has a population of roughly 44,000 and a total area of roughly 20 square miles.
“Prairie Love Letter” was produced by Robbie Fulks, who beautifully captured Leigh’s delicate, detailed stories. Leigh, who spent several years living in Austin, knows it’s a world that might be unfamiliar to many people. But she hopes the feelings of home, family and longing are universal.
“I spent so much time in Texas, where people are very Texas-centric. I learned not to introduce a song in certain crowds and say, ‘This is a song about North Dakota’ because people would tune out. It was like saying, ‘This is a song about Jupiter, where I’m from,’ ” Leigh says. “But I’ve learned that there’s still something in there about the homesickness that people grab onto, even if they’ve never been anywhere flat.”
Leigh lives in Nashville now and talked about creating a concept album and releasing it during a very strange time.
Q: Your last solo album, “The Box,” was released in 2010. What took so long?
A: I don’t know what caused me to languish as long as I did. But I’m not gonna do it again. Honestly, I was probably selfsabotaging a little bit. I think I was being a little bit of a perfectionist. I did have a few false starts in Austin. I talked to Robbie Fulks about it, and he was all game to produce, and that was the best decision. I was originally looking for some label support, and I talked to a few, but I just ended up deciding to do it myself. I kinda just didn’t wanna let anyone have it. Q: Did you question releasing it in the middle of a pan
demic?
A: I had a few friends say, “I don’t think you should release it until after the pandemic.” But we don’t know when that’s gonna be, and others were like, “People need music.” I had this fear in the back of my mind that, “What if I put it out and the same day, there’s some huge news story?” Every couple of weeks, it’s like, “Oh, (expletive), did you hear?” This thing happened or some traumatizing national event happened. That’s a selfish way to look at it, but it’s one of the things I was risking. The election cycle, and just everything in the news, has made it so hard to put art out there and have people actually notice it. But I think it’s landing in the right places.
Q: So many songs — “Don’t You Know I’m From Here,” “The North Dakota Cowboy” — paint really vivid pictures. What comes to mind when you think of home?
A: My folks live in the house they’ve had since I was a kid. It faces a big, open field. Where I’m from is this little area of Minnesota and eastern North Dakota with second-, thirdgeneration Scandinavians, and they have a very unique culture that I didn’t quite respect until I had been gone for a while. You don’t realize it’s not commonplace to have certain Norwegian foods and things like that. It was all swimming around in my head, and I decided to just write as much as I could about it, this colorful culture that a lot of people don’t even know about.
Q: What was important for you to get across to listeners?
A: One of the things I tried to tap into was that romance I had when I was young. I remember standing out on the prairie and it feeling so magical when I was a kid. I was a nostalgic, sentimental, weird kid. I would go out in the woods and pick echinacea and buttercups. And that wind, the feeling of the wind that was always there. I feel like part of me’s still there. I remember feeling like I was such an eccentric. I didn’t want it to all be rosy. I left because I felt that it wasn’t the place for me, and I’ve missed it all the time. But I go back, and there are still things about the culture that irritate me to death.
Q: “Billy & Beau” is a tale of unrequited gay love in the Midwest. Where did that song come from?
A: I was a little afraid to release it, to be honest. You know how people are. I wrote that with my friend Melissa Carper. She’s a wonderful writer, and she writes on that topic of being gay a lot. We both put pieces of our lives into that, things that happened to us and around us. You have these three friends, and they’re all confused and rural. They’re not on the pep squad. They’re just awkward teenagers. I wanted people to see them in their innocence. It’s just like any falling-in-love story to me. That’s what country music is, it’s stories about real people, and that includes everyone.
Q: It’s a strange time, as we’ve said, to be releasing music. What are your hopes for “Prairie Love Letter?”
A: I just want more people to hear it and identify with it. I had hoped it would bring me home a little more because that part of the country isn’t written about very much. Not in a way that’s flattering, necessarily, or true. It feels really great to release it. I feel like I’ve put out a proper representation of where I am artistically.”