Pieta Brown

On last year's Remember the Sun, Pieta Brown starts with the wrong question. "Peace on earth, where'd you go?" she asks, as if it ever existed anywhere but in peacenik delusions. But it's the wrong question, because Brown couldn't be further from the insipid-café school if she set up shop in a juke-joint on a Mississippi flood plain. With guitarist and paramour Bo Ramsey pouring down blues lightning, Brown lends her buzzed-and-slurred voice to honest-enough-to-get-angry rock and country vignettes of "divorce and pills," "masters of war still sleep[ing] at home in their beds" and the "hopes of people under the gun." Like her father, Iowa folk icon Greg Brown, she's a fierce and perceptive songwriter, with a voice and musical vision to match.