Bosque Brown’s Baby sounds like home

By Beverly Bryan
Published: March 3rd, 2009 | 11:40pm

Mara Lee Miller chose the name Bosque Brown for her band in homage to the Bosque River near her childhood home in Stephenville, Texas. Pronounced boss-key, it’s a common place name there. “Everything is named after the Bosque, even though it’s a really small river. It’s almost more like a creek,” the singer-songwriter says. Stephenville is small, with a population around 15,000, and is located about an hour and a half from Fort Worth, where Miller lives now. With a touch of boosterism, she adds that Stephenville is “technically, the cowboy capital of the world.”

Millers says that she wanted a name that reminded her of her home and listening to Baby, her second full-length album, it seems she can’t get enough of such reminders. River imagery and the Bosque itself figure into her often very personal lyrics, and Bosque Brown’s haunting, alt-country sound is audibly influenced by this corner of central Texas. If there could be any doubt, her soft accent would lay it to rest.

Songs like the loping, lonesome, “Went Walking,” one of the first songs Miller ever wrote, reveal a powerful tension and ambivalence in her sense of the place. “I hated where I was from at the time, so it’s about always trying to get out of where you’re from. Later on, I started to like where I was from, so later on in the song it’s about wishing you could go back, but it’s still really hard,” she says.

“White Dove,” the swelling first track on the album, follows a similar emotional arc. “It’s about feeling desperate and then deciding you’re not going to feel that way anymore. What usually inspires me to write is when I’m upset, or angry, or emotional, but I always want there to be a sense of hope,” she says.

Like Bosque Brown, Baby is a name Miller chose for its freight of personal meaning. “I felt like the word was significant. When I was typing up the words to the songs to be sent out, I noticed I used the word ‘baby’ a lot — five or six times. It might not mean the same thing in every song, but I used it a lot,” Miller says.

Adding a second layer of meaning, Miller mentions that her sister Gina Milligan, who sings and plays piano in Bosque Brown, had her first child this year. From there, Miller goes on to assign the name a metaphorical meaning. Baby, you see, is Bosque Brown’s firstborn album as a band. Miller’s first album as Bosque Brown, 2005’s Plays Mara Lee Miller, was recorded in Seattle with session players. And Cerro Verde, an EP recorded in 2006, was a solo project. Since then, Bosque Brown has come to include Milligan, Miller’s husband Ryan Miller on pedal steel and bass, Winston Chapman on drums, and Jeremy Buller on vocals, guitar, and other instruments.

The band’s “baby” was more than 15 months in gestation. Miller wrote the songs without arrangements before recording began, so it was the arranging and post-production that took up most of that time. “We all have day jobs,” Miller, who is also an administrative assistant, says. “So we weren’t going to be in a hurry.”

Finally complete, Baby is remarkable for its sonic depth. Instead of creating a slick, impenetrable surface, the production work has resulted in an album full of rich sounds that rise up only to melt into one another. Miller credits this feat to her friend and producer Chris Flemmons of the Baptist Generals. Flemmons is from Fort Worth, but his grandparents are from Stephenville. Miller always liked the sound he gave his own recordings and enlisted him in helping the fledgling band come together on the album.

“I think there’s a natural and raw quality to it. There’s not a lot of treatment on the vocals. It has a darker feel to me. Chris and I just have the same taste and the same ideas about music,” she says of the production. After a tiny pause she adds, “I think it sounds like where we’re from. I don’t know how to put it any other way. It sounds like home.”

—

Bosque Brown MySpace