‘It Was All Right There’: Alison Brown Converses With the Past for ‘Simple Pleasures’ Reissue

Like most humans do at some point, Alison Brown got to thinking recently about her younger self. She was poring through the original tapes of her landmark 1990 album Simple Pleasures in preparation for a reissue, and she wondered about the twenty-something who’d recorded it.

In a way, the reissue, coming this Friday on Compass Records, put Brown in communication with that young banjo player who was recording music with her heroes and trying out some new sounds that would form a foundation for an entire career. But, of course, Brown didn’t know that in her mid-20s. She was simply testing the waters, and testing herself.

The reissue brings the album, which was produced by David Grisman and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, to online streaming platforms and gives it its first-ever vinyl pressing. The new version is remixed and remastered from the original tapes, and the physical copies feature new liner notes, images from the recording sessions, and access to three demos from early recording sessions.

In going through the master tapes a little at a time over the past few years, Brown got a fresh perspective on the music and a new appreciation for the young woman who composed and recorded it. At the time, the project — and her whole career in music — was a gamble, but one that she can confidently say has paid off.

Banking or Banjo?

Simple Pleasures wasn’t Brown’s first album — she’d recorded one almost a decade earlier with Stuart Duncan, then another with Boston-based band Northern Lights. But it was the first album she made that was truly hers.

As the 1980s gave way to the ’90s, Brown found herself in the midst of a change of heart. She’d graduated from Harvard, earned her MBA, and spent two years as an investment banker in San Francisco. Most people would stay that course, but Brown couldn’t ignore the persistent call from her creative side.

“I just couldn’t shake the bug of wanting to record and wanting to play banjo,” she says. So she quit her investment banking job and gave herself a deadline. For six months, she would dedicate herself to writing tunes and studying jazz guitar as a way to explore layers of instrumental music beyond what she’d grown up with in bluegrass. If nothing came of it, she’d go back to the business world.

But she never needed that Plan B. During her time away from banking, Alison Krauss called Brown with a request: her band, Union Station, needed a banjo player. Brown jumped on the invitation and hit the road. Banking would have to go on without her.

“If Alison Krauss hadn’t called and needed a banjo player, I probably would’ve found another respectable white-collar job,” Brown says with a laugh. “But luckily fate intervened.”

After a year of touring with Union Station, Brown had amassed an album’s worth of songs, and it was time to go into the studio. Grisman, a hero to Brown, had just opened his Dawg Studio in California, and she assembled her dream team to bring Simple Pleasures to life. The core band included Krauss on fiddle, Grisman on mandolin, Mike Marshall on guitar, and Jim Kerwin on bass, but Brown had other sounds in mind too, and brought in Matt Eakle on flute and Joe Craven on percussion.

Right away, Simple Pleasures announced its departure from the bluegrass playbook with opening track “Mambo Banjo,” featuring Brown’s banjo in a joyous dance set to Latin rhythms and a flute melody. Brown put her jazz deep dive to good use on “Daytime TV,” a toe-tapping number on which she played both banjo and guitar. “Wolf Moon” hewed more closely to bluegrass, with Brown’s banjo prowess front and center, but with a few stylistic surprises thrown in. An early version of “Wolf Moon,” complete with false starts and on-the-fly adjustments, is one of three demos from a 1988 recording session available with physical copies of the Simple Pleasures reissue.

“Wolf Moon” editing notes (photo courtesy of Alison Brown)

Even with sounds borrowed from other genres, the bluegrass world received Simple Pleasures positively. The Wall Street Journal, rather than raving about her financial skills, called her “one of the brightest new banjo players in bluegrass.” The album led to Brown being named the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Banjo Player of the Year in 1991, making her the first woman to win an IBMA award in any instrument category. (She’s gone on to win a whole mantle-full of IBMA awards, including the Distinguished Achievement Award in 2015.)

Brown never did go back to a “respectable white-collar job,” but she’s plenty respected in the music world. She’s released 11 more solo albums, most recently On Banjo in 2023 (ND review), and led The Alison Brown Quartet. She won a Grammy in 2001 for a collaboration with Béla Fleck and has been a nominee four times, including for Simple Pleasures. In 1994, she and husband Garry West founded venerated roots and traditional label Compass Records.

She’s constantly moving her banjo vision forward, but with the reissue of Simple Pleasures, she took a rare moment to look back.

Who Was She?

Before she got a hold of the original 8-track, 1-inch tapes that Simple Pleasures was recorded on, it had been a long time since Brown had listened to the album, she says. But she had been thinking a lot about the young woman who recorded it.

“I really felt like listening to that record and rediscovering that music was the path back to who I was,” she says. “ … Who was that person that decided to take that leap of faith?”

Even though Brown has had 34 years of life experience, musical achievements, and banjo practice since the album’s release, she didn’t cringe to hear those early compositions or her playing, she reports: “I really felt like it was musically valid stuff and I kind of was giving myself a pat on the back through the mists of time that it wasn’t a folly to have left my day job after all.”

While a lot has changed in those 34 years, Brown was surprised to find that quite a bit has stayed the same. Listening back to Simple Pleasures, she found herself thinking, “Wow, the footprint for everything I’ve done, it was all right there.”

“Waltzing in Tula” lead sheet (photo courtesy of Alison Brown)

Elements like flute and Latin flavors find their way into Brown’s music still today, and much of her composition style feels like part of the same path to her. “Even the way I write tunes, I don’t think it’s changed too much,” she muses. “I mean, I used to sit on the floor. I don’t do that anymore. But otherwise it’s the same kind of thing.”

Beyond a laser focus on the music, Brown doesn’t remember a lot about being in Grisman’s studio to record Simple Pleasures.

“I’m sure I was intimidated,” she says. Grisman, after all, was an enormous influence, one who’d worked with many of her other influences, including Tony Rice and Flatt and Scruggs. “Getting to work with David on my tunes, I’m sure that it was breathtaking. Even to think that I got to do it these many years later is pretty breathtaking.

“But on the flip side of it, we were recording it in his home studio, so the environment was casual,” she continues, “and Mike Marshall was playing guitar and I’d known Mike for a long time, and then Alison [Krauss] was playing fiddle, and we were at that point in a band together. So there were certain touchstones of comfort. … But I’m sure that I was completely aware of what a privilege it was, and when I look back on it, I still feel that way.”

Finding Answers

Amid all the looking back required to prepare a reissue and getting reacquainted with that young woman recording her first solo album, Brown gleaned a new appreciation for what she has today.

“I hadn’t gotten much validation for what I was trying to do at that point,” she recalls, “so there was a lot more uncertainty to the whole thing. And now at least I’ve done it for long enough and gotten enough pats on the back that I don’t feel that same uncertainty. When we go in the studio to create something, I feel much more confident that it’s real and legitimate that it holds up. And I think I just really wasn’t sure of that then.”

Since Simple Pleasures was recorded and released, the banjo has taken Brown all around the world, connecting her with fans and fellow musicians and constantly inspiring new ideas. But the instrument has strengthened her connection with herself, too.

“It’s forced me to discover who I am and understand myself better,” she says. “And going back and listening to this record was a big asset in that pursuit. Just trying to remember who I was — why was I an investor banker, and how did I possibly have the nerve to leave that and try this banjo thing? Listening back to that music really helped answer some of those questions for me.”

If she could speak to that younger self, she knows exactly what she would say: “It’s all going to work out okay.”