IAN BRENNAN
"A modern day Hemingway."
--The Glass Eye (Toledo, OH)
“His lyrics are a model of economical,
unpretentious, narrative songwriting.”
--Boston Phoenix
Ian Brennan has produced three GRAMMY-nominated records (Best World Music- 2011, Best Traditional Folk-2006 and 2007). In the studio, he has worked with the likes of Kyp Malone & Tunde Adebimpe (TV on the Radio), Flea, Tinariwen, Lucinda Williams, David Hidalgo (Los Lobos), Nels Cline (Wilco), DJ Bonebrake & John Doe (X, the Knitters), Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney), Bill Frisell, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Jonathan Richman, Richard Thompson, and more.
He has produced live-shows of up to 15,000 people in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington (DC), Portland (OR), Tucson, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and Boston with artists as diverse as Green Day, Fugazi, Merle Haggard, film-maker John Waters, Kris Kristofferson, Tammy Faye, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Peaches, and the Vienna Boys Choir. His benefit concerts have raised over $100,000 for local charities and political causes.
Additionally, he created the "Live Nude Bands" benefit game-show, hosted a weekly free performance in a San Francisco laundromat for five straight years that resulted in three "Unscrubbed" CD compilations, wrote a local-music column for ZERO magazine from 1998-2001, directed the weekly cable-access show "Squawk" documenting the Bay Area arts community, created the first "Boxing Bush" online video-game, spearheaded the "MIllion Band March" (protesting misuse of artist's living-spaces by developers), booked the music for "Food Not Bombs" 20th anniversary free-show in Dolores Park, was instrumental in pioneering the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur as a music venue by bringing the first national touring acts there, and had a recurring monthly guest-appearance for years on Derk Richardson's "Here and Now" program on public-radio giant, KPFA. Also, he released nine solo albums, beginning in the pre-historic, vinyl-only days of 1987.
He is the author of ANGER ANTIDOTES: How Not to Lose Your S#&!, published April 2011 by W.W. Norton (NYC).
He was born in Oakland, CA and raised in the far
east-bay.
“All recordings are ultimately ‘field-recordings’. They document life (...or lack thereof), and arise from a specific time and place. If that place is artificial, then the results will be as well. Ultimately, any technology exists only as a means to convey feeling, and has little to no value, otherwise, in-and-of itself.” --Ian Brennan