Jason Robert Brown Talks New Album with Ilana Levine 6/29

Three-time Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown will be the guest for a special podcast taping of "LITTLE KNOWN FACTS with Ilana Levine" to discuss How We React and How We Recover, his new album from Ghostlight Records, and the New York City Center's Encores! Off-Center production of Brown's landmark New York debut show Songs for a New World. The event will take place at New York City Center (131 West 55th Street) on Friday, June 29, immediately following the 8:00 PM performance of Songs for a New World. The podcast taping is included in the Songs for a New World ticket price. For tickets, visit City Center's website HERE.

How We React and How We Recover, Brown's first solo recording in over a decade, is a politically-charged, far-reaching rumination on love, family and music. The album will be available in digital and streaming formats on Friday, June 29, with a physical CD planned for later this year. For more information on the album, please visit www.ghostlightrecords.com/jason-robert-brown-how-we-react-and-how-we-recover.html

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS is a weekly podcast hosted by stage and film actress Ilana Levine. With over 100 interviews to date with today's most successful artists, Levine engages her celebrity guests in intimate conversations that are hilarious, vulnerable, revealing and inspiring. Ilana's unique brand of celebrity interview has been called "Podcast Vérité," because her conversations are unfiltered, raw, honest and uniquely funny. Listen and feel like a fly on the wall as Levine's guests share their secrets and fears, inspirations and challenges and along the way reveal... Little Known Facts. The podcast has been on the iTunes "New and Noteworthy" list and Levine has been listed as one of most influential Twitter accounts to follow for 2018. The show can be found on iTunes and wherever podcasts can be heard.

How We React and How We Recover - partly a response to our fraught political climate, part portrait of an evolving contemporary artist - is Brown's definitive interpretations of his own compositions, pregnant with emotion, capacious musical energy and symphonic sweep. "I grew up on Billy Joel and Joni Mitchell, but also Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein," reflects Brown. "All those influences sit within the work. This album has a specific emotional palette and musical aesthetic that rests between rock 'n' roll, jazz, folk, gospel and Broadway."

The opening song, "Hope," written the morning after the fateful 2016 U.S. Presidential election, was meant to set the tone for the record. "It's about having hope when you have no reason to be hopeful, trying to capture the positive energy of life in bad times. I still have a tough time performing it, it's a very direct expression of a very difficult emotional moment." Ultimately the album is about, as the song "Hope" itself says, being a force of good "in spite of everything ridiculous and sad."

"The Sandy Hook school shooting just broke me," Brown continues. "My daughter was the same age as those kids and it mobilized me to do something, anything I could about the scourge of guns in this country. Ultimately, I wrote 'A Song About Your Gun.' I had to express my anger, not just for the killing of the innocent people, but the fetishization of this weapon. This object has been placed on a pedestal to become a symbol of who we are supposed to be as a country. I started writing this song to deal with that rage and now it's become my primary social issue."

"All Things in Time" - the song which provides the album its title - closes many of Brown's concerts. With a quiet and clear-eyed optimism, the song says, "we can't predict what comes to pass, all we control is how we react and how we recover." "That line really encapsulates both the album and what it's like to live in this crazy time," Brown explains. "Let's just hang in there together. It doesn't matter if I really believe it, what matters is that I must believe it."

Other album highlights include "Fifty Years Long," Jason's lyrical song originally written for a long-married couple he didn't know, but which ended up exploring not only his own marriage, but that of his parents and the very nature of relationships, and how they are affected by community, luck and hard work. "Melinda," infused with the chaos and energy of big band Latin rhythm, is about a rising salsa musician set in the melting pot of 1970s New York City.

"Hallowed Ground" - an infectiously percussive chamber pop song - was inspired by his daughter's visit to the same performing arts camp Brown attended in his formative years, and the emotions from witnessing her budding musical talent. "Being a father is the thing I had to do to keep being a writer," he reflects. "There were things I didn't know how to feel, emotions I never knew existed, or how to express them. I've already said all there was to say about myself. It's very different when you are responsible for other people and every facet of their lives."

The Grammy Award-nominated vocalist Kate McGarry lends her voice to the bittersweet bossa nova-inspired "One More Thing Than I Can Handle." Brown recalled, "I was dazzled by her technical facility and unbelievable musicality, but she really connects with the lyrics too. I am honored that she's part of the album. She's a special artist."

"Wait 'Til You See What's Next" - the album's ebullient closing track - was originally written as the finale of the Broadway musical Prince of Broadway, which honors Brown's mentor, the lauded director Hal Prince. Brown provided arrangements, orchestrations, music supervision, and co-produced the cast album for Ghostlight Records. "As an optimist, Hal genuinely believes good things are going to happen," says Brown. "His entire life and career are based on not the assumption, but the literal knowledge, that it's all going to work out exactly the way you want it to. He's always moving forward with positivity and belief in the future. This song was written to be in Hal's voice, but by singing it on the album, I started to find that quality in myself. The world is rough right now, but wait until you see what's next. Let's celebrate what's coming up."

How We React and How We Recover is produced by Jeffrey Lesser and Jason Robert Brown. Stacey Mindich and Kurt Deutsch serve as executive producers.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Broski