A Wait Off Her Shoulders : Orange County’s Jann Browne Finally Sees a U.S. Release for ‘Count Me In’

It took more than 15 years of preparation for Jann Browne to paint her masterpiece, and another year and a half of waiting before she could unveil it in her own land.

It’s hard to blame her--or the loyal cadre of country music fans in Orange County who have been following her since she moved here in 1978 from small-town Indiana--for feeling a little impatient.

Earlier this month, on the day her album “Count Me In” finally was released in the United States after having been available only in Europe and Australia, Browne started getting calls from some of those antsy, demanding fans.

“ ‘Is the album out? Well, I can’t find it,’ ” was the basic drift, she recalled recently as she sat on the couch in her living room here, chatting in her throaty, folksy, twangy way while waiting for some home-baked bread to rise--or maybe not to rise, since she inadvertently had left the yeast out of this birthday loaf intended for Matt Barnes, the next-door neighbor who is one of her band mates and key songwriting partners.

Browne had committed no such oversights back in November, 1993, when she recorded “Count Me In” on a small allowance from Red Moon Records, a Swiss label whose owner had fallen for Browne material that was too adventurous, stylistically diverse and emotionally acute for Nashville’s mainstream country labels to touch.

The result, first released overseas in April, 1994, was a collection of a dozen richly melodic and beautifully sculpted songs--one of the strongest albums ever made by an Orange County pop artist. “Count Me In” made the national year-end Top Four of all three regular pop critics for The Times Orange County, but until this month it hadn’t made it into any record bins within 6,000 miles of here.

After getting those first calls from frustrated would-be buyers, Browne said, “I thought, ‘Oh, no, I’m going to go through another year of ‘I can’t find it.’ Please don’t make me do that again.’ ” To reassure herself, she “went over to Tower [Records] and saw my little card in the pop-rock-soul section, which was wonderful. I don’t want to be known as just a country artist.”

In fact, Mitchell Cohen, owner of Cross Three Records, says his small, independent label has placed some 10,000 copies of “Count Me In” into domestic distribution. Next month, some 1,000 promotional singles of Browne’s sad anthem “Ain’t No Promise (In the Promised Land)” will be sent to country stations and roots-oriented rock radio programmers; Cohen’s plans also call for a follow-up video of “Hearts on the Blue Train,” a memorably chiming, firmly rocking ode for the lovelorn.

Cross Three is working to set up Browne’s first U.S. touring since 1990-91, when she released two albums on Curb Records in a briefly promising but ultimately unsuccessful bid for mainstream country stardom. If all goes very well, Cohen said, Cross Three could sell as many as 50,000 copies of “Count Me In” during the coming 12 months--a strong showing for a small-label release that would establish Browne’s credentials as part of a growing movement of singer-songwriters who take their inspiration from country tradition but transcend the narrow boundaries and artistically shallow formulas that typify the hit-oriented approach of mainstream Nashville.

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Browne, 41, is a tiny woman with hair dyed Irish-setter red and eyes that glint playfully but also show the creases of some hard weather endured. She has a folksy charm, but there also is something firm and sinewy suggested by the raspy, too-many-cigarettes current that runs through her twangy speaking voice.

As her living-room decor of Native American artifacts and Western desert motifs attests, she is fond of the sun and open spaces. A strong sense of family is the other impression the room conveys. The top of an old upright piano serves as a mantelpiece.

The grandparents who raised Browne and gave her the piano when she was a small girl appear in one old picture in matching, check-patterned square-dance outfits. The Moore household back in the farming community of Shelbyville was strict in its rules, Browne recalls (she got a lot of piano practice while grounded), and serious in its appreciation of the rural arts of square dancing and bluegrass music.

After fronting an all-female band called Custom Built in Indiana, and getting her first taste of the road as Diamond Lil of Diamond Lil & the Prairie Fire Band, Browne came to Orange County in 1978 and soon became a favorite in the local honky-tonks. In the early ‘80s she sang with the long-running, hard-touring Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel.

By decade’s end, she had qualified for a chance at the country-music big-time. Her debut album, “Tell Me Why” in 1990, enjoyed modest success, yielding two Top 20 radio hits and spending half a year on the charts.

The follow-up, “It Only Hurts When I Laugh,” failed to build on that foundation, so Browne and her second husband, Roger Stebner, moved to Nashville in 1992, figuring proximity to Music City’s machinery would help her get back on the upward track.

What Browne found during her year in Nashville was that her maturing artistic aims as a songwriter didn’t mesh with the machine’s commercially geared rumblings.

She was trying to secure a new recording deal while also laboring as a staff songwriter for a major Nashville music publisher, Sony Tree. “I used to spend a lot of time worrying about, ‘Will this song be radio-friendly? Am I writing a hit?” she recalls. “At one time I was required to think that way as a songwriter.”

Pat Gallagher, a friend since their high school days together in Shelbyville, says it was easy to tell that Browne didn’t take to that let’s-write-a-hit mentality.

“Her heart just wasn’t in it,” says Gallagher, who now lives in Nashville and serves as one of Browne’s two regular songwriting partners. “It wasn’t that she was crying and moping around the house, but you could tell she wasn’t really happy.”

Working with Gallagher, who had played with her in her early Indiana bands and who had begun writing songs with her after they both landed in Southern California, Browne came up with a series of songs that she felt were her finest work.

“I took them to my camp [of managers and producers] and told them I’d like to put them on my albums,” Browne said. “They were all turned down because they weren’t radio-friendly country hits. [Her Nashville handlers] were right in saying that. But it proved once again that the inspiration part mattered more to me than being radio-friendly.”

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With her Orange County house unsold in a recession market, Browne simply moved back to her old digs, resolving to pattern her career after such highly personal country-influenced singer-songwriters as Nanci Griffith and Iris DeMent. “Every song they did had a story to tell, and it didn’t matter if it was 6 1/2 minutes long,” Browne said. “It seemed they had an opportunity to do those things, and I wanted it too.”

Nancy Russell, owner of a public relations firm in Nashville that represents such country stars as the Mavericks and Travis Tritt, had befriended Browne in her Curb Records days and says she had mixed feelings about Browne’s exit from Nashville. She thought Browne still had the potential, given the right break, to emerge as a major country star.

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“On the [other] hand,” Russell added, “I respect Jann Browne immensely because Jann is not somebody who is into this to be a millionaire at all. Her priority is absolutely not a money situation. Jann just couldn’t live with herself if she wasn’t expressing exactly who she is.”

(Browne isn’t totally out of the Nashville loop: Former Highway 101 singer Nikki Nelson has recorded a version of a song from “Count Me In,” the upbeat, exuberant, straight-country “Trouble’s Here,” which is expected to be the first single from Nelson’s upcoming mainstream country release on Columbia.)

What Browne had to express was a wide-ranging array of musical interests ranging from traditional country and bluegrass to the somber, Leonard Cohen-inspired folk lament “Dear Loretta” and the darkly driving, Tom Petty-like anthem-rock muscle of the album’s title track.

She and her key collaborators worried at first that all the stylistic turns and thematic ups and downs on “Count Me In” might rob the album of a sense of cohesion.

Browne’s method nowadays calls for “using country as the springboard, but you jump into a real different pool real quick,” notes Gallagher, who wrote four of the album’s songs with Browne (the more rock-leaning Barnes co-authored six, while Browne wrote two by herself).

In the end, the diversity helps to sustain musical interest as the album winds along, unfolding in two separate five-song cycles that move from loss toward twanging, optimistic declarations of strength and a feisty determination to carry on.

At the end comes a closing valediction, two final ballads that find eternal truths amid deep sorrows.

“When the Darkest Hours Pass,” dedicated to Browne’s grandparents, is a bluegrass prayer that quietly affirms the solace to be found in Christian faith. The Celtic-tinged “White Roses” is a vow of loving devotion that endures beyond the grave. Browne’s voice slowed and deepened with emotion as she told how she wrote it to memorialize her six year-old cousin, Collin Elizabeth Etchison, who died in Indiana of a rare disease.

“[The song’s core symbol of] ‘the last white rose’ came from going to her grave. It was cold and winter, and the only flowers left [from the funeral] were the white roses. All the other flowers had died and withered away. The white roses were still alive.”

Since finishing “Count Me In,” Browne has toured Europe three times and has performed in Australia (ironically, she has been hard to find locally; she has been without a regular gig in Orange County since the Swallow’s Inn, her old stamping ground in San Juan Capistrano, changed hands, just around the time that “Count Me In” came out in Europe). In keeping with the album’s feisty declaration (on “Long Time Gone”) that “this girl keeps movin’ on,” she has carried forward with more strong songwriting. Having lost her publishing contract when she left Nashville, she is again a salaried songwriter, working for Stillworking Music, a concern based in Nashville and run by Barbara Orbison, widow of the Rock And Roll Hall of Famer Roy Orbison.

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One promising new songwriting partner for Browne is Jake Stebner, her 23-year-old stepson who recently graduated from Washington State University and is headed back to the Northwest to launch an alternative-rock band called Nickel.

“I enjoy working with my son. He comes up with new concepts and ideas I wouldn’t have thought about because I’m kind of set in my ways,” Browne said. “I think he appreciates writing with me because I’m passing on to him some traditional things he wouldn’t put in a song by himself.”

One catchy result of their collaboration is “Rita (Queen of Postcards),” a brightly rocking ditty with an enigmatic psychological twist and the resonant dimensions of a good short story. Browne’s new crop of songs also includes “Cold Here in London,” a soaring, highly emotional lonesome-lament that she wrote while on a working vacation in England.

Asked about the song’s inspiration (after all, she had husband Roger and son Jake for company on the trip) Browne sheepishly admitted, “The truth is, I was lonely for my dogs”--Cayuse, the Yorkshire terrier that appears with Browne on the cover of the American edition of “Count Me In,” and Gracie, a fluffy Maltese.

As she prepares to promote a long-delayed release that is, from her point of view, practically archival material, she is looking ahead with confidence.

For her next album, she already has “at least nine songs that are going to work,” she said. As for the level of success she hopes for now, “I don’t know how big my daydreams are. I don’t daydream about hits. I like my space musically.

“I look at [“Count Me In”] as a stepping stone. I don’t have big dreams for this album,” she said. “I’m happy so far that the people who have gotten ahold of it seem to like it. If it inspires them to think that I’m a valid songwriter and they like my work, I’m lucky. I’ve grown a lot since this album, and there’s more.”