My Lucky 13

You can get My Lucky 13 at Itunes, Napster, and CD Baby!!!“Everyone asks if Burgandy Brown is my real name and it just makes me chuckle,” says the Colorado native. “I love to tell people that my mom was just a crazy hippie, because that makes so much more sense than the actual reason: Tommy Bolin had a song called ‘Sweet Burgundy,’ and my mom loved him as a guitarist and she thought it was a beautiful name. Her favorite color is purple, but she didn’t want to name me Purple or Lavender, so she thought that Burgandy would fit.” That 1976 nugget from the onetime Deep Purple and James Gang guitarist was the motivation for Burgandy’s given name and it also instantly pegs her onetime concert promoter mom as a rocker. “I always remember that she’d be jammin’ out to Aerosmith or Mötley Crüe or Alice In Chains, Def Leppard—so I grew up with a lot of that from her.” That rock & roll sensibility is certainly evident in the pair of songs that Brown has already recorded and released as a precursor to her still-being-recorded debut album, but no more so than the country influences she picked up from her grandparents. “My grandpa always listened to Elvis,” she says, “and my grandma loved Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Hank Williams, Jr.” In “Basics,” her pedal-to-the-metal acoustic foot-stomper of a lead single, she embodies classic country-rock, especially in the full-throttle, quick-hit chorus: “Live more, laugh more, love more and hug more/That’s what we need to get back to the basics.” Brown takes it down a notch with “Risk,” giving it a musical feel and believe-in-yourself lyrical bent similar to the slow-burn side of ’90s rock stars Creed, with something of a ’70s Linda Ronstadt vocal quality. Both songs have been delivered on Two For The Road, which preceded Burgandy’s as-yet-untitled album by a few months. “We’re in the middle of recording,” Brown says of the sessions which began at the end of February 2007. A release date in May is the current pla n. “We took our entire repertoire, which is probably over 50 songs, and picked everything that we thought was the best, even if the songs might not necessarily tie hand-in-hand with one another.”Burgandy was born in Los Angeles, but a few days later her family was on the move to a farm east of Denver. It was there on the Eastern Plains of Colorado where she developed a love for the local sports teams—especially the Broncos—eclectic, eye-catching action movies with good cinematography and, of course, singing. “I started singing in elementary school and my grandma got me singing in church. I started singing solos when I was probably 9 or 10.” A couple of years at Denver’s School of the Arts and years of private lessons have helped Burgandy develop a rich, commanding voice. Brown figures she was in her early teens when music turned into something that she “could maybe do for the rest of my life,” and she wrote her first song in her freshman year of high school; that song, “Don’t Lie To Me,” was included on Eastern Plains, a four-song EP that she did in 2004. Around that time Burgandy joined a popular local band as a background singer, and experienced firsthand the thrill of performing at the breathtaking Red Rocks Amphitheatre; one of her dreams is to be able to sing her own songs there. Now in her early 20s, Burgandy Brown is recording her first album even as she juggles a pair of part-time jobs and her senior year at Colorado University-Denver, where she’s majoring in Sociology. “Originally I was going to school for Political Science,” she says. “I was very wide-eyed and wanted to do so much good to change the world, but sometimes you just realize that you can only do so much, so I decided to change my major. I’m still getting my minor in Political Science, as well as Psychology. Ultimately, if things don’t pan out with my music I’ll probably go into marketing.” Understandably, that kind of a workload doesn’t leave much time for gigging, but after playing her first official show in May of 2006 Burgandy and her band played out all summer, including an opening slot for Reckless Kelly. And then there was the one-off performance in March 2007 when Denver’s new Country radio station, 92.5 The Wolf, asked her to be the evening’s entertainment at a party welcoming their new morning DJs.While Burgandy is just getting started with her musical career, two of the three guys she makes music with began playing together when Brown was still in pigtails and preschool. “EJ and I met in 1989 and played in a band together for a couple of years,” guitarist Bryan Dennis explains, referring to drummer EJ Worden. In the ’90s they played the metal/rap of the day, released one CD as the Hippie Werewolves and toured the Western US sharing stages with No Doubt, Sublime, 311, Everclear and Corrosion Of Conformity. After years of living apart, Dennis and Worden reconnected when Burgandy invited them to back her up. “They were part of a previous band that my mom worked as a concert promoter—I actually went on tour with them when I was six. We crossed paths again about four years ago and started working on my project.” The combination of the young, upstart frontlady and the veteran backing band has worked out well for everyone, with guitarist Dennis becoming more than a sideman. “Lately I’ve been co-writing with Bryan,” says Burgandy. “We’ll have a jam session and he’ll play this really cool guitar lick and I’ll make something up to it. That’s how ‘Risk’ was born. I came up with the tune to ‘Basics’ in my head, but Bryan actually created the music for it.” For his part, Bryan sees a lot of potential in Burgandy. “She’s got a whole ton of natural talent, which is really on her side because the rest of us have to work hard. She’s real easy to work with, too.” Burgandy Brown’s debut full-length release is expected to include 15 songs written by Brown or Brown and Dennis, and while you can’t necessarily take the country out of the girl, no one said you can’t mix in a little of this and a little of that. “Initially I thought of myself as a country artist, but my music has evolved so it’s hard to classify now,” says Burgandy, who admittedly listens to everything from Justin Timberlake and Fall Out Boy to Carrie Underwood, Beyoncé and Nine Inch Nails. “I like to try writing in different genres and experimenting with different things. I’ve got a couple songs that are not country: one has a real Pulp Fictiony sort of feel and another one is kind of a dance-club mix song. It’s going to be a very eclectic album.”Jim Nelson