Biography
Named after a river flowing through Stephenville, Texas, Bosque Brown operates as an alt-country outfit touched lightly by Christian themes, yet ultimately revolves around singer-songwriter Mara Lee Miller. Her darkly haunting yet strangely hopeful and spiritually tinged storytelling echoes the style of Gillian Welch. Raised in Stephenville, Miller absorbed countless hymns through her Baptist upbringing, while her mother, a piano instructor, ensured both daughters could perform those hymns at the keyboard. At the same time, Miller gravitated toward the country tunes that sporadically reached her via radio. At age eighteen she relocated to Denton, Texas, for college, where she immersed herself in the area’s music community and encountered the work of Townes Van Zandt, Hank Williams, and Gillian Welch—artists whose influence shaped her developing songwriting and vocal approach. Fellow musician Ryan Miller proposed tracking her material on a four-track recorder; during those sessions the two fell in love and later married. Miller distributed the resulting demos, frequently adorned with her own hand-drawn covers, among friends and relatives. In 2002 Damien Jurado passed through Denton and received one of those recordings. Struck by the material, Jurado arranged for Miller to work with his producer Eric Fisher in Seattle, yielding the album Bosque Brown Plays Mara Lee Miller, issued by Burnt Toast Vinyl in 2005. The four-song EP Cerro Verde appeared on the same label the following year, and the full-length Baby surfaced in 2009.
Albums
