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SPEAKER 1: Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter Chastity Brown celebrates her new album Silhouette of Sirens this week with a concert at the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul. The album took a long time to make, but Euan Kerr tells us that Brown believes that just means it's coming out at the exact right time.

EUAN KERR: Silhouette of Sirens opens with a quiet muscularity and then just doesn't let up.

[CHASTITY BROWN, "DRIVE SLOW"]

(SINGING) Drive slow

I don't really want to miss

What is even happening?

One can own the game

EUAN KERR: But just as there is a story behind each track, there is a story behind the album itself. Brown had much of it recorded three years ago. She'd done it in the standard way, with each musician playing separately and then layering the elements during the mix. Sitting in the bustling Modern Times Cafe in south Minneapolis on a recent morning, she said she began feeling something was wrong.

CHASTITY BROWN: Everything was just separate and perfect, and it was so perfect that it didn't really resonate with the way that I sing live.

EUAN KERR: So she scrapped the lot.

CHASTITY BROWN: That was an easy decision, but the following day was chaos in my mind.

EUAN KERR: She threw out some of the songs she had and wrote more. She recorded the resulting 10 song album with the musicians playing together. Then she shopped it around before signing a deal with Saint Paul's Red House Records. Brown admits it took longer than she thought it would.

CHASTITY BROWN: But I'm really glad it did. Like, I was able to articulate a great deal of pain and transcendence. And then now, two years later, removed from that writing, I can feel how I've grown. All things in due time, and now is the perfect time to release it.

EUAN KERR: Brown moved to Minnesota 12 years ago from Tennessee. She says she can feel her new home's influence on her work.

CHASTITY BROWN: I mean, I'm very much a Southerner, though. I'm very much a country girl that loves the city of Minneapolis. So it works out. It works out.

(SINGING) Don't you ever miss me

Where you're gone?

[INAUDIBLE]

EUAN KERR: You can hear the country and urban folk influences in Silhouette of Sirens, with the occasional sprinkling of jazz. But these songs are stories, according to Brown. She likes to refer to her favorite novels, where she says, individual readers can recognize things from their own lives and make the story their own.

CHASTITY BROWN: And that is the hope with this album is that you can get a sense of the feeling, you can get a sense of the emotion, but the listener still has agency in how they want to interpret it.

EUAN KERR: Silhouette of Sirens is attracting attention from around the US and Europe. It's also been described as political, even though you can listen to just about every track as a love song.

CHASTITY BROWN: What's funny is that the personal becomes political.

EUAN KERR: Brown is biracial and gay. As she puts it, when people are groups publicly love themselves in a way that others have forgotten to do, other people become astonished at that and interpret it as being political.

CHASTITY BROWN: I own my own story and my own honesty and my own pain in a way that I think parts of society are not comfortable with a woman of color being that confident. So it's like, sure, whatever.

(SINGING) You lied to me

So many times

EUAN KERR: While Friday's Fitzgerald Concert is an album release show, Chastity Brown will play her early stuff too. She says not to do so would be disrespectful to the people who came out to see her early Twin Cities shows. Covering the arts, I'm Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio News.

CHASTITY BROWN: (SINGING) I was driving through the mountains of Colorado

Got a gig to get to, I'll be there tomorrow

Ain't slept a wink for three damn nights

That's the way it is when you're living this kind of life, you know