True to Her Country Roots

Just 24 hours after Garth Brooks was introducing his “Scarecrow” album to 18,000 onlookers at the Forum and 8.4 million TV viewers, country singer Jann Browne is sitting at her kitchen table in Laguna Hills talking about her latest album.

There are no adoring fans holding “We {heart} You, Jann” banners, no TV cameras focusing on her every gesture, no record stores begging her for promotional visits.

Next to her is Matt Barnes, her songwriting partner, next-door neighbor and lead guitarist in her band, who notes enthusiastically, “After we sell another 600 or 700 CDs, we’ll break even and then we’ll start making some money.”

Her album, “Missed Me by a Mile,” cost less than $10,000--enough, perhaps, to cover the dry-cleaning bill from Brooks’ Forum show--and most of it came out of Browne’s and Barnes’ pockets. Now they sell CDs one by one at concerts or via her new Web site, https://www.jannbrowne.com. In the weeks it will take to move enough copies to put them in the black, Brooks’ album figures to sell half a million more copies, on top of the 466,000 it sold its first week in stores.

Despite the discrepancy, the 47-year-old singer-songwriter says, “This is a great time to be in the music business. People like me finally have the opportunity to be independent and actually make it work.”

That’s more than Browne could say a decade ago, when she made two major-label albums for Curb Records and moved to Nashville for a few years before giving up on prospects of fame in Music City and heading back to Orange County, where she’s lived since 1978.

Browne has been involved with music from the time she was a toddler, raised in Indiana by grandparents who hailed from the bluegrass-steeped Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky.

She recalls being taken--sometimes dragged, she concedes--to bluegrass festivals regularly by her grandparents, professional square-dancers who appeared at the Grand Ole Opry in the ‘50s. That roots-country foundation melded eventually with her early love for all manner of rock, pop and R&B; music into a colorful blend of influences that usually ends up somewhere between Merle Haggard and the Rolling Stones.

That foundation is evident throughout “Missed Me by a Mile,” from the chunky country-rock love song “Can’t Build a Better Love” to the hauntingly confessional folk-rock “Cold Here in London” to “The Lonesome Mile,” which closes the album with the tale of a staggeringly hard, solitary life that never descends into self-pity.

With Barnes’ eerily squealing guitar work amplifying the lyrics’ theme, the track would have sounded perfectly at home on Emmylou Harris’ “Wrecking Ball” album.

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Harris, in fact, was the musician whose 1970s work pushed Browne back to her country roots after stints in rock bands in Indiana. After Browne signed with Curb, Harris made a guest appearance on her 1990 debut album, “Tell Me Why,” which yielded two Top 20 country singles.

But Browne was supremely frustrated by record company and management pressure to conjure up more hits on her 1992 follow-up, “It Only Hurts When I Laugh,” so she asked to be let out of her contract and abandoned Nashville.

“I learned a lot,” she says. “I met a lot of great people who are still my friends, and got some recognition,” which is still helping her as she goes about making new music more economically and sporadically but, to her, more satisfyingly.

She refuses to grouse about being dragged through the dirt during her years in the country music capital, just as she laughed off being literally dragged through the dirt recently by a 140-pound dog she was caring for as part of the pet-sitting business she set up after returning to California. That’s how she has paid the bills while pursuing musical independence.

Browne is eager to move past the “Missed Me by a Mile” songs. “Next! When I’m done with something,” she says with a smile, “I’m so done with it.”

She is confident that her next round of songs will reflect the effect of the recent death of her grandmother, Lillie Belle, at 93.

“I’m going to be feeling that for a long time,” she says. “Talk about influences: She was the one who always told me, ‘If you don’t know [what you’re singing about], why bother? If you’re not going to be true to who you are, why bother?”’

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Jann Browne & the Dangerous Neighbors play Dec. 8 and 20 at the Swallow’s Inn, 31786 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. Also Dec. 9 at 4 p.m. Free. (949) 493-3188.