Biography

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Steve Martin and Edie Brickell's first album together, 2013's Love Has Come for You, found the two iconoclastic artists pooling their diverse talents to make emotionally resonant, effortlessly accessible music that was unlike anything that either had created previously. Their remarkable musical collaboration continues into fresh creative territory on the duo's second collaboration, So Familiar.

The new collection's stirring compositions match Martin's inventive, expressive five-string banjo work and Brickell's distinctive vocals, detail-rich lyrics with the sublime music they composed jointly. The songs also benefit from legendary producer Peter Asher's sensitive, expansive instrumental arrangements, which make imaginative use of a wide array of acoustic and orchestral textures, lending a cinematic quality to the songs' intimate character studies.

While Love Has Come for You represented a step into uncharted musical territory for Martin and Brickell, So Familiar showcases an organic, evolving working relationship that continues to bring out new creative strengths in both of its participants. Such sonically lilting, lyrically vivid numbers as "Won't Go Back," "Always Will," "I Had A Vision" and the winsome title track tap into a rich vein of American storytelling tradition, conveying a wealth of imagery, emotion and musical ideas within playful, irresistibly catchy tunes.

So Familiar's stellar supporting cast encompasses a variety of prominent players from the worlds of bluegrass, folk, pop and rock, including seminal banjo ace Béla Fleck, who is featured on the uplifting "Heart of the Dreamer," along with session bass legend Leland Sklar, Cobra Starship's Victoria Asher, Mike Einziger of Incubus, Emmy-award winning composer/arranger Geoff Zanelli, and Martin's much-acclaimed longtime bluegrass cohorts the Steep Canyon Rangers.

"I guess that this is the logical sequel to the first album, but it's also different in a lot of ways," Martin states. "It sounds bigger and wider, and it has a lush feeling that I really like. I think that Edie's voice sounds beautiful with these arrangements, and I love the way the banjo sounds with strings. Peter really had a vision for this record, and he really came up with some wonderful things."

"What Peter did was so beautiful," agrees Brickell. "He has a great musical imagination, and he always surprises us. I'm so impressed by his ability to come up with things that feel grand and intimate at the same time. Peter has a really great ability to create something majestic and incorporate that into a traditional-sounding song."

"It's not a bluegrass record and it's not really a banjo record. It's a song record," Martin says of the album. "I'd write a banjo melody and send it to Edie, and she would hear the story in the melody and write a counterpart melody and lyrics from that. Sometimes she'd write two or three different songs over the same banjo melody. The only difference this time was that we wrote several of the songs with specific characters in mind."

"Steve would give me a banjo melody and I'd just start singing along to it, and lo and behold, there was a song," Brickell explains, adding, "On the first album, the lyrics were all inspired by the emotion and the feeling that I heard in Steve's playing. This album was written that way too, but there was also the idea that the songs needed to express a specific emotion or a specific character. So it was almost like being an actor and a writer at the same time, allowing the character to flow through me.

"Steve doesn't write stock banjo parts," she continues. "He writes these melodies that are very original and have their own personality. I think that Steve thinks and hears in a different way; he has a lot of humility as a player and he's willing to step out of the box, and that makes writing with him different and special."

"The partnership between Steve and Edie is so unusual and extraordinary," producer Peter Asher observes. "Steve's a very good composer and very fluent on the banjo, and he writes these remarkable little banjo pieces. And Edie doesn't just write words, she also creates these amazing counter-melodies over Steve's banjo melodies.

"What I tried to do with the arrangements was the same thing that Edie did when she heard Steve's banjo pieces, just following the songs where they took me," Asher explains. "Our ideas were very much in sync, so every time I tried something, they seemed to like it. We had the luxury of working with some great musicians, and I think that we got some original and organic sounds. It was such a pleasure to spend some time with these remarkable songs and see what I could add to them."

So Familiar adds yet another prestigious item to a pair of resumes that are already crowded with notable credits. Steve Martin is currently in the fifth decade of a uniquely varied and accomplished career in which he's excelled as a comedian, actor, author and playwright, and as a Grammy-winning, boundary-pushing bluegrass banjoist and composer. His fellow Texas native Edie Brickell initially burst onto the national scene in the late 1980s fronting the New Bohemians, and has since carved out an iconoclastic solo career that's solidified her reputation as a uniquely compelling singer and a songwriter of rare insight.

The duo's longtime friendship became a formal musical partnership after Martin invited Brickell to come up with a song for a banjo tune he'd come up with. The experiment proved successful and they began collaborating in earnest, despite the fact that they lived on opposite coasts, writing separately and exchanging digital files via email.

Many of So Familiar's songs are also featured in Bright Star, a new stage musical built around Martin and Brickell's songs, with Asher as music supervisor. The show, whose initial inspiration was the Love Has Come for You track "Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby," was first staged at San Diego's Old Globe Theater in 2014 and opens at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. on December 17, 2015, to be followed by a Broadway premiere in 2016.

As Martin recalls, "We were talking about how much we loved musicals, and Edie said 'Maybe there's a subject in one of our songs that could be the subject of a musical.' I didn't think so, but one day I was on a bicycle in Manhattan, mentally going through our catalogue, and I remembered 'Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby,' and I fell off the bicycle and immediately called Edie.'"

The experience of hearing their songs performed on stage by Bright Star's cast proved to be a moving experience for the songwriters.

"We both got very emotional hearing other people singing these songs," Brickell marvels. "They have such big, beautiful voices and sing in a way that I don't, and they bring the full dramatic effort to it. To hear those voices singing our songs, it just feels bigger than life, and it makes it all feel so real somehow."

With a pair of deeply compelling albums to their credit and a major stage musical on the way, Steve Martin and Edie Brickell's unique musical partnership couldn't be any more real.

"Everything about this feels so unexpected, yet at the same time it feels like it was meant to be," Martin observes. "It started as 'Let's try writing some songs,' and the next thing you know, we've got a musical. The whole thing has been a very nice surprise."