Trailer Radio's Shannon Brown-Goin' For It in Gotham

I don't like country music.  I don't garden.  I don't cook.  I don't eat tomatoes unless they come from a packet and are drizzled over french fries.  I don't bike.  I don't scrapbook, hell no.

At age 37 I knew who I was.

I moved to New York City from Man, West Virginia in 1997 seeking fame and fortune on the Broadway stage.  I arrived with $2000, a pile of sheet music and 85 pairs of shoes.  I promptly got sucked into Corporate America.

Corporate America trained me to be a web designer.  So for 10 years I designed, and coded, and HTML'd, and FTP'd.  Life was ok, my career was ok, my bank account was ok.  But my life as a whole was so...virtual.  I’d had a more intimate relationship with PhotoShop than with many past boyfriends.  My friends started calling me CyberShannon.  It’s who I was.

This is not a blog about leaving my day job and "following my bliss" because that’s a fairytale cooked up and served hot by the self-help industry and doesn’t happen to most people in real life. But I can tell you I was pretty miserable.  I gave the world the reigns and it made me a web designer.  I wasn’t having a lick of fun.

I'd not sung a note in 10 years, but I decided to take some voice lessons.  One day in the middle of a nice Sondheim tune my teacher stopped me and said, "Why does everything you sing sound like country music?" 

I didn’t know why…maybe it was my accent, or the fact I’m from West Virginia.  But it’s not who I was.

But then a light bulb sprang atop my hard head.  Maybe I should try that.  Country music.  Singing it.  Opening my mind to it.  It felt pretty natural…it felt pretty good.  The more I sang it, the more it felt like my dirty little secret...what would my friends think?  My own mother said “Country music?  Who are you?” Eventually I found a band, booked some gigs, and invited all my friends to watch me sink or swim.  I felt kinda old to be starting something new.  I kept thinking,  “What if I trip and break a hip on stage?”

Shannon and her biscuits

Luckily I swam.  And I’m still swimming.  At the ripe old age of 39 I’m still a web designer, but I’m also a country singer, and my first CD is being released this summer.

Operating under this new-found freedom, I decided to open my mind to other things, too. This summer I made my first attempt at gardening planting rose begonias and coleuses at my boyfriend’s country house.  I opened my mind to cooking, and while I nearly burned off a pinky toe (don’t ask…) I now make a helluva parmesean chicken!  I opened my mind to tomatoes, and have unlocked the joys of the BLT.  I bought a bike and a helmet, and allow my bangs to get crushed beyond recognition in order to tool around Central Park.  As a result, I’m happier now than I was in the days before my thighs met and bonded for life. 

The moral of the story:  It’s never too late to try something new.  Regardless of age, or your past, or what people think, there could be something out there waiting to enrich your life if you can just open your mind new adventures.

For the record I still don’t scrapbook.  But I will admit to squeezing the puffy stickers at the craft store on occasion…

Mary Lamont-How Lucky! But with hard work...

I am a true country hick.  There is still a Lamont farm in Ontario, Canada, started by my great grandfather, passed down to my grandfather, uncle, and cousin.  I grew up in a tiny town where everybody knew everybody.  I was 
always singing to myself, so my Dad signed me up for the church choir, and then the choir leader asked me to sing solos in church. I was petrified.  But I did it, and I liked it a lot.


When my folks moved to Long Island, I took off to New York and one of my first jobs was working for Alice Cooper’s management (and coincidentally, the first live rock show I ever saw was Alice’s, in a small Canadian venue).  Over the next couple years, I moved through music-related jobs in magazine publishing and booking agencies.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was all prep for my own band:  a first hand music business education.  Meanwhile, my husband, photographer Jim Marchese toured Europe with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, seeing a first class band on the road.

Mary Lamont and her husband
photographer/guitar player —Jim Marchese

I met Jim by chance in New York.  He kept pushing me to join a local band, and for a while I sang backup while he played lead guitar.  It wasn’t long before Jim insisted that we needed our own band.  Which brings me to the main point:  the Mary Lamont Band was all Jim’s vision.  If it hadn’t been for Jim, I wouldn’t have a band, I wouldn’t have written songs, or played the major venues we’ve played, gotten interviewed for ASCAP Audio Portraits, or been the first American country band to tour Mainland China.

So after my Dad pushed me to sing in the choir, my husband pushed me to write and sing in our own band.  I need to be pushed!  Thank you, gentlemen!  By the same token, there’s an advantage to being a certain age.  I’m “over 40” so I don’t have to get anyone’s permission for anything!  (Did I mention that Lamonts are stubborn?)  A lot of experience, school of hard knocks: tragedy, triumph, heartbreak, jubilation, it all comes with livin’ for a while....hmm, I think there’s a song there.


To be a successful singer/songwriter, you have to have all the facets in place, besides obviously writing good tunes and having the right people to play with:  booking, management, promotion, sound...whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring others.  It makes for long days, but the rewards are very satisfying.  And be able to look at yourself in the mirror:  don’t do anything you feel uncomfortable doing.

Karen Hudson and I were paired to sing “Hickory Wind” for a Gram Parsons tribute a few years ago, and we got along instantly!  And I recently saw Karen perform some of her “Sonic Bloom” songs – beautiful!  The “Sonic Bloom” cosmos seeds she gave me are rapidly growing in my garden, and I look forward to seeing flowers this summer.  Thanks Karen, and much success with “Sonic Bloom”!


Find out more about the fabulous Mary Lamont and her hard working band at:
www.marylamont.com

How does Mary's garden grow?
With SONIC BLOOM cosmo sprouts!

Claire's Bush

My mother Claire has been a source of inspiration and strength for me in so many ways. After having five kids, she finally divorced my crazy father and picked up the pieces of her life and carried on with the strength of a racehorse. She went to school to become an accounts payable clerk, and worked at night in a factory to support us.

My mom, Claire Kikta, rocks!

Times were tight. I remember one time,  LILCO turned our power off because she couldn’t pay the bill. Our boiler broke, and we borrowed heaters one winter. We were on welfare and food stamps, but we had a roof over our heads, food to eat, and besides us kids, nobody was any the wiser. My very strong mother, who put up with my father for seventeen years finally broke down crying in front of me one day. Her Chevy Nova had been spouting black smoke from the exhaust pipe, and a cop gave her a ticket. The ticket had pushed her over the edge.

Claire worked hard at her job, and got us off of welfare after a while. She had her pride and refused to have us on assistance. We had a nice house in Hicksville, NY, on Long Island, and because I had no father, who never visited (thank God), and eventually died of a brain tumor when I was in third grade, I felt different. Our carpet was threadbare, with small area rugs covering the holes, and the furniture was old. It had the aura of the past surrounding it. But, like Stevie Wonder sings in his song “Just Enough For the City”—“Her clothes are torn, but never are they dirty,” our home was kept spotless. But our hearts were not.

When my father died, we got his much needed social security checks, and my mother replaced the carpet in the living room. My sister Susie and I re-painted our rooms and bought pretty comforters for our beds. My Aunt Ethel gave us her beautiful velvet couches, lamps and a dining room set, and we felt a sense of renewal living on Elliott Drive. On the outside, our yard had beautiful lilacs, black and yellow irises, blueberry bushes and red roses in the backyard. On the inside, Sue and I thrived, and grew up, in a confusing environment, yet, we were very well cared for, and loved both by our older siblings and my mom, who is now almost 88. I am a lot like Claire, in her looks, creativity (she wanted to be an artist, but in those days they gave you a test to see if you had talent), her voice (she also wanted to be an opera singer), and her temperament (oy!).

We didn’t have a rhododendron in our backyard in Hicksville, but my mother gave me this one when John and I got our weekend cottage upstate. We affectionately call it “Claire’s Bush.”  It’s thriving, and it blooms big white flowers. I thought that the flowers would be pink when we picked it up at a farmer’s market. You never can tell what life will hand you. So I accept it, and love it just the same.

Chicks Rockin' the Garden! Planting the seeds...

While our popular culture projects youth oriented images, I represent a woman of a “certain age,” but I am definitely no old fuddy duddy! I am still growing, and producing art and performing.  Young stars are being made on competitions like American Idol, and reality TV bombards us with the petty conflicts of wealthy celebrities. Have you ever seen the show “Doggie Moms”? Ooof.  This is why I think it’s important for my audience to hear my point of view, and for them to share theirs, too. Contributors to this blog will tell their stories of thriving in the face of obstacles, along with photos of growth in their lives, their fantastic adventures, and of course, what blooms in their garden! 

“I worship in the church of Rock ‘n Roll.” That’s what my husband says. Some hotshot! But, I heartily agree! Our first date was a Talking Heads concert a few days after we met in environmental biology class at Buffalo Stage College. Ever since then, all of the time we have spent together these past couple of decades has revolved around music—listening to it, talking about it, and watching it all go down on stage.

I feel a pull to have music separately for myself, like a kid who wants her own room. I am a “words” person and John is a “music” person. In the song “Michelle, My Belle,” the Beatles may as well have been singing, “Someday monkey play piano song.” Yet, his knowledge of Rock and Roll music is so in-depth it goes beyond mere interest, to one of a well-read historian as a respected industry professional. Like the Yin to his Yang, the product of my interest in music takes on a life of its own.

The songs on my upcoming CD, “Sonic Bloom” are filled with a yearning to grow, to blossom and sometimes— to explode! I write the words first. I observe, question, describe and bare my soul on the blank page and fill the empty space with explanations, then lay them on a bed of music. The process starts with an ache to tell where it hurts, and to “get it right” at the same time, and to plant that kernel of truth and feed it. My songs portray a normal woman of substance and independence—qualities that are relevant to what real women experience and can relate to.

As I grow as an artist, I’m learning that, its important to know were you’re coming from, before you tell people where you’re going with it— and when you create something for the public (that means you) to see or hear, it becomes yours, too. So, I will share my songs right here, and the ideas behind them —in demos, lyrics, and videos. I welcome your comments as well!