Saving Lives, Playing Dives
A cardiologist croons in clubs across the country.
BROWN LEADS A DOUBLE LIFE. WHEN she’s not healing hearts at Philadelphia’s Albert Einstein Medical Center, she’s singing the blues at venues around the city and the nation. Last spring she headed to Nashville, Tennessee, to record her third album with her idol, producer Oliver Wood of the sibling folk-blues duo, The Wood Brothers. She and Wood took a new approach with Almost There, trying to capture as much live energy as possible. “I wanted to capture a moment in time, a performance, and all the emotion that comes with that,” Brown says. The album charts the many stages of relationships, though “Receipt for Love”one of three tracks co-written with Grammy Award winning guitarist Scot Sax, who also happens to be her husband was an unusual one to write, considering they’d penned it only a month after meeting. “If it’s all peaches and apple pie, you don’t feel the need to write a song,” she says. “It’s the conflict that makes you need the song.”
Shyness prevented Brown from pursuing her passion for music until her senior year in college. While studying for a physics exam in the Medical School library that fall, Brown received an email about a cappella tryouts 15 minutes before they started. “I left all my books, ran over to the Hop, warmed up in a bathroom stall and tried out.” Despite “shaking like a leaf” during the audition, Brown won a spot as a member of the all female Rockapellas. “I felt things I had never felt before when I was doing music. It definitely planted a seed,” she says.
Before starting at Harvard Medical School, Brown taught herself guitar and attended a music camp at Berklee College of Music. At Harvard she performed at open mic sessions throughout Boston, and during her residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital she joined a cover band composed of residents and doctors. After moving to Philadelphia for a cardiology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, she found herself with free nights and weekends to pursue songwriting.
“There’s something about a song that allows you to say things you’d never say in words,” Brown says. After playing open mics in Philly, Brown was “totally hooked.” In between shows she released the five song EP Side Streets in 2009, followed by the acclaimed album Heartstrings in 2011. Her music has been played in Starbucks, Gap and Anthropologie stores, she has opened for Lyle Lovett and Livingston Taylor, and she was named “Best of Philly” by Philadelphia Magazine. Almost There—due in October—is a fan-funded effort recorded live in seven days. “The result is an elegant yet unvarnished 11 song collection that harks back to the recordings of influences like Bonnie Raitt, Patty Griffin and, of course, The Wood Brothers,” according to World Café Live in Philadelphia.
Balancing cardiology and performance is not easy. Brown works one full time week per month and two days per week for the other three, which allows her some flexibility to go on short tours. “The transitions are really hard,” she says. “Music is open and honest and emotional and vulnerable and medicine is kind of the opposite. If you open yourself up too much, you’ll just get crushed.” But she is grateful that her education and medical career have allowed her the freedom to pursue music. The secret to managing a passion and a career, she says, “is a mixture of keeping your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.”
“There’s something about a song that allows you to say things you’d never say in words,” says Brown.
LAUREN VESPOLI, a formerDAM intern, lives in New York City, where she works at a PR agency and continues to write.
