About
“It was time to get back to basics.” Brett Dennen says of his fifth record, Smoke & Mirrors, which debuted in late 2013. “I wanted to return to the folk and acoustic music I loved when I began writing. I decided to tap into my memories and explore new emotional territory as honestly as I could.” Brett Dennen’s music career began humbly around the camps of the Sierra Nevada mountain range–a retreat to which he would eventually return for inspiration on Smoke and Mirrors. “Being in the mountains, aside from the inspiration, was so crucial to me, because as a kid I used to spend so much time in the mountains. And just being there helped me regain that self-confidence. I remembered who I was. I called the album Smoke and Mirrors, because one of the major themes of the album, lyrically, is that things aren’t exactly as they appear to be. If you focus on how you think things should be, then you can’t see them for what they really are.”
