Brave (Marillion album)
| Brave | ||||
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| Studio album by Marillion | ||||
| Released | 7 February 1994 17 October 1998 (two-disc edition) |
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| Recorded | Château de Marouatte, Grand-Brassac (France), November 1992 – August 1993 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 71:08 (single-disc edition) 123:01 (two-disc edition) |
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| Label |
EMI (Europe) I.R.S. Records (United States) |
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| Producer | Dave Meegan | |||
| Marillion chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Brave | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Dprp.net | (10/10) |
Brave is the seventh studio album by Marillion, released in 1994. It charted at number 10 on the UK Albums Chart, being the last of the band's albums to reach the Top 10 in the United Kingdom until F E A R reached number 4 in 2016.
Raw ranked Brave as one of the 20 greatest albums of 1994. In 2000 it was selected by Classic Rock as one of the "30 Best Albums of the 90s", and in 2003 as one of "Rock's 30 Greatest Concept Albums".
After trying and failing to reach a wider audience with Holidays in Eden, Marillion figured it was time to go back to their roots and make a more progressive rock-oriented album again. Brave is a concept album, based on a news story Steve Hogarth heard on the radio about a girl who was taken into police custody after being found wandering the Severn Bridge. She did not know who she was, where she came from and refused to even speak. This inspired Hogarth to write a fictional story about this girl and what might have led to her being on the Severn Bridge in this state.
The band relocated to Marouatte castle in France for the duration of the recording of Brave. The influence of these surroundings can be heard throughout the album in a lot of haunting atmospherics. They even went into a cave which lay in the nearby area and taped some cave sounds which were used as background ambiance on the album. This recording concept was later used by Radiohead for their OK Computer album. As engineer, they recruited Dave Meegan, who had previously worked with Marillion on Fugazi. As for EMI, they really wanted the band to do a 'quick record' to gain some revenue, but this project progressively escalated, taking the band nine months to write and produce, partly because of Meegan who would go through 'every single new tape made every day' each night listening for any riff or melody which sounded good enough to be included in the songs. This hard and tedious work paid off in the end.
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Wikipedia