Ian Brennan (music producer)

Ian Brennan (/aɪˈən/; born June 15, 1966) is an American music producer.
Of the albums he has produced, Tinariwen's Tassili (2011) won a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album and Zomba Prison Project (2015) was nominated; and Ramblin' Jack Elliott's I Stand Alone (2006) and Peter Case's Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John (2007) were nominated for Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album.
Brennan has authored eight books, three on anger, Anger Antidotes (2011), Hate-less (2014), and Peace by Peace: 99 Steps Toward Violence Prevention and De-escalation (2025); a novella, Sister Maple Syrup Eyes (2015); and four on music, How Music Dies [or Lives] (2016), Silenced by Sound (2019), Muse-Sick (2021), and Missing Music: voices from where the dirt roads end (2024). Brennan travels in search of countries and languages whose music is under-represented internationally, making field recordings of musicians and producing albums of their work. He started out making nine albums of his own music, and hosting benefits, producing live recordings and releasing compilation albums of local bands in San Francisco.
Brennan was born in Oakland, California to James Brennan, a railroad engineer, and Marilyn Brennan, a nurse from a tiny town in eastern Kansas. He grew up on the Pleasant Hill border in the same suburban home his entire life. He and his older brother and sister have a mere two-and-one-half-year span between the three of them. This is due in part to his sister, who is the middle child, being born more than two months premature with Down syndrome.
At age five, he began playing drums and switched to guitar at age 6, which he taught himself to play.
At age 20, he self-released his first solo album and went on to produce eight more. He reflects now that he was his "own worst enemy" and made some of the "most horrible albums possible" due to his obsessive-compulsive, autocratic approach.
Beginning in 1996, for five years he hosted a free, mostly acoustic music show in a San Francisco laundromat. He would perform solo and feature a different local band each week. He documented the shows as field recordings and these resulted in three Unscrubbed compilation albums in 1997–1999.
Brennan also regularly organized benefit shows for social and/or political causes during this period with artists such as Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson. Most notably he presented Fugazi, Vic Chesnutt, and Sleater-Kinney for free in Mission Dolores Park to honor the 20th anniversary of Food Not Bombs in 2000, as well as staging Green Day and The Blind Boys of Alabama for free in front of the steps of San Francisco's City Hall on the Sunday before George W. Bush's election as President, also in 2000.
He received two Grammy Award nominations for producing albums in the traditional folk category (Ramblin' Jack Elliott's I Stand Alone in 2006, and Peter Case's Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John in 2007). The Ramblin' Jack record features Lucinda Williams and members of Wilco, X, Los Lobos, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
In 2009, he and his wife, the Italian-Rwandan filmmaker, photographer, and author, Marilena Umuhoza Delli, began traveling the world in search of countries and languages that were underrepresented internationally. Amongst others, this has resulted in releases from Rwanda, Malawi, South Sudan, Cambodia, Djibouti, Tanzania, Romania, Comoros, Pakistan, Vietnam, from within Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya and most notably from inside Zomba Central Prison in Malawi.
In 2011, he won a Grammy Award for the Tuareg band, Tinariwen's Tassili album, which was recorded live in the southeast Algerian desert just months before the Arab Spring erupted and war swept through the area. The album also includes members of TV on the Radio, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and guitarist Nels Cline.
In 2015, he gained a nomination for Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for Zomba Prison Project, the story of which was covered around the world including on the front-page of The New York Times and by the television program 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper reporting. The segment won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Feature Story and was nominated for two other Emmys.
Brennan has also produced many of filmmaker, John Waters' live comedy shows since 2001 at venues such as The Fillmore in San Francisco and the Royal Festival Hall in London, as well as at festivals including Coachella, Bumbershoot, and Bonnaroo. Brennan has created pairings for Waters such as with Jonathan Richman, evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, Peaches, and Wanda Jackson.
Brennan has spoken about music at the Smithsonian Museum, the Grammy Museum, the University of London, The New School (New York), the Berklee College of Music, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, the WOMEX conference, the Le Guess Who? festival in The Netherlands, Peter Gabriel's WOMAD Festival (UK), the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, the Audio Engineering Society (AES), and WOMADelaide in Australia.
Brennan is known for his fly on the wall style of production and is often compared to Alan Lomax. He states that relationships and emotion are what interests him, not technology. He often prefers to work with those who have no previous musical experience and hearing from historically persecuted populations. He advocates for embracing imperfection as a partner and prefers to record outdoors and 100% live, without any overdubs.
At age 20, in need of a way to support himself, he began working in locked psychiatric hospitals as a counselor. He continued to do so for another fifteen years in psychiatric emergency rooms in Oakland and Richmond, California.
In 1993 he was asked to develop a curriculum and teach his co-workers in verbal de-escalation at East Bay Hospital in Richmond. This request was based on his having regularly demonstrated skill at de-fusing emotionally charged and violent situations. Through word of mouth, he began teaching full-time at hospitals, clinics, jails and schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and greater California. This teaching eventually led him around the country and then the world, having now taught in Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, at such places as University of California, Berkeley, the Betty Ford Center, and the National Accademia of Science (Rome).
Brennan has worked to establish a memorial for those who have died from homelessness in San Francisco. The installations were unanimously approved by the Board Of Supervisors, but later stalled due to opposition from the Mayors Office and the Chamber of Commerce. In the fall of 2019, Brennan produced a "sonic memorial" album featuring voices and songs from the homeless community of West Oakland.
Brennan wrote a piece in May 2019 for the Chicago Tribune criticizing the racist and misogynistic lyrics of The Rolling Stones', "Brown Sugar", and calling for the band to cease playing it live. In October 2021, the band announced that they were retiring the song from their performance repertoire. Brennan's piece was widely cited as a reference in this decision.
At age 19, Brennan's poetry was published for the first time in an anthology (Fineline Thunder) curated by his adult-school creative writing workshop instructor, Betty Solomon. He was published again that same year in the Berkeley poetry journal, Agape.
He has written about music for The Guardian, NPR, Guitar Player, Sound on Sound, Chicago Tribune, CounterPunch. BOMB, Pollstar, Modern Drummer, American Songwriter, Talkhouse, Huck, Songlines, The Quietus, No Depression (magazine), The Vinyl District, Afropop Worldwide, Quincy Jones' Qwest TV, Fretboard Journal, SonicScoop, Perceptive Travel, Flood Magazine, Zero, and Tape Op.
In 2011, he published a book on anger, Anger Antidotes. A follow-up, Hate-less, was issued in 2014.
In 2015, his semi-autobiographical novella, Sister Maple Syrup Eyes, was published, after working on drafts of it for over 25 years. It deals with the aftermath of the sexual assault of a partner, a trauma he experienced at age 21. Readers+Writers journal praised it, "A beautiful book. Achingly beautiful." And Louder Than War states it is, "….alive with the energy of an eye-witness." Small Press Picks noted, "In vividly re-creating Kristian's personal journey, Brennan offers a layered and moving exploration of the truth…"
His fourth book was How Music Dies (or Lives): Field-recording and the Battle For Democracy in the Arts. In it he explores concerns related to the continuing domination of English language media across the planet, and details how recording technology can lead to more lifeless results as well as centralization of content. LargeHearted Boy calls it "…one of the most thought-provoking books on modern music that I have ever read."
His fifth book, Silenced by Sound: the Music Meritocracy Myth, was published in the fall of 2019.
In 2020, Brennan co-authored Negretta: Baci Razzisti with his wife, Marilena Umuhoza Delli. The book is based on Delli's life growing-up in Italy's most conservative region with an immigrant mother from Rwanda.
Brennan has hosted book events with the disability rights activist Judith E. Heumann (featured in the Academy Award nominated documentary Crip Camp); tech visionary Jaron Lanier; David Harrington (Kronos Quartet); feminist scholar Silvia Federici; Ted Hughes Award winning, deaf poet, Raymond Antrobus; crime novelist Gary Phillips (writer); and music producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Billy Bragg, Toots and the Maytals).
Muse-Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes, was published by PM Press in October 2021.
In 2023, Brennan co-authored another Italian language book, Pizza Mussolini, with Marilena Umuhoza Delli.
Missing Music: stories from where the dirt roads end, was published in March 2024 with PM Press.
His latest book is Peace by Peace: 99 Steps Toward Violence Prevention & De-escalation, published in January 2025.
Acoustic performances at Brainwash Laundromat in San Francisco recorded live by Brennan.