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November 19, 2026
“Decades” was recorded completely live, without overdubs, click track or pitch correction, giving the songs room to breathe in a natural performance captured over two days at White Whale Studios in Santa Rosa. In the most stripped back work John Courage has presented, it now seems as a sort of reintroduction- to a local artist reaching for a broader canvas to tell a story, or rather many stories – that span Decades.
From the beginning, Jade Brodie has paved her own way. Armed with life experience and the truth, Brodie has begun to carve out her space in western songwriting using her unique style that blends each era of her life and facet of her personality with flawless depth and simplicity.
Brodie was raised in a small rural town most famous for its role as not only, “The Egg Basket of the World”, but also the filming location for Alfred Hitchcock’s, “The Bird’s”. Petaluma’s unique combination of dairy and poultry farming heritage, historic Victorian architecture, and direct correlation to the arts set the stage for Brodie’s unique take on the world, creating in her a set of values and interests that would eventually come full circle as her life played out.
Brodie left high school early, opting to move out on her own and start creating a path for herself at a young age. She worked odd jobs to pay the bills and began to explore her relationship with music, playing guitar and writing songs as an outlet for her creativity along the way. Eventually, she took a job with the railroad, with the intention of becoming a railroad mechanic, but eventually switched tracks and took a conductor job with Union Pacific instead.
Union Pacific took her to Winnemucca, NV. With half her time spent away from home, Brodie found the space to write and play more frequently, using her time plugging away down rail lines and nights spent alone in hotel rooms to pen songs about the things she was seeing, feeling, and experiencing. Hard hats and hard living began to take their toll, but almost fortuitously, Brodie was furloughed and forced to choose between life in rural Nevada, or a move back to urban San Jose, CA with the railroad. Brodie “pulled the pin” and never looked back, leaving her life on the rails for a job on a working cattle ranch — a decision largely driven by her lifelong love of horses.
Ranch life stuck. Brodie is still a working cowboy on one of the famed “big outfits” of Northern Nevada, writing songs about her new way of life in the same way she wrote about life on the railroad — with a truthfulness born of living what she writes about. Her songs are rich and multi-dimensional, balancing the hard realities of ranch life with a uniquely feminine perspective, sung and played in her soft yet forceful way.
Brodie has been featured in a number of songwriter showcases and plays independently throughout the western states, but most of the time she can be found in the saddle with a good horse beneath her and a good dog trotting along at her side, likely thinking on her next song and living life one day at a time.