Sometimes people ask me about myself, so here's a bit of info.
Why/How are you so creative/productive?
The short answer is that I like to make things and I make myself lists of things to do each day.
The flip answer is that I must have been dropped on my head as a baby.
However, when I think about it, I come back to a few things. My mother really didn't seem to care what I or my brothers did as children, and this freedom allowed me to explore all kinds of things. Our house was quite tiny and in our dining room there was a bookshelf that had paper, some to-do craft books, scissors, etc and we used to sit and make things when we weren't beating each other up. My older brother fascinated me and I tried to keep up with him. We made a very very long gum wrapper chain and he liked to draw and even one time had a contest with his friend of writing numbers in order. They put a considerable amount of time into this though I quickly bored and moved on.
I also had a Great Aunt who bought me a doll when I was very young that I named Karen. "Auntie" as we called her spent a lot of time making the doll and me matching outfits and sending them to me from Hershey, PA. This made a huge impression on me and opened me to a world of conscious thought and action.
Also, I was a bit precocious and got put in a gifted program where my assignments were all creative-writing, photography, clay, etc.
I honestly did not really truly think I was going to live a creative life-I thought I would become a Doctor. However, after I began studies at the University of Illinois, I pined for my sewing machine so much that I went back home after only a few weeks to retrieve it and began making clothing for myself when I had the time. I went through intense agony over the idea of changing my major from Biology to Fashion Design which brought down the wrath of my father. He didn't want me to be a Doctor, but rather a child psychologist, but he definitely did not want me to study fashion. What that has to do with me being creative, I am not sure, but I suppose I had to think it through and through and through. The same for writing songs. My creative choices were met with intense disapproval and opposition, so I suppose it means that I really had to want to do it to continue on, though he tried to steal my oar and take the wind out of my sails at almost every turn.
Digression.
There are a lot of creative ancestors whose genes I seem to have inherited. I have a treasured quilt from the 1880's that I'm assuming was made by my maternal great grandmother or her mother. When I first looked at it in my Great Aunt's wooden chest, I was spellbound. It is quite simple, but so beautiful. I thought for sure my Aunt Esther had given it away but found it after her death and took it home. To me, this shows me who I am. There are many many ugly but well put together quilts. This one is timeless.
My female ancestors were not able to fully realize their creativity, though my Great Aunt quickly took to the camera and left me with wonderful pictures beginning in the late 1910's. She didn't write verse, but kept a diary most of her life. She cut out things from the newspaper that appealed to her. Truly she was my mother.
On my father's side, there is creativity as well. My Aunt Sandi used to redo entire car interiors! and make whole bridal party dresses! and one of our ancestors was a shoemaker, though most of the men were farmers, which meant that their wives had an overwhelming amount of work to do, so creative pursuits were secondary.
I do like to complete tasks, though it seems like I have an inordinate amount of unfinished projects. I try to take an inventory each day of what needs to be accomplished and mentally break it down into the steps involved, or the next step. I like to work alone and I might have ADD but have learned to use it to my advantage. When it strikes, I can flit from project to project--maybe paint for an hour, then play music, then get on the computer, etc.
How did you start writing songs?
Short answer is that I just did.
However, I took an early interest in the piano, tapping out the melody from a commercial on my toy piano as a toddler (as told to me by my mother). She played the piano and my father sang in the church choir, there was that. They enrolled me in piano at 5 with the church organist, who assigned pieces that I learned well or not. I very much wish she had taught me about chordal structure but she did not, so it eventually became boring to me. I did buy some blank sheet music and tried to write songs at about 10 but seemed to lack ambition.
Once I "discovered" the Beatles, things started to change as I bought and read through a book of their lyrics and was intrigued by the combination of melody, voice and text. I sang in the choir in Jr. High and High School. Luckily my high school choir director let me sing Tenor, Alto and finally Soprano, which stretched my voice. After freshman year of college, I bought a cheap acoustic guitar but hit a roadblock over my being left-handed. I seemed unable to settle the question for a few years before choosing to go Left. (Sometimes I think this was a huge mistake, but it's really too late now to change). I started writing verse after buying those blank notebooks with the grainy black cover that artists use for sketching. I took some lessons, but as a right-handed player, but as soon as I learned "Leaving on a Jet Plane" I started to tinker with chords and my own melodies.
Being a female singer-songwriter or the front person of a band was just not something that women seemed to do at my college so it was a challenge. There were a few women in bands--notably a woman named Rose who is still in the punk band Poster Children, but I didn't know her and was frankly, intimidated by most of the kids in the music scene. I would ask my girl friends if they wanted to be in a band but no one really did at first. Eventually I was allowed to be the singer for a cover band. We had one performance at Mabel's and that was really alright. The covers I remember us doing were: Rebel Rebel, White Room, and Cheap Sunglasses. Some were songs the guys already knew and some were songs I suggested, though I don't remember any of the other ones.
Then I moved briefly to work as a nanny in Wayne PA outside of Philadelphia and brought my guitar...then moved again briefly to Newton, MA for another nanny job and this time took both a songwriting and opera course through some Cambridge adult-education course. I really loved both classes. We had to write a song a week in the songwriting course, bring its in and provide lyric sheets for everyone and either perform the song or play it on cassette. It was great!
After moving back to UIUC, I kept writing, played my first solo show, started a band with my best girl friend, Alison, that we were going to call the Texas Waterbugs. However, fate intervened and I moved to New York to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology. It has always pained me that I left because I really would have loved being in a band with Alison. She was a great drummer and her father had let her drive his VW Bus that he named Orange Julius (which we did drive to see the Dead). The other members in the band were the physics PhD students we were dating, Pete on guitar and Rex on bass.
Then I moved to NYC, went to an open mic my first week and was offered 3 shows at the Lion's Den. What I thought might be the start of something great and relatively fast moving has turned out to be a rather long and circuitous, serpentine road.
What is your favorite medium?
This one is like asking which is your favorite child. Sometimes I feel like being a singer-songwriter combines all the things that I love, writing, music, fashion, partying and fun, but it's often been very cruel to me. It's like trying to hug a rosebush. Once you get past the pain of thorns, you get to the intoxicating scent of roses. But if you go at it bare, like I seemed to have, you really have to brace yourself, and quite frankly, sometimes I seem to have been sleepwalking or something and not able to steel myself for the thorns.
Fashion, I feel is in my blood, it's hard and yet not hard for me. It seems to be super easy and I seem to get perhaps more enthusiasm for my output here, but maybe that's because it's visual and people can wear it, touch it, own it, whereas music might be more cerebral. However, the fashion world is very crowded like music, and the business side of fashion has been something I have struggled with. Right now, I am content to make my own clothes (but has that really changed since the beginning) and sell small amounts here and there. Which brings me to...
Painting. Painting I do really love. It's not something that I pursued for a long time, because I think I got a little spooked when I first started painting with oil on canvas with my then boyfriend, Jeff. The cool thing for me is seeing how that first painting relates to the paintings I do now--it's really like picking up a stitch or a conversation that was started years ago. I've been saying that I do love painting at the moment because it's something I can do to please myself and only myself and keep at home if need be. I love art and in my younger years spent a lot of time in museums looking at art and hey, now I'm making it! But what intimidated me years ago was Jeff's roommate Frank who told me that he liked my painting more than Jeff's and me not wanting to compete with Jeff or steal his thunder. However, Jeff did teach me a lot, as has my husband. I don't feel like the field for great women painters is too crowded, so I feel that by painting, I'm adding to a collective body of work. Also, it's super easy for me to see that I have a style and a POV. I mean, with painting, I could tell you that Lee Bontecou, or Frida Kahlo, or Jean-Michel Basquiat or Andy Warhol or Cy Twombly have influenced me, or even Masisse, or Miro, or Picasso, but that might not be readily apparent.
Writing. I love to write, as you can see. Writing also freaked me out for a while, mainly because my father used to type and send me letters which always seemed like a form of abuse and so I was afraid that my writing would do the same thing. I have vented in type and then regretted it, because it's there like an ugly stain. I've started several memoirs, but finding the desire to finish one or three or more is hard. It's like a purse string that I need to pull, pull together. I also am largely untrained here. No graduate writing seminars in my CV.
What else is there? Sculpture, as a friend of mine pointed out a few months ago. I'm starting ceramics, and do love it, and see it as a haha form of relaxation but it's hopefully a really long and slow build for me. Big sculpture? I do have another friend who welds who I'd love to take a class with. But not now.
Ah. How do you even write songs with all the chaos in your life?
Again, short answer is that I've been doing this a long time now, so it's just "something I do."
The longer answer is that, just like there are "many ways to skin a cat" (a terrible phrase, really) there are a lot of ways to write a song and it definitely helps if you have more than one thought process. Easily, I just come up with melody and words. In my sleep. In the grocery store. When I'm reading something, thinking about something. I used to carry around pens/pencils, and paper and a recordable cassette player. I still have many cassettes that contain the starts of countless songs. Once I got an iPhone and realized that the voice memo function could replace the cassette, I started using that and have written a gob of songs that way. I might start a snip, then record another snip, sometimes of me singing a melody, sometime me with the guitar, sometimes with me on piano. It gets a bit overwhelming because i have a lot of separate files. However, if I find myself singing a bit over and over again, that might be the one worth going back to. After my friend Bridget died in 2013, I was moved to finish songs again, which are the batch that I'm currently recording.
I scribble a lot and so sometimes it's a matter of rounding up all the scraps, laying them out in front of me and trying different chords until something sticks. Almost every time I am a bit freaked out until it's done and my mind races with the thought that I don't have everything I want to say or don't have the right chords. I've been criticized by some for not having more complex chords in my songs, so sometimes I try to find something new and different to play.
Now I have a nice comfortable loft where I can sit and work through my scraps. I steal a bit of time and try to knock it out. But, sometimes I get ideas for alternative melodies, alternative lyrics which has a tendency to slow me down. For instance, I might need to come up with an entirely new song to complete my 4th ep. I have several unrecorded songs to choose from, songs I like, but maybe they are not what's needed. So, there is a need to keep mining the depths of my mind, or (what i have been thinking) trying to write a song for "right now".
I think one has to be comfortable with a bit of chaos, which I not always am. I'm trying to knit together these different bits of thought, emotion, experience and observation into a cohesion. Am I successful? I don't know and can't really say.
If you're so good, why aren't you more well-known?
Ok, this answer presupposes that I think I'm good. And anticipates a critical voice (hello, Dad!).
Am I good? I don't really know. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. I've never really gotten a negative or bad review, but in person, I've taken a lot of flak! Well, ok, Richard Milne at WXRT wouldn't play the last song I sent him. But, actually, he didn't even give it a negative review. He liked my voice and lyrics, but wouldn't play it and didn't elaborate.
Sometimes, tbh, I don't feel confident on stage, mainly playing the guitar, but sometimes singing, too, though most of my solo shows (at least when I played in NYC) ended with requests for an encore but who really knows? When I see footage of my live shows, usually I cringe and see all the mistakes I made.
But, the larger question of why am I not more well-known. That i can take a shot at answering, since you'll probably never get the answer another way. It seems to me, that based on my experiences in the music industry and as a woman-at-large, I think there has been a huge barrier that for lack of a better word, is best known as misogyny. Hatred of women. From having my head slammed so hard by a guy when I wanted to slam dance at a Ministry show in Boston, to it being suggested that I sleep my way to success both overtly and covertly, to having my ideas overlooked and overridden, to being aware of the lack of women on the radio in almost all formats, to the tale after tale I hear about sexual harassment in the music industry--not over by any means, to the lack of women on panels, in positions of power, and so on and so forth.
That being said, when I was really making a push for label support, women were also afraid to support women in some instances. I pray and hope that that is the old way. There were, of course many women who did support me--and I played almost exclusively at Meow Mix (Brooke) and CB's Gallery (Micheline) for that very reason-those bookers would call me and schedule me, taking one job off my to-do list. And the two agents I had to represent my music to film and TV (and yes, they did get me placements) were both women--but then both dropped out of doing that.
So, then when I write out my successes, I think, well, I did have help, maybe I did just suck. But really, the men who had the power always seemed to want something else. Jeff Buckley's lawyer wanted me to get a deal, then he'd represent my band, Dogwater. Who knows what Managers wanted. The men with power wanted sex, or again, wanted me to get one other piece of the puzzle--like a record deal before they would help out. Not all men, of course. But it's hard to do it all when you are living hand to mouth.
I think my problem was really, that I was not comfortable having sex with married men. And eventually, casual sex. It's embarrassing to type this, but it seemed to be necessary to sleep with at least one married man, if not many to move ahead back in the days of Action Hero Superstar. Now, I'm not sure what my male peers had to do, and maybe it was something equally abhorrent. But when we are talking about Male Privilege and White Male Privilege, aren't we really talking about the structure of society, the misogyny and racism that is an unequal filter? I think this is sort of the "thing we don't talk about when we talk about women in music" because I can fault myself for not trying harder, trying to book more out of town shows, and, then, since music is subjective, we can always go back to the, "well, you just weren't good enough" argument.
So maybe it's one or the other, a bit of both, or neither! The good thing is, you will have a chance to be your own judge very soon when I start rolling out these new eps/new videos. I will make some playlists on youtube, spotify, etc. and you can compare and contrast me/my music/videos with other women in my genre. And, you can comment away on youtube!xo
+++++++++++
ok, well, that's where I'm going to stop for now. If I can think of another question people ask with some regularity, I'll put the q&a here. If you have a question, get ahold of me via the"contact us" page and I'll try to answer asap. xo!