Back in February, just days before I left for my 2 month Spanish Immersion trip to Colombia, I did an interview with Ellis. It was my second interview on the show, and my first phone interview and I generally am a nervous wreck at phone calls, especially when I don’t know the person I’m calling. It went really well (although I did have a little bit of trouble getting the exact songs I wanted to play in the right order ), we ended up talking for over half an hour about all sorts of things. It was actually the official release day for her latest album Break The Spell. (You can download or stream the interview here)

So I missed the concert, but I begged my husband to go and at least get me a CD. He ended up going to the whole show, and when I asked him about it he said he didn’t want to tell me anything. I finally dragged it out of him that it was an AWESOME show and he didn’t want to tell me about it because he didn’t want me to feel bad that I missed it.

Then this summer when I went to the Rocky Mountain Song School, I found out that Ellis was one of the teachers, and she was also available for mentoring sessions. I bee-lined it for the sign-up sheet as soon as it was put out because I knew I had to meet her in person, and she only had 4 slots.

My first class that week was a guitar class, which ended up being a little beyond my skill set, at least in that I couldn’t keep up in the moment with the rest of the class. And then ALL the doubts came rushing in – “See I told you that you weren’t good enough to be here! You should just go back and stay in your tent the whole week!” sort of thing.

Luckily my mentoring session was right after that. I sat down with Ellis and told her I was the one who interviewed her from Fairfield and she thanked me for it again, and then asked what I wanted to get out of the session. I said I wasn’t quite sure but just knew I liked her vibe and wanted to meet her in person. And then I told her about the guitar class just previously and pretty much burst into tears.

She told me that every person – student and teacher alike – at the camp was feeling the way I was feeling, or had felt that way before, or would likely feel that way at some point in the future. Which was a huge relief to hear. We went on to have a great conversation about lots of things relating to the artistic gremlins that everyone deals with, and some strategies for dealing with them.

It was really a perfect way to start the week, to have my confidence breakdown right away, and get some great, supportive words of wisdom directly after that to help me get my head on straight for the rest of the classes.

A couple days later I met her manager Terri when they did a “Musician Think Tank” class to talk about different strategies for musicians to make money and survive the touring world. Terri is just as sweet, supportive and down-to-earth as Ellis, but she also has a very focused, no-nonsense mind that makes her a perfect moderator for those kinds of conversations and ensures they keep moving along and questions actually get addressed instead of lost in vague/creative/artistic land.

All of that is to say really, that I’m SUPER excited that both of them are coming to Fairfield this weekend. Ellis is doing a concert on Saturday at Cafe Paradiso, and then Ellis and Terri will be doing a workshop on Sunday! Here’s the workshop info (email me at LyricalVenus at gmail dot com for more details):

Host: Steve Cooperman
Location: Bonnell Building
107 1/2 S. Main St., Fairfield, IA 52556 US
When: Sunday, November 30, 2:00PM

You are invited to spend an afternoon with singer/songwriter Ellis and booking agent/artist Terri Mazurek, who will be sharing their advice and ideas on the business aspects of making music in a workshop entitled “Making a Living Making Music in the 21st Century.” The workshop takes place on Sunday, November 30 from 2 to 4 pm at the Bonnell Building in Fairfield. The cost is just $20/$15 for students. Topics include: how to set direction for your music career, how to find an audience for your music, promotion and marketing ideas, and how to plan/book your own tours. All levels of performing musicians are welcome, from those just starting out to touring musicians. Since 2006, Terri and Ellis have been the official business instructors at the prestigious Rocky Mountain Song School. Their workshops help creative artists to get on friendly terms with the business aspects of making music. They tackle music business challenges with humor, optimism, and compassion. Gemma Cohen, who was part of a large contingent of Fairfield musicians who attended this year’s Song School, says of Terri and Ellis, “I’d pay to just hang out with them!”

But of course, before all that, you can hear from Ellis and Terri LIVE on the Lyrical Venus Radio Hour! Just tune in to KRUU-LP 100.1 FM here in town or kruufm.com online worldwide, Tuesday from 9am-10am.

Official Ellis Website

The Coffee Song at Rocky Mountain Folks Fest 2007:

How Would It Be:

Feed and email readers may need to come to the blog to see the videos.

Finally found my camera cord and was able to upload pictures from the past month, including a few from some great concerts I saw up in Iowa City. They are kind of “artsy” because I didn’t want to use a flash and distract the performers. (clicking on any of the pix should take you to them in flickr if you want to see them bigger)

Here’s Melissa Ferrick. She plays FAST.

Here is Coyote Grace backing her up. I met Joe at Song School and he let me borrow his guitar during one of the campground song circles. It was fun to meet Ingrid and see them play together.

Here’s a wide shot of all of them playing together on Melissa’s song “Heartbeat” Apparently this was the first time they played together and afterward made it part of the show each night.

One of Ferron at the Women’s Music Festival.

Kim Char keeping the crowd entertained while the power went out. (city wide, and they found a generator so they could keep going)

Patrice Pike at the Women’s Music Festival.

And finally, here’s one of me with Dar Williams after her concert. Is it just me or do we both have one eye more squinty than the other? That obviously means something for my musical career. heh heh.

Back in January I had the great pleasure of hosting Sharon Bousquet in the KRUU studio for my very first interview on Lyrical Venus. This week I’m excited to have her back with her newly formed trio!

Beaucoup Shakti takes the first half of its name from French and the second from Hindi to mean “lots of creative energy/life force” and they are aptly named. Multi-instrumentalist Eric Hurlin and vocalist Heather Love take Sharon’s songs to a whole new level, and they were dang good before! (Vocalist Gemma Cohen often adds her beautiful harmonies to the mix for an extra treat.)

The gang will be sharing the stage with fellow Iowa artists of the BeJae Fleming Duo at Cafe Paradiso on Saturday, September 6th ate 8pm.

Tune in to KRUU-LP 100.1 (kruufm.com for those of you out of town) Tuesday at 9am for a taste of what you can hear at the concert, plus a few new tracks from more of the amazing gals I met out at Planet Bluegrass.

I almost missed
Girlyman when they came through this fall. I’m glad I didn’t, or I would have also missed out on discovering a new favorite artist! The concert was on a Monday night, an hour and a half away, and I kind of spaced on getting a ticket till that actual day. I think it was partly that I was waiting for their street team coordinator to get back to me, the last time they came through I put up posters and such in exchange for a ticket, but it never happened this time around. All of a sudden at work I thought “Hey wasn’t the concert today?” Luckily when I called CSPS they still had tickets.

I got stuck wrapping up end of day stuff at work, so I arrived at CSPS a little late, and the opening act had already started. I could hear her from over the divider, and as I whispered to the door man that I had a ticket held for me I thought “Who is THAT?!”

Scurrying to an empty seat on the edge (every seat is good at CSPS) I settled in and looked up to see a girl with cool tattoos, spiky hair and a guitar finishing a song with Nate from Girlyman. Her name was Adrianne and her set proved her to be everything I love in a musician – powerful, intelligent, confident, insightful, vulnerable, humorous and talented! One particularly memorable moment of the evening was when a train came through town just as Adrianne was about to start a song. Every time she tried to start, the train would blast its horn, probably 7 or 8 times. It was really to the point of ridiculousness, but she handled it gracefully, joking about how she now understood why their hotel for the night offered complimentary earplugs.

I knew before her set was over that I’d be going home with two CD’s that night, the new Girlyman one, and an Adrianne one. I ended up choosing her album Down To This, which is a collection of live acoustic recordings, because I figured it would be the closest to what I’d seen that night that I liked so much. Don’t let the word “acoustic” fool you, Adrianne’s music runs the full range from soft & sweet to full out rockin’ it! The high energy Shout It Out (her self proclaimed “Avril moment”) really got me through several days at work. The song is so fun and infectious, it was all I could do not to “shout it out” along with her.

Adrianne’s press info includes an impressive roster of people she’s shared the stage with, including many of my personal favorites:

“Adrianne has been playing, writing and performing for over ten years, by way of Miami, Boston, Toronto, London and now Los Angeles. She has shared the stage with artists like Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Michelle Malone, Melissa Ferrick, Emm Gryner, Tegan and Sara, Girlyman, Kay Hanley, Peter Mulvey, Lori McKenna, The Weepies, Kristen Hall, Matt Nathanson, Tracy Bohnam, Ember Swift and Michelle Lewis, Jonatha Brooke, Ian Moore, Colin Hay and Jeff Buckley and Julie Wolf…”

If the company she keeps gives you any indication of what caliber to expect, the bar is set pretty high! With her song 10,000 Stones on Men in Trees on Friday December 7th, and a new album due out in February 2008, I think we can look forward to a lot more from Adrianne!

Bio, tour updates, album listings, music, vids and more:
Adrianne’s Website
Adrianne’s MySpace
Adrianne’s YouTube Channel

Buy Down to This:
CD Baby
DRM Free Download on Amazon
Download on iTunes

Photo by Jeff Fasano

Coming soon: The Girlyman writeup! Subscribe to Lyrical Venus by Email or by RSS Feed and have the updates come straight to you!

When I went to the Ani DiFranco concert on her Handful of Dates Tour in Iowa City last month, I was completely BLOWN AWAY! I know, I know – as a female folkie I’m supposed to have Ani’s entire collection already or something, but I think I just wasn’t ready till now to really dig in. And it actually seems like a good time to get to know Ani – she just released Canon, which is a career retrospective, so it’s got a little something from every album she’s done, and it was all handpicked by her, so in a way it’s an interesting, layered self-portrait.

I had a pretty good seat, about 10 rows back on the left side, and close to the center aisle. Similar to to the phenomenon I noticed at my first Dar Williams concert, the thing that struck me as soon as Ani stepped on stage was how she is physically tiny but energetically POWERFUL. I think maybe that power is why I shied away from her music for so long. I knew she was powerful, I’d heard mostly about her angry reputation and anger has historically scared me half to death, even when it’s not directed at me. I’ve heard from friends who have been long-time Ani fans that having a baby has really softened her.

Seeing her on-stage I quickly found that Ani is not scary angry – the angry stuff was more of a righteous anger that sees what is wrong and gets things done about it. (Yeah, I get the whole Righteous Babe thing now!) And a lot of the songs were incredibly vulnerable, or just plain beautiful. I was really impressed with her high energy, her stage presence, the confidence and joy she exuded while performing. While her lyrics show that she definitely experiences moments or areas of insecurity, she’s brave enough to throw it all out there, which I think is often the fastest (though not necessarily the most pleasant) way to process through something.

For example, one of my favorite songs of the night was a new one called Present/Infant, aka “that one about mirrors”. In it, Ani talks about a moment of self criticism, and how the innocence of her baby jolted her into remembering her true beauty. She just performed it for AOL, and it’s so new I think this and the podcast might be the only way to hear it outside of a concert at the moment:

Email and RSS readers may need to come to the blog to see the video

During the concert, I was so inspired that I started ticking off as many parallels or similarities between me and Ani as possible, hoping that it might mean something. I was excited that we were both wearing cargo pants (although I’ve since noticed they seem to be a staple for her), and one particular line that stuck out for me was: “you’ve gotta crawl through the desert between when you hear it and when you can play it with your hands” from the song Lag Time because that’s something that totally applies to me – I’m always getting frustrated by the things I can conceptualize but not yet express/do – in music and all of life really.

The creative energy in the theater was so electric, at one point some new song lyrics of my own started coming to me! I had to grab my journal out of my purse and scribble some notes by the spill-off of the stage lights. So far it’s definitely more driving and intense than stuff I’ve written before, we’ll see how it turns out. It’s also one that so far I can hear a lot better than I can play with my hands. It’s kind of exciting though, like maybe I’ve just opened up a whole new area of song themes for the future.

In the Spinner interview podcast (where she performed the Present/Infant song) Ani talked about learning to play the guitar out of a book of Beatles songs and I grinned myself silly because that’s totally how I taught myself to play. (I don’t know which book she used, but this is the one that helped me .) She said something else about “that great thing music does so well” in connecting people and making them feel like they are not alone. It resonated big time for me, because that is what draws me to music so strongly – the way that some person I don’t know can say the unformed words in my heart, and make me breathe easier for it. That’s powerful. That’s amazing. That’s what I would love to give back to the world, to even one person. Because I know how sometimes one song can get you through a day at work, or get you out of bed every morning for a month, or bring a smile to your face each and every time you hear it.

I’m not quite sure what it is about certain artists that radiates from them so strongly, but Ani has been inspiring me hardcore for over a month now and I think it’s just the beginning. It’s kind of like discovering an awesome TV serious on DVD after it’s been going for a couple seasons. You get to gobble down hours and hours of a great story without having to wait a week for the next episode, at least until you catch up.

Obviously the best place to get Canon is on Ani’s website. Her website and live shows are the only place to get her official bootlegs. But here’s a quick link to it on iTunes if that’s your preferred method.

You can also preview some songs on her MySpace page. The page is not run by Ani herself, but by her trusty intern Amanda, who does a great job with info and contests, etc.

Ok, one last thing. Because it’s so good, and because it’s something I really need to remember, here are the lyrics to Present/Infant (at least how they sound to me based on the podcast):

Present/Infant ~ Ani DiFranco

lately I’ve been glaring into mirrors, picking myself apart
you’d think at my age I’d have thought of something better to do
than make insecurity into a full time job
make insecurity into an art
yes and I fear my life will be over
and I will have never lived it unfettered
always glaring into mirrors, mad I don’t look better

but now here is this tiny baby
and they say she looks just like me
and she is smiling at me
with that present infant glee
and I would defend to the ends of the earth
her perfect right to be

so I’m beginning to see some problems
with the ongoing work of my mind
and I’ve got myself a new mantra
it says “don’t forget to have a good time”
don’t let the sellers of stuff
power enough to rob you of your grace

love is all over the place
there’s nothing wrong with your face

love is all over the place
there’s nothing wrong with your face

lately I’ve been glaring into mirrors, picking myself apart

Amazing right? There’s something really healing about hearing someone tell you there’s nothing wrong with your face over and over…

I think I’m going to listen to it again. As Ani says – Don’t forget to have a good time!

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So the Dar party was great fun! Many of the people who showed up were fairly new to Dar, and I think actually seeing her on screen was the next best introduction to seeing her live.

The DVD started off with Dar talking about Woodstock (where the concert was filmed) and performing in general and how there seemed to be something amazing and perfect about every night on tour – like adding a song to the set list out of the blue, and having someone come up to her afterwards saying that they’d driven 400 miles to hear that particular song. Then she did a solo set, and a set with the band.

I love hearing Dar’s stories about the songs, it adds a even more depth and understanding to the lyrics. I got goosebumps a few times because I was hearing the songs on a new level. It was also fun to hear some new stories or insights she had gained about a song, and then try to guess which one she was talking about before she started playing.

There was a brand new song called “The Easy Way” that she said was about her life as a musician and how she’d had several chances during her career to take an easy way out, but stuck to her principles and did it her way. I think that’s why people connect to Dar so powerfully, she’s very real and honest and herself.

If you’re interested in the Dar Williams: Live at Bearsville Theatre DVD, you can pre-order the full version with 16 songs, music videos and behind the scenes footage on MusicSpace.com. I definitely recommend it!

And now I’d like to take a moment to thank the people who made this event possible!

Provided by Razor and Tie, Dar’s record label:
1) Dar Tour Poster
2) Sampler CD
3) 45 minute Live at Bearsville preview DVD
4) “Cool As I Am” button
5) Coupons to get a discount off the full length DVD

Provided by me (oh, that’s cheezy, I didn’t mean to thank myself, just list stuff):
1) Mini lemon-poppyseed muffins
2) Chocolate chip cookies (the dough was actually made by my friend B, so all I had to do was mix in the chips and bake!)
3) Carrot sticks & celery & ranch dressing
4) Mandarine-Tangerine Mint Iced Tea
5) A few original tunes after the show

Provided by Goj:
1) Two bags of super tasty cheesy popcorn
2) Ginger ale

Provided by Tommy:
1) House cleaning
2) Furniture moving
3) Picture taking
4) Amazon herb tea

Provided by Gilberto:
1) Projector setting up
2) House cleaning
3) Furniture moving
4) Picture taking

Provided by the Library:
1) A projector!

Provided by Everyone Who Came:
1) Listening ears
2) Smiling faces
3) Good times!

P.S. Speaking of divinely orchestrated things – I’d told people I might do a couple of my own songs at the end, but after the amazing show, I was starting to chicken out. RIGHT at that moment someone called me out of the blue to say how much she liked my songs and wished I would play out more because they really touched her. (The last time she’d seen me play was a couple years ago at an open mic.) It was exactly what I needed to hear, because ever since Dar made such a huge difference in my life, I’ve been hoping that I might someday be able to give something like it back to the world. I think I’ve been holding back waiting to get “good enough”, but I’m also starting to think that you get better by DOING, not waiting for someone to tell you “ok, you’re now officially let out of the house” type of thing. And hey, if I can’t play for my friends, who else?

I love this sweet little video of Ani DiFranco performing Overlap with Erin McKeown and Julie Wolf. It starts out with the girls practicing unplugged, probably in a hotel room, and then melts into them performing the song on-stage. The camera work is obviously by someone close to them because that person got to be at the rehearsal and had a really good balcony seat at the concert.

I have to admit I never got into Ani the way people seem to expect me to. I have a few of her songs from iTunes but not one whole album! Most of my early exposure to her was more through friends doing covers in dorms and such. I’m feeling like I should explore her stuff a little bit more though, because I certainly like what I have, and what I’ve heard from my friends. T gave me a little overview of “the history” of Ani in college once. She had almost every album and highlighted the changes and growth from the first one to the most recent. It was pretty encouraging actually to realize that even someone as famous as Ani DiFranco started with what she knew and could do and then evolved from there. That’s the process for pretty much everyone I guess, but it’s easy to see someone really talented and say “I’m not as good as that, and I don’t know if I ever will be, so I should just give up now.” Some of her simple first songs (like Both Hands) are still my favorites!

Back to the video though, what is really neat to me about it is the collaboration of the three artists, especially because I’ve seen both Erin and Julie live. T actually introduced me to Erin McKeown a few years ago, I think she had seen Erin open for an Ani concert. (now I’m wondering if it was for this same tour featured on the video?) I really fell in love with Born to Hum off Erin’s 2003 album Grand. Got on her mailing list and then got to see her live when she came through Iowa City about a year ago with Melissa Ferrick. Very awesome, fairly small but packed concert at The Mill, but that’s probably a story for another post. I’ve seen Julie Wolf a couple times playing with Dar Williams. It must be so neat to get to play with so many different artists the way Julie does. Getting this little sneak peak at the rehearsal process and then seeing how it translates to full-on, fun and funky performance is a real treat! Enjoy!