Stephanie Nilles, Kay Meek Studio Theatre Cabaret, May 3 and May 4. Tickets $29-$38. For more information visit kaymeek.com/stephanie-nilles.
The singer barrels down the road. On the road, she’s home. The destination’s not always well known, but she follows the path the music carves out for her.
Songwriter and barrelhouse musician Stephanie Nilles sits in her van in Camarillo, Calif., en route to her next destination.
“I’m basically on the road all the time,” she muses. When she’s not sleeping in her car, she tends to call New Orleans home. But lately, she says, she’s been swept up by the iconic dust bowls of America.
“I didn’t discover the desert really till about five years ago. I would always just blow through it and stick to the cities and now I’ve been playing in a lot of really small towns in West Texas, Arizona, New Mexico – I keep spending more and more time around here.”
On and off, Nilles has been on the road for more than 10 years, exploring pockets of the U.S. and Canada as she easily rips off more than 150 performances a year.
Her music’s difficult to quantify, but could be said to lie somewhere in between the ragtime chops of New Orleans’ Jelly Roll Morton and the anti-folk ephemera of the East Village, with a little Chicago blues thrown in the mix.
Her latest project is an album called The Harbinger: Act 1 (the first in a purported trilogy), a song cycle for radio-drama based on Shakespeare’s Othello and set in post-Katrina New Orleans. She’ll be performing pieces from the album, as well as a scattering of other original tunes and notable covers of classic jazz songs, during a two-night stint at the Kay Meek Centre next week.
If Harbinger seems like an ambitious undertaking, its scope comes from a place of genuine curiosity and admiration for literature.
“I just had the idea of taking on Shakespeare,” Nilles explains. “Honestly, I think it was observing a lot of American political happenings that made me start thinking very seriously about Shakespearean characters.”
Othello follows the titular character, a powerful general in the Venetian army, whose life is ruined by the conniving solider Iago. The sense of perpetual warring in the play, Nilles says, is relatable to the post-Katrina and post-9/11 era in the U.S., when an everlasting sense of instability reigned (reigns?) supreme.
“Everybody is unsure whether they’re in wartime or peacetime. It’s very nebulous and I think that messes up our psyches,” she says.
But she had a revelation when writing it, realizing that Iago, who conspires against Othello, who is black, is not so much pure evil as he is a pure symbol: “He’s very reasonable – in a world that’s racist!” she explains. “He ends up becoming the sort of perfect mirror to society.”
Nilles musical ambitions have a literary quality (she was once described as someone who has been “doin’ (Ken) Kesey proud one bar at a time since 2008”), where these days she aims to tell stories that are less about setting and more about storyline and compelling characters.
“I’m drawn towards long-term projects as opposed to just writing three-minute songs and having them be their own separate worlds,” she says.
Born and raised in Chicago, Nilles was more immersed in the world of classical music than Chicago blues when growing up.
Her love for the old timey started up after college, when she moved to New York and became immersed in the folk scene, becoming specifically enamoured with the form of the murder ballad, a type of storytelling and songwriting that generally depicts the events of a murder or crime in its lead up and aftermath.
“My ears perked up at the notion of getting to know those songs,” she says. “To be exposed to music where it’s all about the words and the storytelling was interesting to me – but at the same time there are beautiful melodies and very complex harmonic structures.”
Escaping New York years later in a bid to find more affordable locales, she ended up hitching her own wagon and never really settled down. She eventually came to call New Orleans home after falling in love with its “velvety air, and the colours, and the smell of jasmine, and the sound of frogs even in the wintertime.”
Despite its revered music scene, Nilles admits it took her some time to find her footing in New Orleans’ artistic community. Even so, her natural way of life tends to be on the road rather than The Big Easy.
“Where politics are concerned lately, I’m a very cynical person. I’ve kind of been in a headspace of we’re nearing the end for quite some time,” she says. But when politics aren’t concerned, she admits, the way of the road gives her characters, inspirations, and storylines aplenty.
“When you go from place to place in this way I think you get a really special, very positive view of humanity. People are very generous and very vibrant and they want to open things up and show you how they are in their homes.”
