Q AND A
ELIZABETH SHEPHERD
Elizabeth Shepherd introduces Rewind at the Havana Theatre, Sunday, April 22 at a 3 p.m. matinee show. Tickets $20.
TORONTO'S Elizabeth Shepherd has been steadily building a brilliant songbook of original material over the last couple of years.
Her music uses the rich history of jazz as a starting point for her own unique mix of soul, pop, blues and whatever else she is involved with at the moment.
In 2012 that means motherhood and just months after the birth of her daughter Sanna, Shepherd is releasing an album of cover tunes. Rewind might seem like a bit of a detour for this most auteur of musicians but it makes perfect sense at this time in her life and the tunes, after she's through with them, fit right in with the rest of her work.
Shepherd spoke to the North Shore News about the making of her new album.
North Shore News: Were you planning to do a covers album or did circumstances dictate it for you at this time?
Elizabeth Shepherd: I was touring the last album, Heavy Falls the Night, in Japan when it came out in 2010 and there were A&R reps from a label there called JVC who had come to the show and they asked me if I would do an album of standards. At that point I was working on some tunes for the next album which was to be original stuff. I said, 'No, not right now but I will keep you in mind if I'm doing anything.'
I continued to tour Heavy Falls the Night for the next 20 months which takes us to April of last year when I got home from that tour of Western Canada. I was four months pregnant at the time and realized that a project of original material was not going to happen before DDay which was, you know, my daughter's birth. Pregnancy is a time of such great changes and adjustment and I really wanted to have an album in the works to keep myself sane during pregnancy and to have something to tour now a couple of months into my daughter's life.
The JVC proposal came back to me and I thought maybe this is a good time to actually do that album. It was something I had planned to do at some point and with the pregnancy it just made sense.
It's a quicker process and in a way more fun to be picking other people's material and trying to shed some light on the work and put my own stamp on it. It was a much less painful process than trying to come up with something from scratch.
North Shore News: In the liner notes you say you were trying to do one thing but it turned out quite different - trying to hold on to something turned out to be an illusion.
Elizabeth Shepherd: I really felt nervous about becoming a mom because I'd seen this happen so much that when women become moms they completely disappear and give up on everything. And now that I'm a mom I can see how difficult that balance is to try to be a fully-present mother.
For the first six months your baby needs you, you're very much attached, almost like one person, and so I guess the idea with this album was to create something for myself just for me - something that I could do both during pregnancy and then I could take on the road after giving birth. I guess what I didn't anticipate was the extent I would want to disappear and be with my child and to have that focus be so strong.
For a while I thought, 'Yeah, I could never go back to music and I would be totally happy with that.' Now that I'm on the road again it's sort of come into focus about how much I love making music. I also love my daughter and how's this all going to work? That's where things are at now.
North Shore News: Did the actual recording process change for you this time? Elizabeth Shepherd: My body was different and as a singer your body is your instrument so it was very different in terms of how to sing - you know your running out of air as your baby gets bigger and so I would have to think in the moment 'How am I going to phrase this?' and where can I take a break that makes sense. I would get the hiccups while trying to sing a serious song and try to stay focused on that while my whole body was jumping up and down. It's a different process.
What was also different this time was in terms of how I brought about putting my own mark on each tune.
What I did was strip the tune down to its skeletal structure - chords, melody and lyrics - and played it as though I'd never heard it before. Not giving it any kind of treatment - no swing, no bossa nova, no hip-hop groove - nothing like that just the bare bones and then seeing where I thought the tune would be going. The recording itself was just book some time, go in there and do as many tunes as we can and repeat process.
North Shore News: How did you choose the tunes?
Elizabeth Shepherd: "Love for Sale" was one of the tunes that got me into jazz, hearing a version on Cannonball Adderley's Something Else and being completely taken by the tune, especially his solo. It's a song about prostitution so it's not the lightest of topics. It's usually sung in a really woeful way and Cannonball's version wasn't - it was really upbeat and uptempo but it still felt a little light. That's what I wanted to get out was the grit.
North Shore News: Let's go through the rest of the Rewind set. You have two French songs in the mix "Les amoureux des bancs publics" by Georges Brassens and "Pourquoi tu vis" by José Luis Perales.
Elizabeth Shepherd: I grew up in France and I wanted to pay tribute to that part of myself because I don't perform in French, I don't sing in French, I don't write in French and so that's a completely missing part of my musical self. I chose two classic tunes that I think anyone in France would know. I listened to them all the time so to me they're sort of standards. Cross-cultural standards.
North Shore News: You do Nat Adderley's "Sack of Woe." Elizabeth Shepherd: That's a tune that I came to really recently at a time when I wasn't in a great place - as we all know change is sometimes painful and so that tune spoke to me. Again that's a tune that's usually done uptempo and kind of fun but the content is really heavy and so I thought I would take it into a bit of a darker place.
North Shore News: You go into the Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes tune "Lonely House" near the top. Elizabeth Shepherd: That one I think is a gorgeous, gorgeous piece and it's always spoken to me. I haven't heard too many versions floating around out there and it's one song I've always wanted to cover. At different points in your life you'll read the same book and it will mean something different to you. Same with this song coming back to it now it means something different and I think it means even more to me thinking of the loneliness - you know motherhood is a lonely time so I thought it was one I could really deliver now fully informed of what the weight is in these lyrics.
North Shore News: Gershwin's "Buzzard Song" is an unusual track.
Elizabeth Shepherd: The "Buzzard Song" is a great song, it's so eery. The lyrics are so hopeful although it's a foreshadowing of what's to come. It's from Porgy and Bess and you know it's not going to turn out well and I felt it deserves to be heard more.
North Shore News: Apparently Gershwin didn't really know what to do with the song. Elizabeth Shepherd: Yeah, I think it was stuck back in after the fact. It's kind of a weird song. I know Ella and Louis did a version of it but other than that I don't know a ton of versions, I can't think of any off the top of my head. If I'm going to do a Gershwin tune I might as well pick one that is really out there. North Shore News: You wrote new lyrics to go with Bobby Hutcherson's "When You Are Near." Elizabeth Shepherd: When I first started at McGill and I switched from classical to jazz I was introduced to Bobby Hutcherson through a drummer friend. It's a gorgeous tune. I feel that the chord structure of it serves as a prototype for many tunes including Radiohead's "Exit Music (for a Film)." I kind of wanted to give a nod to Bobby Hutcherson as 'Yeah, you've heard it because he did it.' I wanted to sing it but there were no lyrics so I wrote some as a love song just based on the title "When You Are Near."
North Shore News: Mel Torme wrote "Born to Be Blue."
Elizabeth Shepherd: That one I remember the Nancy Wilson version - that's the one that did it for me. I was just kind of fooling around at home with it thinking what can I do and this one I sort of built from the ground up just with voice. It ended up being a vocal track with four different layers and then realizing if I'm doing this live I have to come up with some other way. It's kind of a poppy treatment of the song which I opted to go for - there is a juxtaposition as the lyrics for "Born to Be Blue" are kind of a downer. I like this idea of there being a little bit of friction between the lyrics and the arrangement. North Shore News: Denzal Sinclaire sings with you on the Ellington closer "Prelude to a Kiss."
Elizabeth Shepherd: In 2011 I was asked to be part of a number of tribute shows on the music of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot. Denzal was on the Joni Mitchell songbook and that's where I met him. We hit it off right away and of course I've heard him and been totally enamoured with his voice. It was such a delight to realize he was not only a great musician but a beautiful, beautiful person and so we've become friends.
He lives right around the corner, as luck would have it, and he was game to be part of the song. He's one of those people that should be famous. He should be in everyone's living room on their CD shelf.
North Shore News: Did you record other songs?
Elizabeth Shepherd: There are three other ones and actually there's a Japanese release that's a little bit different. We did (John Hicks') "Naima's Love Song" and (Ahmad Jamal's) "Poinciana" and also "Close to You," the Carpenters song. Digital is out this month and the album will be available in May. There will also be copies at the show.
