Profile
Name:
Alice
Channel Views:
11,779
Total Upload Views:
99,940
Style:
Soul
Age:
27
Joined:
Apr 16, 2006
Latest Activity:
4 weeks ago
Subscribers:
273
About Me:
Smith is, on the evidence of her solo debut, 'For Lovers, Dreamers & Me' (BBE Records), the most promising female singer-songwriter to go her own enrapturing way in a very long time. Her voice, with its four-octave range, is luscious and powerful and nuanced and finely sensitive to rhythm. Yet it never makes a cult of its own abilities; for all its fantastic manners, Smith's voice gets on down the road. Sometimes she sings with a booming intensity, yet Smith never loses the unlearnable balance and poise that separates good singers from great ones. And her basic attitudes, which are audible in every unforced phrase she negotiates, are all her own.
"I don't think of it as a soul record," she insists. "When I was in school, I really thought about soul a lot. I was listening a lot to Björk and to the Commodores. I really wanted to know how they felt. And especially with Björk, the music there told me wow, that's really her soul, there. I thought about her a lot, about the sound of her music... Well, it wasn't exactly about the sound, and it wasn't about what other people call 'finding your bounds', or whatever. I thought of her soul; her music made me contemplate her soul. It made me think of Björk, and how she felt. You know what I mean? What she felt like inside. It was never about the genre. So I just came never to think of the idea of soul as being about a category."
At 17, Smith moved from Washington to New York, where she continues to live, to enroll in Fordham University. She studied history and English -- or, as she puts it, "reading and writing." University life suited Smith. "I loved it," she remembers. "I just thought I wanted to stay in college forever. I came to New York all by myself; I didn't have any friends there. But it was fine. I felt comfortable. I started thinking, maybe graduate school? I was really cool with people who were smart, who knew stuff. It's very romantic and stimulating."
After college, Smith began to work as a back-up singer. She once briefly participated in what she calls "a little band" that played out and demoed ten or twelve songs. "For Lovers, Dreamers & Me" is her first solo album proper. It was produced by a drummer whom Smith met while putting together her first sessions for what became her debut album. Earlier, she had tried out and nixed a few producers. "I was recording these songs," Smith says, "and I needed a drummer. Because nobody else was doing it, he ended up producing the album. Then we started playing out." Things started to click.
Smith wrote four glorious songs of the ten that comprise 'For Lovers, Dreamers & Me'. These include "Dream," a quick-gaited wish for romantic success that constantly smoothes out its melodic and rhythmic angularity with colorful flourishes of reined-in brass and harmony vocals, and the lulling "Love Endeavor," which mixes bracingly the relative heat of downtown New York and Brazil. In between are the slow, shadowy, minor-key hopes and worries of "Do I," and an extraordinary thing entitled "Gary Song," a piece of music that demonstrates terrifically well Smith's contention that soul is not a category.
"Half of 'em are my songs," Smith says of her collection, "the other half, I found 'em. Mine sound like me. But I think I'm actually surprised, when people say that they can tell mine from the others. Whatever, I love 'em."
She still isn't sure, though, that with this album she has effected a top-drawer overhaul of the everyday form of the female soul album, which is itself a long tradition of renewing a long tradition. "That's big," she says, looking around her room at the Chateau. "It would be nice if this stuff got to be some other, some new shit. I would be so happy. I think it would be great, if this is where we're going. I would love to be the person to do it. But I almost want to say that I didn't intend that, but that wouldn't be right, not exactly. What I intended to do was to make a record. You know?"
Increasingly, everybody does and everybody will.
Record Label:
Epic Records
Label Type:
Major Label
Country:
United States
Albums:
Subscribers
(273)
Channel Comments
Se eu tivesse grana pra ir te ver em seus shows. Moro no Brasil e sonho com isso.
Bjus Alice
Viviane Mota