Facing down her own shyness has been a boon for Elizabeth Steen,
the only woman in Boston's electronica rock band Count Zero
and former side musician for Natalie Merchant. Steen now
has her own recording project called Fritter. Lead by Steen,
Fritter has just released their debut CD Mockery.
Steen sings lead vocals for the first time on these tunes she has
composed for herself. "Well I just had these tunes that I had written
and I wanted to record them. I didn't really consider it striking
out on my own."
On the Boston scene for over twenty years, Steen started out in
a surf band called The Beach Masters in which she played
a Vox Continental organ. Moving on to Count Zero was a big plus,
since being the keyboard player in an electronic rock band made
her input vital. Feeling more confident these days, Steen thought
it was time to put her own music out there. "It took a while to
get things to come together and to realize that it was something
that I could make happen. It took longer than it does for some people.
But I think everybody has a different trajectory in life. That's
why I called it Fritter, because I feel like I frittered a lot of
time away before I got around to making it happen."
Mockery is a collection of eleven original breezy pop rock
songs. Although her keys are ubiquitous, this is not the same music
she wrote with Count Zero. These tunes are catchier and more radio
friendly. "It's what came out of me," she said. "I listen to a lot
of different types of music and I love more experimental music.
I wouldn't mind going in that direction more. But I'm not really
much of a studio head. I wrote these songs in a more lo-fi way,
with just me and piano and then began to flesh them out in a studio."
Steen relied on Count Zero's lead singer Peter Moore to produce
Mockery. "He helped me to give it a little more with the
programmed sounds," Steen explained. "There's some drum machine
on it. There's some programmed keyboard sound on it." Steen has
become comfortable working with Moore over the years. Their partnership
made the album a musical success in that Moore could bring to life
in the studio the music Steen was hearing in her head. "I love his
approach to music. I love his song craft. He's just a wizard in
the studio. I also love his artistic sensibility. I knew he was
somebody I could communicate my ideas to. I could just say to him:
'I'm hearing this line in this section, and I'm hearing it in this
instrumentation and if that instrument didn't exist, if it was a
cross hybrid of several different instruments, he could program
that on his keyboard."
Steen's Fritter project is also much different than the music she
played when she went on tour in 1999 with Natalie Merchant. The
harmonic language is different and Steen's personality is, of course,
more introverted than Merchant's. Steen's song "Sohbet" is
one of the catchiest on her CD. The chorus is simple, but Steen's
sweet voice makes some unusual words sound like a nursery rhyme
being cooed by a child. "You're like Muji too/You read Rumi too/I'm
listening for you." "Sohbet" was born out of her reading of mysticism.
"The name is a Persian word which means mystical communication.
I was reading about Afghanistan after the war there. I was reading
about Sufism, Sufi mystics. One of my favorites is the poet Rumi.
I just started becoming influenced by his poetry and how he talks
about communicating on another level that's less direct than actual
verbal communication. I learned about how elephants can hear each
other over very long distances. They're hearing very subtle vibrations
in the ground. The noises that they emit work on very low vibrations
that the human ear can't hear. So, that's the general theme of that
song. It's about communicating through silence rather than words."
Preserving the childlike qualities of Steen's singing voice is "Milk
Toast," a tune inspired by a comfort food her father used to
make for her when she was five years old. "You heat the milk and
you pour it over toasted bread, and then you put a lot of cinnamon
and sugar in it. When I was five and would have inexplicable mood
swings, that would be the way he would sort of calm me down."
Steen's sweetly pleasant singing voice can also mask her ruminations
about more misanthropic subjects. Her song "Legerdemain"
has a catchy chorus that she makes sound innocent with her voice
even though it's theme is dark: Sleeveful of pain, legerdemain/
I will swear I'm behaving/ I will swear I don't fight/ but when
I see your fresh-faced baby I will punch out his lights. "Some
people think that that's a shocking line, and it's something you
can't even joke about," Steen admitted. "Punching out it's lights
is very objectionable to some people. What I meant by it was that
there's a lot of impulses I have---and I'm sure I'm not alone---that
you can't express. You don't let on in your expressions, and yet
there's a lot of not so correct things that are going on under the
surface. Some questionable motivations, and I think everybody's
like that. We live in a civilized society so you don't act on them.
I was just exploring my darker side."
Steen used the image of a "fresh-faced baby" to underscore that
nobody is safe from these impulses that everyone has. "I'm talking
about a child because that's a boundary that you just don't cross.
If you take your actions through to its most far reaching consequences,
sometimes if you did the things you wanted to do, they would hurt
even something as innocent as a little child. 'Legerdemain' means
slight of hand. So, it's about the things you keep up your sleeve.
Or at least the things I keep up my sleeve."
Fritter is the first project in which Steen is the lead singer.
She waited all these years---after successful tours with Tanya
Donnelly and Natalie Merchant and playing in two successful
Boston bands back home---to overcome her shyness. "It's not easy
for me. When I'm a sideman, that's easier because I know I'm not
the center of attention. Drawing attention to myself is very uncomfortable,"
Steen said. "I guess part of me really wanted to do it." These days,
with her CD release party a few months behind her, Steen is enjoying
the spotlight. "I've been having fun playing shows, so I'm not really
that intimidated about it. I've seen a lot of bands that I love.
They don't really worry about stage presence and the Celine Dion
show business aspect of it. That's just not what they're doing.
They just want to get their music across. That's the example that
I follow."
Performing for her local Boston peers has been enjoyable in its
small club intimacy. She said the local scene is just as much fun
as playing around the world with Natalie Merchant. "The only thing
I don't really like about it is how hectic it is," she explained.
"Usually, you have so little time to set up when you're playing
local clubs. There's actually no sound check. So, you're running
around connecting things and things aren't working. You're getting
no sound. You're ten minutes into your set, and you're supposed
to be calm because you're out in front. It's nerve wracking." "When
I played nationally," Steen continued, "things were on a scale where
I got really spoiled by having crew people who were just so great
at making everything function. And if it didn't, the buck stopped
with them and not me. But I love playing little clubs because I
think it's more immediate. You have more connection with the audience."
 Steen's
picture does not appear on the cover of Mockery. Instead,
she has a picture of vegetative matter growing on a vine. The singer-songwriter
said she wanted to break the mold of women putting their pictures
on the jacket. She said men in the music business do not have to
use their looks to sell their products. "There's more pressure in
the way that you market yourself. If you came from Pluto and you
picked up a Rolling Stone, you would think that women had to wear
bikinis in order to be musicians, judging by the covers. So, that
is different for men and for women. I don't think it's so much on
stage. It's just in the way you market yourself. For instance, a
lot of women it's automatic, you have to put your face on the cover.
I didn't want to do that. But I've had people asking me, 'Where's
your picture?' But with a man that question doesn't come up."
Playing keyboards for Natalie Merchant during Merchant's 1999 Ophelia
tour gave Steen a good role model for a strong front woman. "She's
very professional but also very down to earth and comfortable. You
feel when you play with her that you're sort of in the hands of
a master performer. She's a really charismatic performer. People
would just be enraptured by her. She really commands an audience.
There's a comfort level when you play with somebody like that because
her confidence level is so high on stage. If things start to go
wrong, she'll turn it around." When asked if she aspires to be more
like Merchant, Steen giggled before answering. "I don't even think
I can get there," she admitted. "You're not going to find me African
dancing across the stage in my bare feet; I don't think in my life
time. But I think you can learn to have a confidence level and a
command on stage. I aspire to that. I think it just comes with experience."
After officially joining Merchant's touring band, Steen was baptized
by fire. She had to play with Merchant on Saturday Night Live.
"That was the first show that we ever did as a band. We had started
rehearsing for the Lilith Fair tour. I guess this
was '99. Steen said it was so much fun that she forgot about being
nervous. It was watching the performance on a friend's VCR later
on that troubled her. "I don't like watching myself on tape. You
learn a lot about yourself that you didn't know. One thing you don't
ever see really is yourself moving until you see yourself on tape.
You don't see your own body language because you're in it. I guess
I looked a little stiffer than I would have liked. But that could
have been the nervousness."
Steen hooked up with Merchant through Merchant's manager, Gary
Smith. Smith also manages Tanya Donnelly, who Steen played and
toured with. After Merchant told Smith she needed someone to play
keys, Smith arranged for the two women to meet at a recording session.
"Natalie was singing on a Billy Bragg vocal record, the Woodie
Guthrie record Mermaid Avenue," Steen recounted.
"I played accordion on a song on that. We met at that session. She's
very casual about auditions, or at least she was in that case. We
just talked. She wanted to see if I would fit in personally with
her and the other people in the band. It seemed like a good fit."
Steen teaches in the Boston Public School System, but her pupils
in grades K through fifth grade know nothing about her tours with
Merchant. "She's not part of their world," Steen said. It would
be ironic if Steen got signed to a major label after performing
in the background for so long. Then this local Boston musician would
go from being an obscure teacher lugging her accordion from classroom
to classroom to someone recognized by kids everywhere. It may have
taken Steen a long time to grab the spotlight. But now that she's
there, she's become a star in her own right. |
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