About Moi
My first musical memory was being set on a stage by my father with three elderly gentlemen at a local Oktoberfest and singing traditional German songs in English. I liked it, but I was also aware of being used for the “awww there is a kid singing” factor. Very early I learned that some people feel a need to use until they finally get to refuse you. And that was only one experience. I can’t imagine being pressured by parents at that young of an age to perform regularly. You have to develop. I refused ever to do anything like that again. My family was slightly annoyed, but I always had a very strong will. Or, I should say, I grew into one.
This anecdote also made me realize that I was from a working class family. The fancy dresses and outfits of some compared to mine was very obvious. I also noticed this in church as a child, and resented it...until the day my parents stopped attending. That became my focus, and it still is....poverty, the exploiter and exploited. Detroit and its surrounding areas are bleak studies in this contrast. I will always remember the day a little girl was leaving our school and I asked her if we could remain friends. She smiled, such a very cruel smile, and said, enunciating every word: "Look what you are wearing and look at me. We will never see each other again." Of course she was right. But please know one thing: I make music not to depress people, since life itself is depressing enough. I want to share my thoughts and I often love to dream of different worlds. And like everyone, it amuses me to try something different, like with "Black Widow", and many other songs. I am just saying I feel very close to that happy/sad posture of Brecht and Weill.
My music is not perfectly produced. My voice is strange. Sometimes I myself wince at an old song. But my only goal is that you know, I mean know the words I am singing. Literally and figuratively. My favorite film genre is Italian realism. I want to capture in words that look on that child's face when his father steals the bicycle in "The Bicycle Thief". Some times it works, other times not so much. But you live and learn.
I know music is just numbers to everyone except the few. It appears to be very cruel, too. So I stay
where I am, and think of that line from "A Christmas Carol": "Business? “Mankind should have been my business!”
I must feel something in order to enjoy a song. And I mean to really love a song; like Tim Buckley’s “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain”…..something that makes you tear up…
You can’t play that in a damn club, but the days of club dance hits being the only songs focused on are soon to be over.
I think this is my best album ever, but everyone says that don't they? The disparity between wealth and working class comes into this as well...I have played with sound my entire life, but in the only way a working class girl could. So only wealth is allowed to call itself precocious. Is the game fixed?
I didn’t take piano lessons because my parents would never have been able to afford them. As a kid, I would collect sounds on tapes and try to make them work. I would also of course record my voice. You use whatever you can. So it is back to that public enemy scenario....is Mozart a prodigy because his father was a court composer who had his son play as a toddler and his father was the one doing the annotation? I love Mozart, but don't believe he was composing at three. Mozart's father would have made sure any child born to him was declared a prodigy. Except of course if she was a girl. Then you have the Shakespeare's Sister scenario.
Growing up I heard people that made the seed grow, like Tim Buckley and Bobby Darin, but it was always there inside me. I have my own stories to tell, I am not a parrot. If I sing completely out of key, if I have a cold, whatever, I believe in preserving that integrity. Of course my production values would make someone like Red One run for the hills with horror. That is why I love it. It is Punk 2.0 on Web 2.0. I hear the drum beats of the future and I feel people want their humanity embraced. Dark and light.
