Featured Artist

Alyse Black – Singer-Songwriter

Interview with Alyse Black
by Sarah Powell

Alyse Black, a singer-songwriter, with a crimson, velvety voice brings her listeners passionate, stylistic music that takes them on a journey through her experiences to which they can relate. Melodious soundscapes of jazz, classical and pop brought together to create a refreshing, new sound.  Alyse describes that she loves “bringing some of the awesome, classier stuff back into a very approachable style that people can really get. If I were to say my genre had any goal, I would definitely like to bring those two together, to be able to bring the best of jazziness into a more of an accessible, kind of a popish range.”

Alyse tells of when her passion for music began. “I grew up in a household where - at least from my father’s side - music was just always there. His mother, his father, his brothers, and sisters all played an instrument proficiently. His sister is a concert pianist. He was just always playing piano. He was my first accompanist and piano teacher.  He played a lot of old-timey ragtime blues... He’d play a lot of stride piano, which is kind of fun. So, I think it started with him and then it blossomed through my sister and me.  We would always do musicals together when we were kids.  So it was just kind of an outlet for me to spend time with her and to do something that I loved.  Growing up, music for me was a lot of times how I dealt with situations. You know if you’re having a hard time, you turn on a particular sad song that even if it is not the exact expression of what the situation is, it hits you just right so you can kind of get that out. Or when you’re feeling really happy and you put on some awesome happy music and it makes you feel like life is the most beautiful thing ever.  So for me, I think it’s both coping and heightening my sense of life since I was quite young.”

Alyse’s passion developed into her career after taking a detour to work in Corporate America for a short period of time. Alyse describes her experience, “I finished off high school and then started to mostly apply for music schools. I got a full scholarship to be in Germany for a year. I got to study abroad a lot in high school and college. While I was in eastern Germany – Germans are generally a very pragmatic sort of culture and even worse with a house full of doctors. So my mentality over the course of the year came to be even more so that the arts weren’t responsible, which is not something that they put on me at all. They were extremely wonderful and loving towards me, but the arts weren’t practical. You never really could make a career and that I should really apply myself to something that I can actually make a living so I came back to the University of Washington and got a degree and got a fantastic job coming out of the University of Washington - a job that all my business school friends envied, but I was miserable – not because of any fault of the company. It was really a decent company. It’s because I knew where my heart lie and if I stayed there, I was really killing off something. But again, I’m an incredibly passionate person and I had to kind of cage that so much.  It just didn’t fit in that world so it was a huge relief and also caused me so much fear when I left. I didn’t know how I was going to make things work. I knew I would be performing all the time to build my chops up so I started calling on the streets of Pike Place Market. They call that the Pike Place School of Music because it’s just so intense of how much feed back you get. People just walking by, A, just to give you any change and B, people will tell you straight up what they think of you. If they think you’re great, they’ll want to record you and get a picture taken with you. If they think you’re horrible, they’ll tell you right there on the street. You can think that everybody assumes that you’re homeless if you’re out singing on the street or you’re very not financially viable – if you want to call it that. I think people treat you with a little dismissal unless they like you. It was so nice over to time to see how it changed my performance. After a while I would start getting fives and tens in my change bowl and I would have people coming by wanting to record and get pictures taken and asking me to sing at their shows. Things like that. It was a couple months of singing there all the time and just kind of saying ‘I don’t care that it’s raining again today’ and ‘I don’t care that might not get a positive reaction.’  This is what I have to do. So it’s nice now to get paid well and have people to perform for. That’s really changed from singing in the market.”

Alyse continues by telling how she began writing her music, “I started way back when Mike first saw me in Pike Place Market. I joined his band and then he and I both started a separate band that was dedicated largely to jazz standard love songs, samba-love songs, bossa nova and some old pop classic love songs. It’s really just all about love songs. The group’s called Thursty Love. He and I wrote a few different songs together. He wrote the music and I would put some good lyrics and melody to it. Between the two of us, we came up with three or four songs. We’ve put them on an EP [“Musical Chocolate for the Discerning Ear"]. It’s not largely available. I get some flack for that at times. Up in Canada, it’s pretty big... He and I’ve been working on a song for a little while together and I get asked to do collaborations quite often. One thing I’m really into is I have a lot of friends who are really into producing remixes. They’ll ask me for my tracks so they can work with them so I’m always curious to see how that goes.”

Alyse’s personal experiences come out in her lyrics and create a connection with her listeners. “Blood and Wine”, Alyse states “That one I wrote over the course of a really short period of time. I think I wrote it by singing it to myself over and over again over the course of the day. I was actually doing a thing where I was trying to put out a new song and a video up on YouTube every Wednesday along with a track, a really rough demo and I came up with that one. The story behind the lyrics is kind of interesting to me. It’s about being intuitive, about being full out. Not caring whether that means I’m not in a particular group. I can definitely be a little shocking in every day. I’m currently living in suburbia, especially when interacting with other suburban people, I can sometimes feel a little offsetting and I think it gets me a little excluded at times. When I look at things from a larger perspective, stepping back off this earth and looking at this large planet covered in people, looks like ants in that defense. Like what do I want my life to be about? It doesn’t have to be about being accepted. Being like and looking good to everybody all the time. I think we spend most of our time doing that.” Alyse explains the meaning of the title that “Wine particularly being celebration and passion. This sounds really weird, but I’m a big lover of the color red. It comes out in all my design stuff. And that’s kind of putting your blood on the line and being passionate about everything. So it’s putting my blood on the line and being as passionate as I can be.” Alyse continues “It’s about this life. ‘My kitty cat’s got a rattlesnakes tail’… actually it’s kind of sad. At the time, my cat got eaten by a coyote but I was looking at his tail and I was like ‘are you a rattlesnake or are you a cat?’ I was thinking about how everybody has all the spectrum of emotions inside of them and all the spectrums of possibilities inside of them and how we limit ourselves to being one thing like being a cat or being a singer or being a person in a cubicle or whatever it may be. How it’s not so simple. It’s a lot of particular symbols to me.”

“Stood for Stand for”, Alyse describes “That one has actually won the most awards. It won the Billboard Annual World Song Contest in the category of Jazz, it won in the Independent Singer-Songwriter Awards Song of the Year in Jazz, and it’s gotten put on some pretty prestigious compilations CDs… the hits of the album. As far as radio play, that one and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” are the best… I feel like someone’s thrown music together and hoping people like it.  It’s nice when you get some awesome recognition and things are going so fast for me right now that I’m blown away” Alyse tells the story behind “Stood for Stand for”.  “That’s a very, very personal experience where I was together with a man for years before I felt like he was as committed to it as I was and I personally saw how amazing our relationship was and how much more amazing it could be and I kept on insisting on it… his friends, his sister, everything they were really pessimistic about the relationship... I’m very much a pleaser but on the other hand I’m definitely my own person and so we got definitely some feedback for that and he took it really to heart and it hurt me how much. Every time something would come up, it would set us back and confuse our situation again. I just kept on saying ‘No, I know this could be amazing, this is an amazing relationship. I know it.’ I thought we were building a relationship I had never seen and I think he saw that to some degree too – or at least he really liked how crazy about him I was… what it really came down to is after years, he really saw that as well and we had the most beautiful relationship and… I’m actually still together with the guy to tell you the truth. We get comments all the time about how we have the relationship that everyone around us aspires to have... It took years and years of saying ‘no really’ and me standing up for it over and over and over again. To some degree I see him now larger than I saw him then… That was where the emotions came from.” Alyse quotes from the lyrics “Here we are on this mountain so many failed to climb’… it’s so hard to stick your neck out when you could be completely shot down and I think this was the first time I’ve ever stuck my neck out for things to say ‘no really, I’m going to be completely committed to this’… it was so amazing to be like, this is my personal relationship of dreams. I’m not a big fan of monogamy, I’m not a big fan because I’ve seen it back fire so many times… but I’m in a happy relationship and it’s fantastic.”

In her song “Love Tonight?,” Alyse describes how her emotions take her for a ride at times. “Even if the other person isn’t doing it, I constantly am seeing that the other person is turning to leave. It’s really about a mix of emotions. I think that everybody has their underlying ‘you don’t want me’ and that particular song is about me projecting that on the person. ‘They don’t want me’. The other person can continue to be saying ‘I love you. I want to be with you.’ And all I hear is ‘why don’t they want me anymore’ because I think they are lying to me. It took over the years to really pass through that. But I have to still consciously catch myself at times tossing those emotions. It’s a real mish mash of stories.”

“Call it quits”, Alyse explains “is a less popular song on the album [“Too Much & Too Lovely”], but it’s really all about my thoughts on committed relationships. ‘They all call it quits so how can we call this real. They all call it quits so how can we call this love.’ So it’s just about how relationships fall apart because no one really commits. It’s a bit of a darker side of my emotions towards things.”

A quirky, fun song, “Complete with Sound Effects,” Alyse describes “is so very much about that feeling of always needing more to replace something and a lot of times I think if we’re not transpiring in what we are doing, we need more stuff to make it work for ourselves… Ever since writing music, my desire to get more stuff - other than what makes my music sound better once in a while – has gone down so significantly. It’s about recognizing you don’t have to cover every surface with more stuff… but kind of in a playful, cheerful way.”
 
Alyse is recording a new CD expecting to be release in Spring 2009. “I’m really excited about these new tunes. This is great. I’m working with an awesome producer from LA to help sort it out and make it as amazing as it can be. The last one I basically produced myself with a little help from the pianist. But this one I’m getting the whole real deal. I have really high hopes for it… I would say it’s much more personal than “Too Much & Too Lovely”. There are definitely some personal moments on “Too Much & Too Lovely” but I think I was holding my songs more at a distance and now I feel like I’m doing that a lot less. It’s a lot more about actual, personal stories for me and I’m really proud of the songs already. It’s definitely going to go on a bit more of a hip hop, indie pop direction - if that’s possible. It’ll still have a bit of the hip hop and a bit of a jazzy flare. It’s some good stuff… A couple of songs that people know already in rough demo form are going to be on there, “Blood and Wine” will be on this next album. “Hold Onto This” will more than likely be on the next album. There’s a song called “Wild Child” is a fun kind of a precocious tune. It’s really talking about the kind of personality that proves that it doesn’t need anybody that it’s crazy and out there as possible because it really just has never felt like it could depend on anybody for a variety of reasons. These are a lot of the feelings I have myself at times as far as how I’m acting towards other people and that I see in other people that I both admire and am repulsed by. It’s just a variety of things… and “Willow” is really about my feelings about alcohol because I write a lot of my songs about red wine. I was really soul-searching to find out if I was really dependent… It’s a good mix of stuff that really when it comes out it’s going to be a lot more honest and very, very, very personal.”

Alyse is ramping up her touring schedule for 2009. She states that “I’ll be touring probably about 6 months of the year…With the new album coming out, and live music is the way to connect with people. I fully expect to be out there as much as possible next year. If anyone wants me to come to their town, you should let me know because we’re starting to plan dates for the next year or so… We’re definitely planning on hitting Nashville this time around. The last time I didn’t want to attempt to make headway in Nashville or New York but this time I think we’re going to hit it pretty hard…Two [venues] that I want to hit on this next year, The Living Room in New York and The Hotel Café in LA. Those two have just been on my mind. I will be doing a show at The Triple Door for the CD release of the album and that’s a pretty big deal for me. That’s a pretty important thing in Seattle. I haven’t really figured out when I’m going to do my big CD release.”

It’s not just passion for her music that drives Alyse. She also has an enduring passion to help others.  During her travels abroad, she helps others and learns about bringing education to third world countries.  Alyse tells of her travels. “When I went to Costa Rica, I was in a town that has a little over a thousand people. I helped build irrigation around the schools and around town hall and such… I’ve done some amazing work with the organization called Room to Read, which is all about bringing education to small towns in third world countries in particular with the girls in those towns. It’s amazing how much it benefits the society when you have an educated female population - at least a basic education. Infant mortality goes down, abuse goes down, a whole list… general quality of life in these towns goes up. The women generally are the ones who are working at home in these towns. And so, to me, it’s a way that affects everything else. From access to clean water, access to good sanitation, bringing down abuse, bringing down child mortality. Bringing all these things that people care about, I feel, are influenced by the quality of their education. I feel it’s the cause that is at the root of a lot of others… I helped with the school group to do the work in Costa Rica. I did a trip to Nepal for a month last year, and that really hit me hard as far as education. I had a fantastic time. The people there are amazing. I did a little bit of work there.  The work with Room to Read was a done deal. I found that this organization was very inspiring for me... I’m hoping to make a much bigger one [impact]. The way things are going. Things are going so fast. I’m hoping that I can use all of that momentum to draw attention to some things I think are larger, whether or not I’m popular or look good to other people.”

A message from Alyse Black to her fans… “I would really love anyone who’d like to, to pass me a line… I really want to inspire people to be full out in their life.  Be what you want and make your life what you want it to be… dream big. Long term I want to use my career to – I know this sounds crazy – but to make sure that every kid in the world has an opportunity and education to do what they want.”

Keep on rockin’ Alyse Black!