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I think also you get a lot more of the theatrical acting side of my personality where I try to really explain and tell little stories and do banter that sheds more insight on the tunes and where the songs come from. Sometimes I go into character voices, just channel other people. It seems to make people laugh, but that's okay with me.

Aside from that, I play with wonderful musicians including Stephanie Winters on cello. She's just phenomenal. And Dean Sharp on drums. He's wonderful as well.

Rachael Sage: Public Record

EEc: Did you concentrate on any particular themes or concepts when making Public Record?
RS: Absolutely. I concentrated a lot on that moment of epiphany within different relationships. That moment that, when you zoom in on it with your magnifying glass, is what's really going to determine which way the relationship goes and taking that apart almost in slow motion. That's really what I wanted to do because it was so important to me to examine that moment because it felt like coming off of 9/11 with the political climate that has been in New York the past couple of years... There's been this urgency of really wanting to reconnect with people that you might have lost track of or people who you've had some type of rift (with). I've been noticing this with all of my friends and all of my peers and just the New York community in general – of people wanting to not waste time and really take bold emotional steps toward people that they'd been alienated from. I thought that would force me to do that in my own life. Also, I was interested in recounting some stories like that, that I'd encountered in the year leading up to the album.

It was also important for me to do that because, if you've seen the final artwork for the record, I included a couple of black and white photos from some of my grandparents in the artwork. I happened upon them when I was home for the Jewish holidays last year, just beginning to work on the record. When I found the photographs, it brought up a lot of memories and also some gaps for me in terms of understanding my own heritage and my own family history and some of the risks and just the lack of communication that I'm aware of through the years in my extended family. I thought that examining that and meditating on that would be a really important part of telling my own story – figuring out who I am, who I want to be.

EEc: Do you see a growth pattern through your CD discography of figuring out who you are?
RS: Well, it's an interesting question to ask somebody if they see their own growth but you know it is certainly something that we're encouraging each other to do as women these days, right? Not to leave it up to other people to tell us how we've grown. I mean, I sure hope so. I feel like I've just grown in the process of making music and that that's hopefully a reflection of how I've grown as a person. I know that I don't take it for granted at all any more – what I'm permitted to do and this luxury I have as an expressive artist. Someone who is able to have their voice be heard and put work out there and allow other people to respond to it negatively and positively and just be part of that community with all its many flaws and warts and all – in addition to all the wonderful things about the independent music scene. You know, it's challenging and I think one thing that I've really learned is not to derive as much of my self-esteem or my state of mind and state of emotional health from the response to my work. I think that that's really self-defeating and that you're not doing your best if that's what's dictating your next move, you know? But it's something that you learn to do the older that you get is just to follow your own instincts and your own muse and remember what it is you love about making music and why you're drawn to it and that's the most important thing to keep track of and protect always.

EEc: Do you have a favorite track on Public Record?
RS: Yes, I do. My favorite track is the first track, "What If". I actually just made a video for it out in Los Angeles with a dear friend of mine, a wonderful director named Joshua Leonard that some people might remember from being Josh in The Blair Witch Project. It's a great song for me because just to sing and to remind myself – it really relates well to what we were just talking about – that sense of perpetual hope and thinking beyond the place where you are now when you're feeling particularly challenged or downtrodden, you know, to remember all the ways in which your presence and your art and your voice inspire and affect other people around you and to let that sober you and put things into perspective and remind you what's joyful about being an artist, being a performer.

I think that song for me, I wrote it, it was just a little poem that I wrote in a notebook while I was touring in Germany, opening up for Eric Burdon, and a young woman had come into the Ladies' Room which is what I like to lovingly call my office on the road, the way that The Fonz used to call the bathroom his office. I say to my band, I’ll say, "If you're looking for me I'll just be in my office" and they know I'm in the Ladies' Room putting on glitter. Sometimes there isn't a dressing room or there is and you just want to find your own little place where you can meditate. I always meet really interesting people in Ladies' Rooms.

That night, there was this young German girl and she was crying and I asked her what was wrong and she started telling me about her boyfriend and that she'd just broken up with him and of course she would never love anyone again the way she loved him and she didn't understand why it had ended. She was just a mess. I tried to console her and talk to her as much as I could and be loving in that way that sometimes a stranger is able to do just because they're a stranger and it made me write the song. It just made me write it from that questioning place, that point, that fork in the road where you feel like “I can never give my heart up to somebody again, I can never put myself through this”. And, then the answer to that question is “of course you can, of course you will”. That's what life is all about. That's what we're on earth to do. To go through that and have it teach us what it means...

Rachael Sage: Creativity

EEc: You seem to be very creative and driven. Can you tell me what drives you?
RS: If I could tell you that, I probably wouldn't need to do it anymore! I have absolutely no idea. I think it has to be something fairly typical to many, many artists – the need to create community, the need to surround yourself with like-minded people, or to create that space where people who relate to one another can come together. My hope is that circle just continues to widen and widen and that it becomes as diverse and as unpredictable a group of people who relate to my music in particular as the type of friends that I like to have in my life – a macrocosm of all different kinds of people that I enjoy interacting with in my personal life and to me. That's part of what drives me in life. It's just the opportunity to connect with people completely different from myself and to learn from their experience and to exchange that sense of commonality and share the love. I guess maybe that's what drives me.

EEc: Could we talk a little bit about your writing process.
RS: Sure.

EEc: Would you give me a bit of insight into that, if you write on a regular schedule or what inspires you, that type of thing.
RS: Sure, I don't really write on a regular schedule. I try to write as much as I can. I try to always be prepared to receive that inspiration, whether it means just carrying around a journal or having my laptop on a plane or whenever that possibility exists or arises, I want to be ready for it and respect it. That's something that's really important on the road because you don't have that luxury to just cloister yourself necessarily in your own private space. A lot of times there are other people around or there's other things going on or you're in the car and they've got the radio blaring and you just have to really nurture that part of yourself where you can block out everything around you and be very focused.

As far as what inspires me, it's really always relationships. It's the way that people treat each other, the things that they say to each other, how one word or one moment can be completely pivotal and affect the fate of love and of people's relationships with one another. I'm always eavesdropping and fascinated listening to the way that people who supposedly love and respect each other really communicate or the lapses in their communication and what is that turning point? Why does something work out or doesn't work out? Could it have been different? Pulling apart those moments and relating them to my own experience as well as just coming from a purely imaginative, fictional place as well.

You can also obviously bring that into the world of politics or history or any other number of perspectives, just that type of approach to life. Why is it that this thing went one way instead of the other? And, if I sing about it and pick it apart, can it affect someone else in a positive way?

EEc: Having won songwriting contests, how do you know when you've written a good song?
RS: Well, I guess if you like it, if you really, really like it and you want to keep playing it over and over and it does something to you physically and then you want to get up and play it for people. There's an urgency to it. It hangs together in a way that makes sense and that where you're sure that if you perform it for people, it really lands and they respond to it. I mean I think that's why people perform. I think if you could really know what a great song was or what a great performance was in a vacuum, that would be the death of the performing arts. I think performers really need to know in their souls that what they have to share can affect people on a physical level. And, that's why they have to get up in front of them and test it all out and share it and thank goodness that's the case. So, I hope that I never know so I always have to keep asking.

EEc: Would you tell me about your first book of poetry?
RS: Oh? Well, let's see. Karma's Trapeze, I think I wrote it in 2000. I've written a lot more since then, but that really felt like one cohesive body of poetry for me, which is why I put it together and continue to sell it at my shows. I wrote it sort of at the end of a string of really intense but relatively short relationships lasting anywhere from two weeks to six months over the course of the past two years. And, so that phrase "karma's trapeze" just came up in my head when I was writing the poem with that title. It just made me want to put the book together because it summed up where I had been all of that time and where I felt I was moving past. And, I think sometimes there's closure in just putting a body of work together. I know that making albums is like that. It affords you the chance as an artist to say here, this is this one period in my work and here are some of the throughlines that tie it together and then you can reflect upon it and move forward from that.

There's closure in binding a book, I think, but more than anything else, it was just fun for me to have that outlet and sometimes there are lyrics that I write that just, they're much better at being poems than asking to be set to music. They have their own rhythm that wouldn't really lend itself very effectively to adding that additional layer of music to it. So, just an experiment for me.

EEc: Did you self-publish it?
RS: Yes.

EEc: And, why did you opt to sell it only at your live shows, instead of on the Internet, for example?
RS: Since I wasn't really that determined to try to get a book deal or land that opportunity per se, it was just about having something that I wanted to share with fans and also there's an intimacy to coming to the shows that is more conducive to me wanting to share that particular work with people. I feel that if someone has come to a show and they've gotten a sense of me in person and my personality, they'll have a better visual image of and a better sense of who wrote the poems and I think that's important. It also just encourages people to get something they can't get anywhere else. That's just something you want to be trying to do as an artist.

Rachael Sage: Independence

EEc: How has having launched your own record label helped you or hindered you?
RS: I wouldn't really know how it's hindered me because it's the only thing I've known. I try to really focus on the positive aspects of why I choose to put out my own work and not really dwell on "What if", "What if I did this", What if I did that?". I do weigh those decisions and continue to put out my own work very carefully and at some point in time that might change. Who knows? I don't ever say never; it's just for now this has really been what's working for me. It's been incredibly gratifying and rewarding. I love the business side of music. I forge relationships that I would never have the opportunity to forge otherwise or if I were only pursuing the artist side of things. It gives me a huge appreciation for the opportunities that I have as an artist, knowing the legwork and the grunt work that goes into creating them. I don't take any of it for granted and I think, oddly enough, having to do that sort of grunt work side of things, has its spiritual flip side, you know, has its spiritual benefits. It's like homework. It's like you do all of that homework, you study and you study and you study or you're rehearsing your lines and you hate rehearsal but six weeks later you're putting on a big show and you're completely comfortable in your own skin and you know who you are on a stage and you know what you believe in and you know that you're walking your talk and you're not letting other people make those decisions or represent you in a way that you would ever look back on and say, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea this was going on behind the scenes." That's a life choice for me. I've always wanted to be acutely aware of the process and how art is shared.

EEc: How important is the Internet in promoting your work?
RS: It's extremely important! It's really beneficial to us. It creates a huge amount of work, of course. I probably get like a thousand emails a day or something and it's just very time-consuming. It's unfathomable to think of that many phone calls coming in or something but the benefit of it obviously is it's so fast and it's so easy to communicate with people all over the country, all over the world. It's completely cheap and just efficient. We book most of our gigs through the Internet and we communicate with our Street Team and our fan base and our distributor. Virtually every business contact that we have and every friend and peer in our community, we communicate with by email. So, I can't really imagine life without it, although I know people were doing just fine before it existed.

Rachael Sage: Influences

EEc: What are some of your current favorite CDs or musicians?
RS: Wow, well, I just saw this concert by Dan Bern. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's a fantastic writer. He is often compared to Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello, even. I think he has a really unique sensibility and a really powerful voice and he's been at it a long time. He's played Carnegie Hall and I just saw him perform a few moments ago at J&R Music World downtown in the City and he blew me away. He's so intelligent, such a great writer, so honest and funny, really witty.

Some independent artists that I'm listening to now are on the lesser-known side but some of my peers: Jenny Bruce is a wonderful pop/folk songwriter. Steve Tannen is really great; he's won a lot of songwriting contests on the independent scene. He just does wonderful work and is fantastic, energetic, and a very sexy performer. Oh, gosh, so many people. Eric Himan is just a wonderful singer songwriter out of Pennsylvania and The Indigo Girls continue to inspire me. I just put on their records and they're so comforting and timeless. I want to hear Elvis Costello's new record though, North. I haven't heard it yet and he's my absolute favorite.

EEc: Have your musical influences changed from while you were growing up compared to now?
RS: Absolutely. When I was growing up, I was much more steeped in the Pop/Top 40 conventional, commercial music scene. It's just what was around me. It was around me at the same time that my really refined, classical, rigid musical environment was around me as well so there was that contrast of me being in ballet for five hours listening to Chopin and Tchaikovsky and Scarlatti and then going home and putting on the Casey Kasem Top 40 and hearing everything from Madonna to Howard Jones to, later in high school, Sinéad O'Connor and even Suzanne Vega was out at that time.

I was just starting to get a full sense of the range of Popular Music and I hadn't really looked backwards that much until I went to college and I rediscovered Carole King and Laura Nyro and James Taylor and artists like that.

Later in college, I fell in love with the music of Marc Cohn. I think he’s one of the most underappreciated amazing, modern, contemporary folk rock artists and I know that he'll be coming record on Vanguard soon so I'm really excited about it. He's an example of someone who, he was working his whole life and he had a career leading up to winning his Grammy that was under the radar and then he won the Grammy and there was all of this pressure and expectation to have another song like "Walking in Memphis" and that's just not what he came up with. I think his albums have continued to be really challenging and innovative in terms of his songwriting and his subject matter and melodically. I'm a huge fan. And, also Meshell Ndegeocello has been a huge influence. So many people!

(2003-1021) http://www.erieentertainment.com/music/music_interview-rs.html