Bio: The cover to Love Don’t Make You Juliet, the new album by Brandi Shearer, shows the musician bruised, taped up, fists out and ready to brawl.
Listening to the record, however, you might be surprised to hear acoustic guitars, a hint of soul, and a couple of piano ballads (not to mention blasts of electric guitar and some percussive jams. But still….).
At first thought, you might think, what the hell?
“These songs are tough,” explains the San Francisco-based musician. “They’re subversive and creepy and desperate and sad, but at the same time, the music can be really beautiful and grooving, too.”
Shearer, it seems, is somewhat of a dichotomy. She’s a songwriter tagged by critics as a “chanteuse” possessing a “whispery tenderness”….who increasingly travels to dark places in her songs. She’s an honest, heart-on-sleeve lyricist with a sly, self-deprecating sense of humor in real life. And she’s a rock/folk/jazz musician who’s quite at home discussing her love of hip-hop and classical music.
Her fourth record, Love Don’t Make You Juliet -- produced by Grammy winner and fellow Bay Area neighbor Craig Street -- represents the moment in Shearer’s life when all of those opposing pieces come together. “I always felt hemmed in by the art of compromise,” she says. “This time, I went to some dark and craggy places, and then also wrote some songs with a soulful rhythm.”
It’s true – while the opener “Night Singing Bird” is as gentle as its title, a track like “When You Wake Up” feels ominous, as the song begins with percussive claps and ends with bursts of electric guitar (Says Shearer: “I bought a Strat and I found I could make some enormous sounds with it. I didn’t know what I was missing before!”). “How Glad I Am” is a jazzy, upbeat shuffle, while the piano-based “I Don’t Love You” is sublimely mournful. Throughout the record, Shearer sings of lost loves, desires, a little political outrage (see “Wake Up”) and a first-person viewpoint that oscillates between obsession and prey (see “Animal”, where she croons “I want to feel the that fear well up/want to know it’s hunting time/and with that bullet in my back/I won’t run too far/too fast”).
The record is, thankfully, impossible to pigeonhole…much like the singer herself. Talk to most musicians, and they’ll discuss a revelatory moment that inspired them to pick up the guitar, sing and devote their life to music. Shearer? “I can’t say I ever had this light from heaven that told me to pick up the guitar…there was no ‘it’ moment,” she says, laughing. “My dad got me one when I was eight. I went to a tiny school in the middle of nowhere Oregon. There weren’t a lot of distractions. It’s just kind of what I did. After a while, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
As a kid, Shearer sang in a choir and studied classical guitar (“It’s how I play and read music still,” she says. “It’s a bitch to teach my chords to someone else.”). Her practice paid off, in sorts - she landed a scholarship to a small university in her home state to sing opera. But her musical passion lay elsewhere. Ergo, she fled to Europe.
It was there, living in Hungary and France, where Shearer found her voice. “At the time I was singing these really poorly worded songs about love,” she admits. But she learned to play, as she says, “in front of an audience,” in small clubs and living rooms across the continent. And her style shifted, as jazz, blues and rock became her muse. Newly empowered, she returned to the U.S. after a few years, with grand ambitions to find success on her home soil.
Shearer moved to California, started gigging around and ended releasing a couple of indie albums, including 2007’s well-received Close to Dark on Amoeba Records. The album won raves from the likes of People, Entertainment Weekly and LA Weekly, which stated that the singer possessed “a ferocity that hints that [she] may just be a tad crazy — just as we Winehouse fans like our singers.”
And yet, success at hand, there was never a master plan at work. “It’s funny, I was never really ‘discovered,’” she says. “I just played a lot of shows and pestered my way into better situations.”
Although she gained mainstream notice, Shearer holds some frustrations with her early records. “I’ve always had a different idea of what it meant to be a songwriter,” she says. “I think at one point I realized there was no point in playing songs to fit into a category, even if you what you write is unsellable.”
Which brings us to Juliet. The album, recorded with an all-star line-up of Chris Bruce (Me’shell N’degeocello, Seal), Michael Jerome (JJ Cale, Richard Thompson), David Piltch, David Garza, Keefus Ciancia, Patrick Warren, Ivan Julian, Glenn Patscha, Gaby Moreno, Cielo Stibor, and Toshi Reagon, and produced by Craig Street (John Legend, Chocolate Genius, Norah Jones), is one that Shearer can finally call her own – down to the record label itself, Vinyl Tiger, which is owned and operated by the singer. It represents her struggles of releasing her own work and, as well, her new-found sense of freedom. As Shearer recently said on her MySpace page: “The long-awaited release hits stores after much hand-wringing, tears of joy, plain old hysterical type tears, looting the couch cushions for quarters and selling stuff on EBay.”
It’s a rather bold, uncompromising statement, and one that’s hardly a surprise for the singer. “At the end, everything I do is about extremes,” Shearer says. “I can’t have it any other way.” (less)
