Illustration: Martin Butler at www.elixirsue.co.uk


THE LEADING LADIES


There are some incredibly pioneering women making music out there at the moment and JEANETTE LEECH picks her top five for you to follow into 2010…


SHARON VAN ETTEN


Brooklyn’s Sharon Van Etten is a name that is being whispered in the same reverential tones usually reserved for icons like Alela Diane and Marissa Nadler. Her debut album, Because I Was In Love, features 11 largely autobiographical tracks detailing love’s adversity and renewal. As Sharon explains: “I fell in love and gave up everything I had in my life to be with this person. He was my world, but he wasn’t exactly supportive musically. So I didn’t play or write.” After the relationship ended, Sharon moved back to her familial home in New Jersey and her parents bought her a computer with the program GarageBand. “They told me to start recording, and I recorded all these songs that I didn’t play for anyone for six years. And that’s pretty much what the album is.” After reconnecting with her music, there


came a fortuitous meeting with Espers’ Greg Weeks, then riding high on the critical success of Espers II. Sharon handed Greg a CD of her home recordings. “I didn’t think anything more about it and then I found out that my boss releases Greg’s solo stuff, and they were talking about me. Greg just said, ‘I want to record you’, and then after we recorded the album he wanted to release it.” She laughs shyly. “Very awesome”. Sharon welcomes the idea that she may be


nursing the kindred spirits who feel their own pain reflected in Because I Was In Love. “I want it to be cool to be sad,” she muses, “and I want to let it be known that it’s okay to be in love and to get your heart broken.” www.sharonvanetten.com


COLLEEN


“What do you do once your dream has come true?” muses Cécile Schott, the multi- instrumentalist who performs under the name Colleen. She’s talking about her most recent album, 2008’s modern masterpiece Les Ondes Silencieuses, and its achievement as an intensely contemporary sounding album made with baroque instruments. “I really reached the end of a cycle with it, and I’m trying to stay true to my beliefs – that I should never treat making music as some sort of job.” After a stint in a, “noisy pop band”, Cécile


adopted the name Colleen and created an evolving sound she has termed ‘minimal acoustic’. Ambient electronica, modern classical and even hints of avant-folk and psychedelic pop are all there on her releases Everyone Alive Wants Answers (2003), The Golden Morning Breaks (2005) and the beautiful collage of music box sounds Colleen Et Les Boites A Musique (2006), culminating in


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Les Ondes Silencieuses. “I don’t reason in terms of genre,” she says, “but in terms of what moves me. It can be medieval music or the most obscure psychedelic band that’s never even released a real record. I actually do love a lot of ’60s music, as there is a freshness to it that is exactly what I’m looking for in art.” But that freshness means she won’t be rushed. “I’m trying to find out what else I really need to say.The next album will take as long as it has to take!” www.colleenplays.org


ELLEN MARY MCGEE


“I tend to write about transient lives,” says Ellen Mary McGee. “There are parts of the human psyche that people are afraid of.” McGee certainly doesn’t back away from these haunted characters in her album, The Crescent Sun. It contains songs of death, redemption and the difficulty of facing up to one’s own flaws – a stunning, folk-influenced, lyrically vivid record all delivered in McGee’s compelling voice twisting between tender fragility and an uncompromising husk. Although this is her debut, Ellen’s has


packed a lot into her young life. Working her way through the folk clubs and open mic nights of Nottingham, she formed the psychedelic folk band Saint Joan who had a number of releases before the band folded and she went it alone. “If you’re playing under your own name,


even if you’re playing with other people, there’s an understanding that you can crack the whip!” Always interested in a wide range of


instruments, Ellen is currently learning the sax and finding herself more drawn towards improv. She also doesn’t seem to mind if her album only finds itself with a limited fan base. “I’m kind of into that whole idea of lost folk artists. People like Bonnie Dobson and Vashti Bunyan, who just sort of disappeared and then got rediscovered years later. In a way it’s heartening, but in a way it’s like ‘why didn’t people pay attention at the time?’” www.myspace.com/thecrescentsun


TARA BUSCH


Although Tara Busch considers herself fascinated by the process of electronic music, she nevertheless heartily embraces the very physical sounds she can make with her epic collection of vintage synths. On her debut album Pilfershire Lane this corporeal presence was a vital idea. “I love the interaction between man and machine,” she says. “And I embrace the way new sounds can be born beyond the creator of the machine’s intention.”


Pilfershire Lane was the result of a very


clear vision and is an aural memoir of Busch’s childhood. “I wanted to conjure up all the feelings, sadness, beauty and sounds that constructed that little universe for me as a child,” she explains. “The album felt like it had a fifteen-year gestation period and finally came raging out.” Tara self-produced the record and smiles as she recalls putting on ‘her Brian Wilson hat’ as it all came together. “I knew that if I collaborated at all, even on production, the idea would be watered down. I felt as though it needed to be built with precise attention to detail.” It’s an approach that works to perfection, as Tara’s vision – not always a simple one to grasp as it skitters throughout different sounds and styles – effectively sounds like a twirling dial from late ’70s pop culture. “I still keep a hand held tape cassette


recorder with me at all times”, Tara says. “It produces plenty of happy accidents as I scan back and forth between ideas.” Keeping up with Tara’s magpie mind may be bewildering, but it’s produced one of the most gripping records of the year thus far. www.tarabusch.com


EBONY BONES


Given that Ebony Bones used to act in the useless Channel Five soap Family Affairs, you’d be forgiven for expecting her shift to music to consist of anodyne covers or landfill generic pop. What you certainly would not expect is a vibrant genre-clashing goddess who claims her music reflects “what London sounds like to me.” Her first single was one of 2007’s best: ‘We


Know All About U’, the most desperately cynical comment on a disintegrating community since The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’. More excellent singles followed, and now her self-produced debut album Bone Of My Bones is set to be unleashed. For anyone who appreciates obscure post-punk, perverse pop music or the DIY aesthetic of riot grrrl, Bone Of My Bones should be a contender for album of the year. Strong on visual style, Ebony mixes charity


shop purchases with found objects and idiosyncrasies that mirror her approach to music. Her radical fashion has gained her attention from the style mags, but don’t be fooled; personal touches like painting unibrows on her backing band in homage to Frida Kahlo are proof that Ebony is as thoughtful in the messages she puts out with her image as the lyrics she uses to highlight political hypocrisy. “Music was a way to escape those shackles


of society, feel liberated instead of crossing my legs and wearing a smile,” she has said. If you want to know what Nina Simone would have sounded like had she grown up in ’80s London, look no further. www.missebonybones.com


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