by Max Vernon
On one of the colder nights in recent memory, I took a brief refuge from the wind in a divey (but in a posh sort of way) club in Harlem around midnight. Inside, down the stairs, underneath the low-drop ceilings seemingly covered in asbestos, flanked by two half-naked burlesque performers and armed with a shot glass of whiskey, Stephanie Nilles sings Ella. But she doesn’t just sing it- she whispers and howls out the words in a Rickie Lee Jones-every sentence is a super cool beatnik epiphany- sort of way. But Stephanie transcends cool. She’s post cool, if you will.
The first time I heard Stephanie play was at Sidewalk café (of course). Stephanie, who looks slightly like Jane after a few years with Tarzan, which is to say she has a striking stage presence, was putting every other pianist in the club to shame. She is a poet without being pretentious about it; she is bluesy, jazzy, soulful (in her way), and lets her music pour out in such an organic way. Her songs can be analyzed word for word, or they can be taken impressionistically, fixating instead on the overall mood. Whenever she plays, the room falls dead silent. Whether everyone will be able to absorb all of the complexity and nuances of her music is unimportant. What is important is that everyone will try.
I’m calling Stephanie the Un-Goddess, because while anyone who has heard her music will vouch for her brilliance (and I, in the course of this interview, may inadvertently put her on a pedestal), she’s too down to earth to wear someone else’s crown.
I shot Stephanie a few questions via myspace, and she responded resplendently:
1. Do you relate at all to any music you hear out there right now being made by either your peers/other? If so, who, why? What do you wish there was more of in the musical world right now? Where would you like to see your music go?
I do relate to other musicians, especially people in my position—-you know, poor; we can compare stories about living on rice and beans while trying to find a better day job—-but it's less that I relate to particular musicians and more that I hear moments they make that I sort of fall in love with. For example, there's a Lumberjack Isto song with a killer line in the middle about how everything we need we can find in Mother Nature. More globally, there’s a monolithic Ani Difranco song called Serpentine about making the political personal and vice-versa, which is literally two chords. While I don’t agree with her in every political ideology she discards, there is a moment there in which she says “Why don’t you just give me my Judy Garland drugs and let me get back to work, because the Empire State Building is the tallest building in New York and I always got the feeling you just liked to hear it fall… off your tongue.” So much of that song I adore, in terms of the poetry—the dichotomy of the word “you”–and the space she uses. I do wish there was more of that—more moments that make people stop and listen. I also love Radu Lupu, a Czech pianist I first heard when I lived in Cleveland. He isn’t that big a person (so I can relate there), but he has such a warm, huge sound, and this incredible use of space. A teacher of mine once explained, “He plays a phrase and you think, ‘That’s it. That’s the way it was meant to be played. That is the truth.’” Some human beings just have a particular quality, a talent maybe, that makes everyone around them listen. I want to hear more of that, and I want to be more like that. For me, that’s really the only place I want my music to go; I love the moments when you’re playing, and you’re having a great time with your collaborators, and you’re in a bar full of drunk people who couldn’t care less about who you are or what you have to say. And all of a sudden, even if for a second, they all stop to listen to you, not because they feel obligated, but because you have created a moment that makes them listen.
2. How do you see your own music evolving? Where is it headed?
I want to be more light-hearted. My mom dragged me to see The Color Purple with her before the strike. I had read the book and was not at all looking forward to a night of all of that. I guess when I think of Broadway, which generally I don’t, I think of Spamalot. I just couldn’t imagine a musical about rape and racial conflict. But it really is a beautiful production. I actually cried. On Broadway! What struck me most about it, though, was the fact that—to quote Eddie Izzard—that music is consistently so happy in spite of everything that has happened. Sometimes I feel my music getting more and more angry, which is strange, because I'm really a good-natured person; the challenge is to make "happy" interesting.
3. Can you give a little mini bio of your background in music- how your passion started, and all the dark alleys it's taken you to?
I started playing on an old upright my mother had in our living room in Chicago when I was 5. I would run around making up songs and singing, and I would make my brothers sing in harmony with me. When I was 6, I tried to teach myself The Nutcracker by ear after we saw the play, so my mom took me to my first piano lesson. I also started playing the cello when I was 10 and was subsequently introduced to chamber music. Ever since then, playing with other people in any context has been one of my favorite things.
I also remember being very young and listening to the soundtrack from Flashdance on a record player in our basement. I think most young girls would try to re-choreograph the dance, but I would listen to the record and play along on air guitar, which is hilarious because I don't even think there's a guitar in that song…
When I was 17, I played in the Young Concert Artists' International Competition in New York, where I met some professors from The Juilliard School. That was probably the first time it occurred to me that this was a business more so than an art form. This is also when it was made very clear to me that, if I wanted to play and be taken seriously, I had to try to do it immediately. I went to The Cleveland Institute of Music for college and got a degree in piano performance. I hated it at the time, mostly because Cleveland is sort of a bummer of a city when you're young and a ball of energy. I remember that I was just so bitter and angry all the time, and then I went to visit a friend of mine in New York around Christmas of my junior year. I flew back to Cleveland and was riding the train across town in a snowstorm, and nobody else was in the train, and I laid my head on the seat in front of me and just sort of watched the city go by sideways. I fell in love with it then. I also know now, having gotten to know the playing of a number of musicians from different conservatories around the country, especially in New York, that I was in Cleveland at the end of a golden age of classical music-making. It was incredible. I miss it a little bit, and I'm sad that I only truly appreciated it posthumously, but that's how that goes.
I graduated from college and at this time was living in a Ward 8 building on Cleveland's east side. I have never been a very disciplined person naturally, so it was difficult for me to adopt the pianist's lifestyle. I finally figured out that I had to make myself get up at 7, drink some coffee, and practice until about 2 in the afternoon. Then I'd have rehearsals or concerts or I'd teach little kids, and then I'd go out and drink at one of the three bars in the city. I had four friends. I learned to be content in almost complete solitude, and I was distracted because I was playing so much music all the time. Then I went to the Aspen Music Festival for my third time. I was living in a beautiful place with very good friends, and I was practicing all day and studying with a very famous teacher. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not a very happy kid, but I had no reason not to be. I came home, packed up, and moved to New York in a van. I had no gigs, no job. Very dramatic. I think I just had no idea what I wanted to be doing, so I figured I'd move into the place where I could do everything all the time. It was awful when I think about it now–I lived on St. Nicholas Avenue in this shitty apartment with florescent lights and white white white everywhere, and we had mold problems and bed bugs and my ceiling was falling down. If I came home after midnight, I had to watch it because there were these men there who freebased cocaine in the lobby of my building. I worked at a cafe downtown and I didn't play any kind of music for about 6 months, mostly because I couldn't find a piano to play on. Honestly though, I had never been happier. It's funny- some people would ask me if I felt a great void having completely dropped something I took seriously for almost 20 years. But any ex-classical musician will tell you (at least the ones I know), we don't miss it really. I've begun to take great stock in new things, and as a result, I feel very free.
Right now, I'm just in this amorphous kind of limbo. I'm doing research at a Center for Ethics, which feeds my "maybe I'll go to law school" impulse; I read a lot (about particle physics lately, which is weird) and go to many more concerts than I did when I was younger, which feeds me, good or bad; I write my own music, which is new to me. I think it's as if I'm making up for the time spent having a self-disciplined childhood. I've been writing in tiny spurts forever, but I never finished a full song or piece of poetry really until I moved here. I wouldn't say the level of music making is better in the city, but I'm surrounded by opportunities to perform all the time, so that pushes me to get off my ass.
4. I feel like your music and music are both so complex and demand a lot from the listener. For people like me, who get what you're doing, it's brilliant. But, a lot of people out there say the emphasis has to be on one or the other? Do you agree or disagree? Which would you say you're more concerned with- the music, or the lyrical content of your songs. What message are you trying to put across in your writing?
My background is in classical music, and I got into writing my own tunes by way of improvisational jazz (which I still can’t do and am convinced I will never be able to), so in a way, it’s not my fault (haha). Actually, this is something that is very important to me. In part, I stopped playing classical music because I felt guilty; the most I could ever do was to provide a very specific demographic with about 2 hours worth of transcendence via entertainment—at least that was the ultimate goal. But no matter what I did, no matter how hard I worked, a. it was not my music and b. it in no sociopolitical manner related to the world around me. So I started writing, mostly about political problems I had with my surroundings. My writing is usually then more lyrically-based, and the music becomes almost a word-painting-esque byproduct. I wouldn't say it's so complex that it demands too much from the listener, but it's as if there are many kinds of songs in which you can find joy in the way there are many kinds of conversations in which you can enjoy yourself. There are the poppy love ballads that stick with you when you're walking somewhere and end up connecting themselves to memories of that moment. That's maybe comparable to being in a bar with a bunch of drunk and rambunctious people and getting kicked out of it–not a lot of substance, but you'll always remember it fondly. Then there are the long songs that you can't necessarily sing in the shower but that have maybe one or two lines in them which make you go, "hmm." Those are more like sitting around all night drinking boxed wine with three people you grew up with and talking, or something. My writing tends to be more like the latter, partially because I'm not good at writing catchy hooks, and partially because there are many important and incidentally complex goings-on in the world, apart from romantic heartache, that I believe need a voice.
Actually, the last song I wrote is about a Jewish parable that boys commonly read before Bar Mitzvah. It’s in part a joke about how rabbis argue incessantly because Jewish people like to argue. In the end, God emerges to tell one of the rabbis that He is siding with the other. The stubborn lonely rabbi says to God, “The Torah is not in heaven. We pay no attention to voices.” Man, not mysticism, has the last word, which otherwise never occurs in theology. This is to say that it is so important that we use our brains, that any kind of conviction or ideology is meaningless if we don’t think and argue through it. So I guess I write complicated stuff because I want people to get into it, talk about it, think about it, worry about it, write about it, and find joy in it. And I refuse to believe that anything a person can write is empirically too much for any other person to understand. I have more faith in people than that.
5. Forgive me for being trite, but who is your music goddess?
Nina Simone.
6. How'd you get to be so cool?
I have an amazing family and friends and a fairly steady supply of whisky within my grasp at all times.
7. What's it like for you trying to make it as a musician in today's climate?
It's obviously getting to be difficult, because everything is now so homogenized and co-opted; and that's not just music–that's every business. I love playing in medium-sized rooms for people I don't know, so I'd like to do that for a while. It's still so new to me, though, that I'm not quite sure. If I'm still writing in a year or so, I'll probably just start getting into cars and driving around the country to play open mic nights "like they used to do." Maybe my music will become even more political, and then I'll move to DC to go to law school and play the circuit around the Hill, and, you know, influence policy indirectly. Or maybe I can marry a nice lawyer who will just take care of me so I can write music and not even have to think about "trying to make it." I don't know.
http://www.myspace.com/stephanienilles
(for more Stephanie Nilles click here…)