Tour Report, Day 3: Nick's, Worcester

Stephanie Bindlestiff made us an amazing breakfast, veggie frittata and oatmeal with pink lentils, and then we hit the road, Worcester-bound. Bob Dylan, Santigold, Cat Power and Judy Collins played on the car stereo as Heather and Dobson and I told each other unflattering personal stories of romantic failure. These will not be repeated here.

Our first stop was the College of the Holy Cross, where I was scheduled for an interview at WCHC. Nostalgia: the radio station looked a lot like the one at Vassar, where as a student I didn’t have a show of my own but loved sitting in on friends’ shows when they’d let me. Cat, my student DJ interviewer, invited me to wait in the lounge while we waited for the radio station’s faculty advisor to show up with a working microphone. I tuned my uke and looked at the posters for bands I listen to covering the walls and felt a little thrill. The interview went smoothly. I told Cat the story of my last extended radio appearance, when I impersonated Juliana Hatfield on a friend’s college show when Juliana was going to be playing a concert at Vassar. I said it was nice to finally redeem myself with an interview where I wasn’t pretending to be someone else. I left with an armful of WCHC T-shirts for the band. Heather and Dobson hand been hanging out in the campus coffee shop listening to the show, and they said I didn’t sound stupid. Success!

Next it was on to Worcester Polytechnic Institute for an interview at WWPI, the school’s internet-only station. WPI seemed like an interesting place, an engineering school with a liberal arts bent, and my new DJ friends, Jess and Connor, seemed like great examples of that combination of right-brain and left-brain talent, bright and friendly and engaged. We talked about Days and Nights, they played some tracks from the CD, and I played a couple of tunes live. That show was recorded and will be a podcast, so I’ll post a link to that once it’s up. Connor hooked up a printer so I could print out the chart to the new song we would be playing at Nick’s (which I had printed at my parents’ en route to Albany but left on the kitchen counter) and Jess made copies for the whole band, god bless them both. We all got WWPI bottle opener keychains with the station logo, a goat wearing headphones.

When Heather and Dobson and I got to Nick’s, Bob was there waiting for us: full band reunion! We got to order delicious German food off the menu and I ate a giant platter of sausage and potatoes and cabbage before we started loading in. Nick’s is a charming bar with a pressed-tin ceiling and a tiny cabaret stage with red curtains and shell-shaped footlights. People started arriving when we were still sound checking and slowly filled the tables by the stage in the back room. The Worcester Magazine reporter who wrote the article on Sweet Soubrette gracing the cover of the nightlife section came over to say hello. I changed into my sparkly dress in the basement, where there was a mirror propped next to shelves filled with pickled beets and condiments and spices: a step up from the dim bar bathroom at Valentine’s, though not as homey as Chloe’s bedroom in the Musica loft.

We played two sets to a largely appreciative crowd that filled the back room. In close quarters on the tiny stage, Bob knocked over Dobson’s glockenspiel early into the first set, but Dobson got it put back together quickly and disaster was averted. By the end of the second set, the remaining tables of people were getting talkative, but people bought CDs and T-shirts and signed the mailing list, and Nicole, the owner of the bar, was gracious and complimentary. After the show we drank at the bar, even Sweet Soubrette’s uptight bandleader (that’s me) was talked into doing a couple of shots, Dobson taught Heather and me some swing dancing moves, and we danced to the jukebox until it was last call and we had to load out our gear. Then Heather drove us through the wee hours to Bob’s aunt and uncle’s house, where I woke up to the sight of blue sky through the bedroom skylight and a red-painted dock jutting out into a lake.

Tour Report, Day 2: Musica, Hudson

On our way down to Hudson from the Albany Ramada on Tuesday morning, one of the hosts from a show on WGXC, Hudson’s local radio station, called to confirm an interview. We got into town with hours to spare. Rob, the owner of Musica, the music shop above which we’d be performing that night, gave us a little local history as he drew us a map of the places in town we might want to check out. “Until 1950, Hudson was whore town,” he said. “Every one of those buildings on the main drag was originally a whorehouse – there were a hundred years of whores here.” In 1950 the feds came in with 20 panel trucks and there was a big raid, and since then the town has not been quite so colorful. Nevertheless, we managed to amuse ourselves in town. Most excitingly, Heather scored a pair of black and white polka-dot shoes at a thrift store that are a perfect match for one of her show dresses.

Rob’s daughter Chloe ferried me over to the radio station, which is so new the doors inside still have stickers on them instructing the contractor how to hang them properly. In the studio there was a blackboard over the window with phonetic spellings of all the nearby towns so that the DJs would pronounce them properly: Delhi = dell-high, Milan = my-lon, and so forth. We did a quick interview and I played “Stick Around” into the microphone on a uke that had already gone out of tune since I had tuned it a few minutes ago.

The Musica loft is also where Rob lives, and it was clean and light and homey. We ate dinner with him and Chloe and a friend, and then moved tables to make way for more seating. Our preparations made it feel like we were getting ready for a wedding at someone’s home, the funny combination of formal and informal, women in fancy dresses and stocking feet arranging chairs, putting on our makeup in Chloe’s bedroom. Liv Carrow, a songwriter from Brooklyn who recently moved upstate, opened with a set of beautiful, witty songs. The chairs in the room filled with people as the windows got dark. After she finished, we followed with the same marimba set we had played at Valentine’s the night before but to a very different crowd, quietly sitting and listening.

Afterwards almost everyone went across the street to get drinks at Helsinki, where Sweet Soubrette played in February and where their weekly open mic was going on. The Helsinki folks gave us a warm welcome back, and the emcee of the open mic asked if I would play a song in the show. When I told him I’d packed up my ukulele, the sound guy went and got his ukulele for me to borrow, a 1920s Martin that sounded beautiful. I played a new song called “Catch and Toss” that no one has heard yet other than there. All I could see from the Helsinki stage were the twinkling lights of the table votives.

Stephanie of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus put us up for the night. Before we went to bed she fed us snacks and gave us a tour of the hot sauce museum that lives in her fridge. I got to sleep in the juggling room.

Tour Report, Day 1: Valentine's, Albany

I got up in the morning and picked up the Dodge Caravan rental, loaded it up with merch and gear, said goodbye to my cat, and picked up Dobson and Heather before heading to my parents' house for a box of LPs and some sleeping bags. My mom fed us and made us coffee and sent us back out into the world with a chocolate bar and fruit and bottles of water. So far so good.

We arrived in Albany with time to spare and checked into our rooms at the Ramada, our only hotel night on this tour since friends or family will be hosting us every other night; air mattresses and couches await. We got to Valentine’s, Dobson set up the marimba, we did a sound check, and it was getting close to the posted showtime of 8:00 with no appearance by our local contact and opening act, Stephen, who had booked this show. I tried calling him, but his phone kept going to voicemail.

A quarter to nine: still no word from Stephen. The bartender and the sound guy were getting antsy, and so were we. It seemed like it might be time to switch to plan B: start the show without the opening band. So we took the stage. Then, two songs into our set, Stephen walked in with band members and gear in tow.

I was in the middle of singing “A Lot Like Being Alone,” and as I tried to give the words of the chorus a special significance in light of our situation (it was a lot like being the only band on the bill to show up) I could see there was some drama happening between Stephen and the sound guy, and then the mutual friend who had put me in touch with Stephen approached the stage with an expression of deep pain on his face. As soon as our second song was finished, he implored me to stop our set. “It's not supposed to be like this,” he said, meaning the still practically empty room, the other band standing ready to set up their gear, our having started a show only an hour after its advertised time when the followers of the opening act didn’t expect them to start until then; apparently starting the show anything like on time is not how things roll upstate.

Most of what I know about performing I learned from the circus: be versatile and quick on your feet, be prepared for unexpected changes, respect your colleagues, and the show must go on. So it was very surprising to be asked by another performer to stop in the middle of our act so that the night could proceed as originally planned, and it was extremely awkward being forced to have this conversation onstage in front of an audience. I was furious, but gracious; after a brief band tete-a-tete we ceded the stage to the other band and regrouped by the bar to console ourselves with drink ticket Budweiser.

In spite of ourselves, Dobson and I actually really liked their set. Punk rock is alive and well in upstate NY. And the room filled with people as they played. When they finished we returned to the stage, this time with a decent number of people listening. Torch songs with a marimba/violin/ukulele arrangement was definitely not what this audience was expecting, but I like a challenging room, and I’m starting to suspect I perform better when I’m a little pissed off, and we won those bastards over pretty fast. We killed them in the end.

So Albany was an interesting start to our week of shows. We’ll see what’s next...

Sweet Soubrette Seduces Audience at Bowery Poetry Club

That's what CultureMob's writeup of the release show says.

Also: "What makes a Sweet Soubrette? Speculatively, one part circus performer, one part poet, and third part rockstar...a Sweet Soubrette show is much like badass adult story time."

Check out the full article here.

Release Show Aftermath

The CD release show was a big success. A packed house, a hot band, and everyone had a great time.

Here's a piece of video from the show -- Avalanche featuring the horn section. That's Cecil Sheib on the trombone solo.

More pix, etc. to come...

First review of "Days and Nights" is in!

Rock NYC says:

"Take Amanda Palmer covering Radiohead and then take Phoebe Legere and drain out the jazz and replace it with Jenny Lewis circa The Execution Of All Things and then throw on some fishnet stockings and you have Sweet Soubrette...this time she has a full band and the songs have texture and beauty."

In other news, 7 days until the big album release show!

Roosevelt Island show report

Stacy Rock and I played a shared set in a festival on Roosevelt Island on Saturday, which was really less a festival and more a comedy of errors. First we learned that our set was to be reduced from 10 or 12 songs to 4. Then we started an hour later than planned. Sound/tech issues included a PA that we discovered couldn't handle our 4 modest inputs (2 mics, 1 keyboard, 1 uke) only after we began our first number, along with mic stands that can only be described as comical: no boom stand for Stacy, who had to straddle the straight stand holding her mic and play keyboard around it, and my mic stand was wrapped in tape that secured it at a height more suitable for a small child or an average-sized monkey than a grown woman in high-heeled boots, forcing me to affect a profound stoop. Finally, after our third song (of four), an old man wearing hearing aids and a navy blazer rushed the stage to brandish a flyer at Stacy, bellowing at her that the event after the one we were in was supposed to have started already and we needed to hurry up and get off the stage. We graciously performed our final number and beat a hasty retreat.

Oddly, for all that, it was kind of a good gig. The audience loved our four songs; one woman kept closing her eyes to listen with a look of great pleasure on her face, and all the people milling around the gallery stopped in their tracks to hear us when we started to play. We sold CDs, people signed the mailing list, and Stacy and I may have even scored a couple more gigs out of the experience (at different venues). And I got to visit Roosevelt Island for the first time. My only big regret was that the tram is still undergoing repairs, so I didn't get to take a ride.