A varied cast of musicians share their songs at a rare gathering at Saint Rocke
How, when, where, and to whom songs arrive is a mysterious thing.
Take the case of Lucy Schwartz. She came from a musical family and played piano since she was 4, but had never dreamed of writing her own song until one day at the ripe old age of 12 she sat down at her piano and out popped a fully formed song called “Lonely Town” about a little town washed away by a flood.
“A little depressing!” said Schwartz, who at 20 has already written deliciously swooning pop songs that have appeared in Shrek Forever After and Grey’s Anatomy and whose new Mitchell Froom (Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello) produced album has her poised at the cusp of stardom.
Take the case of Justin Hopkins, who came from a mostly non-musical family but who sat down at a piano one day at the age of 8 and immediately understood the rules of the game and has been shambling musically forward ever since, becoming a pop star in Sweden before choosing Hermosa as the place to make his musical stand (see story).
Music travels unlikely routes, and musicians are often just along for the ride.
Take Omar Torres, a half-Russian, half-Mexican, fully bohemian kid from Seattle who picked up the guitar as a teenager and a few years later took the Bumbershoot festival by storm (he was dubbed “the Latin Hendrix”) with a rip-roaring electric set but then wandered off with an acoustic guitar to travel with Andalusian gypsies, later toured Africa and Russia, and last year ended up playing guitar for Tom Waits on a global tour.
And then there is the case of Keaton Simons. He grew up in an entertainment industry family in L.A. and realized his musical calling at the age of 14, playing in a series of rock bands before heading north to Evergreen College in Washington to study ethnomusicology. He took a special interest in south Asian music – particularly the Indonesian gamelan – and could easily have wandered all his life studying traditional music far afield when he abruptly found himself graduated from college (“I was like, oh shit, I graduated?”). His first post-college gig? Playing guitar with Snoop Dogg on the Tonight Show.
Simons has a theory about the alchemy of music and how it is that some songs seem to come to life and take anyone nearby for strange and often lovely strolls.
“It’s just like some people don’t say very much, but when they do, it’s really profound,” Simons said. “I think of songs as characters, as entities, and they each have their own distinct personalities and dimension. And some of them are assholes, and some of them are wise, and some blather on and on, and some chose their words wisely.”
Many such songs shall be sung by an unusual gathering of Top Songwriters Tuesday night at Saint Rocke, when the aforementioned songwriters will be among 10 performers sharing the stage for a “Songwriters in the Round” show. The round has been organized by Hopkins, who said he did it for the most selfish of reasons – he wanted to see the show.
“Nobody listens to albums anymore, but you go to a show and you are going to have to listen to 40 songs by three bands? Ideally, this is what I would want to go to – as a musician, and listener of music, this is like the ideal concert,” Hopkins said.
It is a rich and varied musical cast carefully assembled by Hopkins that also includes Shane Alexander (“He just spent three months in Europe packing houses….A great voice, kind of James Taylor meets Gary Jules, very clean, great songs, lyrically really good,” says Hopkins); Brett Young (“Kind of a country Gavin DeGraw, sings a lot about girls, but it’s cool…on the verge of Fleetwood Mac and country, definitely a great talent,” Hopkins says); Bryan Masters (“Lefty, plays everything, guitars, drums, bass, lots of loop work…He’s really got a great sense for a song, I think he’s right up there…”); Randy Coleman (“‘Love and War’ is one of my top 100 songs ever…He’s got that wailing Jeff Buckley meets Motown kind of voice…The son of Dabney Coleman, but he’s 42, so to say son of anything is kind of funny…”); and Scott Fisher (“A South Bay guy, my friend from Portland…It’s amazing, Scott will take three chords and make it sound like 1,000, and one of his gifts is this very angelic voice, very clean and sweet…).
Hopkins said this congregation of talent is indicative of the burgeoning local music scene that is attracting more and more talented musicians. His hope is that nights such as this one will help bring more awareness to the gathering of songs that happens almost every night at clubs all across the South Bay.
“I do think people maybe take it a little bit for granted, not to be too negative,” he said. “Like, I think rather than watching 15 sports games a week on TV in a bar, it’d be good to maybe check out the entertainment section in the paper once in a while and realize there are amazing, amazing things happening – the kind of things that warm your soul and prepare you and leave you fed and ready for another day. That is what music is about. I think we are going to absolutely astonish people with this singer/songwriter round.”
Songwriters in the Round is at 8 p.m. Oct. 12 at Saint Rocke. $5 advance/$7 day of show. See www.saintrocke.com for tickets. ER
Lucy Schwartz and Landon Pigg perform “Darling I Do” from Shrek.
Keaton Simons “Currently”
Omar Torres “Dog Heart”
Randy Coleman “Love & War”
