Eilen Jewell and band
by Dermot Whittaker
The following review appeared in the September 2006 issue of Middlesex Beat. All rights reserved.
Back from a national tour this summer, country folk singer Eilen Jewell and her band are hitting their stride. The experiment of combining Jewell, strictly a solo artist until last year, with experienced local instrumentalists has produced the fantastic debut CD Boundary County and a stylistic jukebox that this fall is still playing folk, country, and gospel numbers in local pubs.
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Singer and songwriter Eilen Jewell (photo courtesy of www.eilenjewell.com) |
"I'm really learning what it is to be just part of a group in general, musical or otherwise," says Jewell, 27, of Cambridge, Mass. "I wasn't from a big family. I was never really in any clubs at school, or anything, so the idea of cooperating as a team -- I was also not on any teams ... is very new to me." As the featured singer and songwriter for the group, Jewell is getting the knack of balancing the needs and styles of her performers. The result is a seamless act in which singer, song, and music astonish and please the listener.
In addition to Jewell on vocals, guitar, and harmonica, the band includes Massachusetts musicians Jason Beek on drums and vocals, Daniel Kellar on violin, and Johnny Sciascia on upright bass. Jerry Miller joined Jewell on her July tour, playing electric guitar, mandolin, lap steel, and dobro. The easy pace of Jewell's songs is an instrumentalist's dream. At a recent gig, Keller's artful fiddle breaks seemed to have an extra bit of gambol near the end as if to take full advantage of the open pasture.
Jewell's voice holds center stage. It saunters around the middle ranges, soft, plain as day, sometimes bluesy and wistful, sometimes just determined, and makes her every song believable. In her own songs, Jewell often sings melodies of a single note for one or two lines. Her volume often swells, but gently, as one would raise a cigarette to one's lips, move a fan, or raise a hand from the arm of a sofa and let it fall. She works blue notes or wavers moodily when the lyrics call for it -- but she can come back singing straight, perfectly in tune and clear as a distant bell, in an instant.
Every fan and reviewer of her music knows that voice is something special. Jewell, 27, of Cambridge, wonders.
" I try not to over-sing," says Jewell. "I like to keep everything as simple as possible, and in that that sense I've always thought that maybe it was just understated, my vocal style," says Jewell. "I think that maybe what they like is the style, not necessarily the voice itself. It's what I'm not doing with my voice, rather than what I am doing with it."
Boundary County, an album of 13 of Jewell's songs, was released to positive reviews last spring. From each of Jewell's compositions, a new and distinct person emerges. "I miss those violet hills, and the sweet smell of the fields. Reach their arms out so wide, like Heaven's only bride." So says the weary singer of the album's title track, a country lament that paints an Idaho landscape the singer will never see again. In the down-tempo jazz strut "Mess Around," the narrator is a restless trouble-seeker looking for life experience, while in the spunky, two-stepper "Back to Dallas," a woman is plainly getting shut of her no-good man and letting him know exactly why. In "The Flood," Jewell dwells on the present -- the here-and-now neglect that accompanied the hurricane disaster in New Orleans.
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Eilen Jewell (photo courtesy of www.eilenjewell.com) |
Jewell was raised in a small family in Boise, Idaho, where life, as she describes it, was "slow paced, laid back . . . something kind of, just mellow about it." Her Idaho youth gave her a preference for slow, introspective songs, a love of landscape, and respect for the "idea of striking out and trying to make it on your own in the world." In her college town of Santa Fe, New Mexicio, she began performing in a local farmer's market. "Just that experience of creating music and having people react to the music live was what got me interested in performing. I've never considered myself just a vocalist or just a guitarist." With stops in California and the Berkshires, she eventually began performing solo in the Boston area in early 2004. Jewell's performances at old time music nights at The Skellig in Waltham, Mass., brought her to the attention of area musicians, including Beek "I was just blown away -- 'Who was this girl?'" he says.
"She's a great singer, they're playing simple songs - no histrionics," says Kellar who has played violin professionally in the Boston area since the early 1980s. Sciascia, who has played a jumping bass with many area old-time groups, credits Jewell with attracting and holding solid musicians who respect her talent. The band's recent summer tour included appearances in New York, Idaho, and the west coast. "I've never been on the road like that before," says Beek, who felt "a little nervous, to be sure." Needless to say, they won the new audiences over, he says, adding, "Everyone always says they love Eilen's voice."
Eilen Jewell's website is www.eilenjewell.com
Copyright, Middlesex Beat, 2006. All rights reserved.