She brings past lessons into the present
In French, chanteuse simply means a female singer. Usually a nightclub singer. Nothing more, nothing less. Yet the word has taken on its own meaning, conjuring raw emotional eloquence as sung most famously by Edith Piaf.
ElodieO is the epitome of a chanteuse. She’s automatically dubbed as such because she was a) raised in Paris, and b) she is a singer. But her breathy, intimate voice, cautiously crooning surreal lyrics over an electro backdrop, also captures the evocative quality of the word perfectly.
Then there’s her name: pronounced eh-loh-dee with that extra exclamatory sigh of a syllable, oh. It’s a moniker that Elodie says is something she “took back from her childhood.” Elodie is not an uncommon French name, and there were two in her junior school class, so she was simply Elodie O (as in, Ozanne) in order to differentiate.
ElodieO, who performs at the Middle East Upstairs tonight, is at a point in her life where much from her past is starting to make sense. It’s a past that included many artistic endeavors as she flitted from acting (she was in a French equivalent of the TV show “Friends,” among other things), to dance (she trained in tap and classical dancing and was so advanced that by the age of 13 talent scouts for the Moulin Rouge approached her), to her first love, musical theater.
“I remember going to see a classic musical with my family as a child, and it was like, how you say, when you see God?” Revelatory. Elodie saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and everything made sense.
“It’s funny I am doing pop music now, but when people ask me, I always talk about that. I go back to source. Always, like I have to,” she says with a thick French accent and a soft, shy laugh. She’s speaking from New York’s East Village, which she now calls home. She first came to New York on a joint scholarship from the French government and New York University to study musical theater, which landed her some small Broadway roles. However, she quickly became disillusioned with her beloved musicals.
“My idea was to come and learn about this form of art and then make something out of it that was my own,” she recalls. “But I found it such a commercial thing, kind of tacky.” She then alternated between New York and Paris, moving ever more toward music, but not the eclectic music she had grown up with.
“I was raised on classical and jazz, avant garde and obscure stuff. Pop and rock were totally forbidden at home: it was [totally] bad music, you know? I had my musical theater, and somehow that was accepted in the family.”
She followed her jazz-covers band in New York with an indie pop group, Elm, in Paris, during which time she began writing songs and developing her naïve singing style reminiscent of Björk.
“After Fred Astaire, I would say this is my second idol,” says Elodie. “She’s absolutely unique, artistic, and particular. She has managed to bring her strange artsy thing to a pop audience,” a goal Elodie also shares.
“The challenge right now is to write good pop songs. It’s the hardest thing to do, like ’60s French pop,” she says. “People like Serge Gainsbourg, they were so accessible and so artistic. This is what interests me, I’m really very far from that.”
Brazilian Girls, the art-dance band based in New York, has helped her get one step closer to realizing her vision.
“I started to hear those guys, and I thought I had to add this element to my music,” she asserts. Aesthetically, Elodie coveted the Brazilian Girls’s beat-jazz artistry; musically, she longed for the band’s propulsive, captivating energy: “They are so dynamic; they involve the audience. It’s hypnotic.”
Elodie recruited Girls drummer Aaron Johnston and bassist Jesse Murphy to play on her album “Attache-Moi,” which is due this fall on the Cambridge-based indie label Chez Moi. But ElodieO owns the record, especially in the video for the spare electronic drone “Milk and Honey.” The film intersperses black-and-white footage of Elodie dancing, making big swooping movements with her arms and legs - the moves are very Fred and Ginger - with clips of a clambering child wearing a red hooded cloak.
“My grandfather made a Super 8 video of me when I was 7, as red ridding, how do you call that in English?
Red Riding Hood. Elodie laughs. The memory is still fresh.
“It’s so accidental,” she says of creating the “Milk and Honey” video. “It’s everything but intellectual. The way I do things, I let my subconscious take over. When my father saw it, he said, `This so makes sense. This is you.’ “
ELODIEO, ElodieO performs tonight at 10 at the Middle East Upstairs. Tickets are $5. 617-864-3278. mideastclub.com
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
12
var cpgnum=0,articlepgs=2,articleurl=’http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2007/08/31/she_brings_past_lessons_into_the_present’,asep=’?';articlePaginate();More from Boston.com
More:Globe Living/Arts stories