I was born in Virginia and lived there when I was small--the youngest of a big family I had a pretty dreamy time. My mother is Russian and my dad's a yank and it was a cheerful household, in my memory at least. My great-uncle Joe was a turn-of-the-century Russian emigre who moved to Los Angeles and wrote When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You).
For some reason I sang in the children's choir up at the Unitarian Church which was in those days an active center for hallucinogenic drugs, on Saturday nights. But on Sundays me and my sisters would go up there to sing and there was a choir master who taught us a million songs. We learned all the protest songs that were popular then--civil rights marching songs that were to teach us too. We had Pete Seeger to teach us "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" and I remember when Elizabeth Cotton came and taught us Freight Train, playing her upside-down left-handed guitar. Sometimes we would learn strange pop songs, like "Up Up and Away".
Me and my sisters were crazy for singing and we learned a million songs form our father. My mother tried to teach us some Russian ballads but we were impatient with that, as I recall. Every night before we went to sleep Dad would come in and sing "The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night" or "The Golden Vanity" or "The Foggy Foggy Dew". When we were driving in the car we sang "I've Got Sixpence" or "The Corner Master Store".
When I was about seven our neighbor came back from London. She was 19 years old and secretly married to an English race car driver named Johnny Bradley and she was pregnant (also secretly). She brought to us the fashions and music of Carnaby Street and we loved her passionately. She taught me how to play a few songs on guitar -"The Cruel War is Raging", "Fennario", "And In The End".
After we moved to Europe we saw a Fred Astaire movie for the first time and me and my sisters went crazy for Fred Astaire. There was a festival of his movies out at Laxenburg Palace outside of Vienna and we took the tram out there every Sunday for several months until we had seen every movie. We bought all the recordings we could find and learned every single song that we could get hold of and sang them obsessively for about ten years. My mother often asked us to sing her "A Foggy Day in London Town" while she was making sinner. We had a l large kitchen with a fine floor for dancing. During this time my brother loathed and detested us and had his own life revolving around Vespa motorbikes and dealing hash and mescaline from Turkey.
Around this same time I was in a play at school, "The Pirates of Penzance". Me and my sisters learned every work of every song and most of the dialogue and we sang and recited it over and over as the family traversed Greece and what was then still Yugoslavia in our red microbus.
Once in February me and my sister Nell accompanied our parents on a trip through Poland. We counted the countless horses on the little roads and sang "The Boxer" and "Homeward Bound".
Being a ballet student, I was not missing out on the classics. I had a great deal of Chopin and Tchaikovsky and Prokoviev in ballet studios around Europe. Also I studied piano with a very young and beautiful and secretly pregnant Hungarian, Imola, who drilled us endlessly with Czerny exercises and a good bit of Bartok.
When I went to college my friend from West Texas played me a Loretta Lynn record and then I discovered the Cleveland country station and listened to an awful lot of awful country music (this was the early 80's). But I loved Dolly Parton, and she was the queen.
After working as a dancer for years and years I decided to learn how to play the guitar and see what might become of the millions of songs that were floating around in my head. Eventually it became obvious that singing and playing was more fun than dancing and writing grants.
I've made two 5-song demos before this record. Besides NYC I've played down in Nashville, and at SXSW in Austin, and in Italy with my band. Vin Scelsa plays me on WKCR, and I've been on WFMU and WFDU and some station in Juneau, Alaska. Hyperion Press just bought one of my songs (A Sister) to publish as an illustrated children's book.
I work part-time in nature book publishing and I live in Hoboken and have for years. I spend a lot of time on ye olde homestead Hudson Valley family apple farm in a small town which has the oldest street in America on which my pa was born, okay?
Well the weather is so pretty now wouldn't you all like to quit your jobs and abandon your families and go on the road with us? No? But maybe you have friends and relatives in these distant lands and you could be an angel and call them up and tell them to come see us play, so we won't be all alone. That would be so nice.