Brandi Shearer 'The Sycamore' album

Songwriter Brandi Shearer grew up in small town rural Oregon. Her grandmother kept a plastic organ from Sears Roebuck in the living room, and she learned to pick out "5 Foot 2, Eyes of Blue" and "Isn't It Romantic?" by watching her grandmother play. One November someone left a burning cigarette on the keyboard. A spectacular electrical fire ensued and that was the end of the organ.

Her disappointment was softened by the Christmas gift of a steel string guitar. Money was gathered, lessons were arranged. Her first songs were about robots, springtime, and livestock. By high school she was writing about boys and being fat. She took gigs wherever she could find them: proms, graduations, local AM radio stations - any place that would let her play. A college in Oregon gave her a scholarship to study operatic voice, but it didn't last long. She moved to Europe where she learned about Billie Holiday and playing effectively in front of drunken audiences. French girls taught her to be artful with make-up and pluck her eyebrows just so. She wrote about nostalgia and growing older and bittersweet homesickness.

She washed dishes in a beachside café in Carnon during the tourist season, and was there the night the French police raided looking for cocaine. Feeling it was in her best interest to pretend, she made like she didn't understand a word. She showed them her rough hands red like boiled lobsters from a particularly busy dinner crowd and said, look just work, just working see see. By degrees she melted into the crowd of onlookers and no one seemed to notice. The next day the café was boarded over and no one answered the phone at the owner's house. It became obvious she'd worked a whole week for which she would never get paid. She took a job singing jazz standards at a shabby resort hotel, and wrote a song called Je Ne Suis Pas Une Arlesienne about a man she wanted to marry, but who was already married to someone else. It was never recorded.

She returned to the States, re-located to San Francisco, and got a job in a flower shop where she learned to say get back to work in Urdu. She started to produce her own records and has continued to impress critics and audiences alike with her haunting vocals and unique interpretation of American music, garnering glowing reviews in SOMA magazine and Discoveries. "I don't see why the Beatles should be the best at everything," she says of the 4 hour recording session that led to The Sycamore (due out August 2005), "If they could make a seminal record in a day, I wanted to do it in less. Besides, I had to be at work by 6."

Do you also would like to share your opinion? If so, please register or login here.

Details

Popular Songs

New Songs

Brandi Shearer - The Sycamore