| BIOGRAPHY |
Wendy Wall has maintained her grace. She's survived heartbreak, inner demons, deferred dreams and the sometimes seemingly unforgiving terms of life as an artist. Rather than lapse into bitterness or cynicism, which Ms Wall would describe as a personal defeat, she has the rare gift of turning pain into beauty.
On your first spin through Wendy’s new record The Road to Paradise her densely textured voice is the initial draw; it is magical and haunted, evoking such greats as Joni Mitchell and Sarah Vaughn.
"A voice as deep and seductive as the still of midnight..." - Hits Magazine
But don’t stop there. Spin it again and the voice draws you into the full beauty of the song. Listening to Wendy Wall's music is like appreciating a particularly lustrous fabric, a shimmering, intricately interlaced sonic weave of life, love, loss, transcendence, and hope.
“pure talent... timeless music...soul-baring lyrics and goose bump-inducing vibrato... depth and hard-won authenticity...” - SESAC Songwriter Magazine
With an unfiltered connection straight from heart to voice, Ms Wall sings of love lost, love renewed, of life, of community, of humanity, of “hard lessons learned", of transformation, in a voice that radiates warmth, empathy and a paradoxical innocence that somehow manages to coexist side by side with experience and wisdom. The lyrics, on their own, read as soul-searching statements on the human experience. An accomplished songwriter, Ms. Wall crafts musical poetry.
"Elegant compositions about life and love...contemplative lyrics, highly imaginative, even exotic with the strong internal rhythm of good poetry." - Metroland Weekly
With the perfect blend of skill and inspiration, singer/songwriter Wendy Wall, and the nuanced vocals, guitars and rhythms on The Road to Paradise, instantly draw your attention and hold you until the final note.
The finished fabric of her music allows what is essential to unfold slowly, the listener to savor the discovery. Through her creative process, Ms. Wall makes a real and lasting connection with her fans and creates a musical conversation to continue for years to come.
Wendy first recorded in 1989 on SBK/EMI and was one of the forerunners of the eclectic female singer-songwriter movement that blossomed in the 90’s and continues to evolve to this day.
"Intelligent and highly literate songs...brilliantly performed and conceived with lyrics worthy of a first rate novelist...memorable melodic hooks and an intoxicating fervor..."
- New York Daily News
For Wall, it all traces back to childhood days, early days spent sitting in her room on the blue dresser her mother hand painted, writing stories, books, mysteries, poems, as well as hours spent at the piano, all delicious escape from a world she was already struggled to fit into.
“I’ve needed music for as long as I can remember. My grandmother bought us a piano one summer. To my mother it was furniture to polish. To me, it was magic. They pronounced to me that my fingers were too small, so lessons were not mine. A teacher came weekly and gave lessons to my brother and I sat at the top of the staircase, listening to each note. When the lesson was over, I would run down the stairs and pick out notes, sometimes from the numbers in the little book she left, sometimes from what my brother showed me, more and more from what my ear wanted to hear. I don’t know exactly what happened to my brother’s lessons, but they stopped and not long after, the piano was gone”.
Wendy found another way for music for “music to transport her”. She writes of a sound that woke her from a dream one night during her childhood. She crawled out of bed.
“At the end of the hall, through an open doorway, my sister was balanced on the side of the bathroom vanity, expertly rolling her hair onto big pink plastic rollers, a cigarette dangling from her lips, bathed in light, in riveting nonchalance, in incandescent beauty. On the shelf above her head, music poured from the blue plastic radio. It was Buddy Holly, singing ’Everyday,’ followed immediately by a The Beatles “Love Me Do” “I sat on the floor in the doorway of my bedroom. I had never heard anything so beautiful in my life. No, more than that. I had never felt anything so beautiful. Somehow every fiber of my being thrummed with every note. After a steady diet of fine art, classical music, classic poetry, classic folk, this new sound, this new look, rocked my world. Whatever other direction my life might have gone in all changed in that moment”.
Behind the seemingly idyllic childhood, though, (“my mother thoroughly researched her role of creating the perfect picture”) inside a family was quietly unraveling. “My parents were smart funny, creative, loving, imperfect people. The family disease of alcoholism was slowly eating away at the façade, although my own enchantment with alcohol was just beginning. Then, when I was a teen, my mother abruptly went into recovery and pretty much pooped that family party for the rest of us”. Soon after that, a failed family business and an over mortgaged house scattered the family in all directions. Thanksgiving dinner that year was the last they would all share together. “For me, the loss of our family home and the unraveling of our family unit left a hole I underestimated the depth of for years.”
Wendy’s first gigs, early, surreal experiences singing and playing tambourine in a southern California bar band paid $10 a gig in biker bars (complete with barroom brawls and topless townies) So began Wendy’s first look at the music world.
Once back in New York, she spent time working as a singing waitress, busking a capella on Columbus Ave in New York City with Ellie Sarty and Lynne Robyn, a trio they eventually named “Fine Line”, graduating to clubs, then, off on her own, moving down to Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. She started work at the legendary nightclub, The Bitter End, waitressing, and booking comedy.
Once there she formed a band with Baker Lee, the sound person, on guitar, (still Wendy's creative partner and guitarist today) and Dug Rock, the night Manager, on drums. Kenny Gorka gave them a Tuesday night residency at 1am - a regular gig – “loud, really loud” she describes it. “I paid the band by passing out flyers on Bleecker Street - you'd get a buck a head for anyone you brought into the club. In the winter, by the time you got onstage, your lips were so frozen you could barely sing. But it was music school - 24 hour a day music school”.
But Wendy was spinning more and more out of control. Speaking candidly of her own bout with addiction, Wendy says “the biggest failed love affair of my life was the one I had with alcohol and drugs” She goes on ”I thought I’d found my miracle cure – for the shy writer who needed to sing, for a heartache I couldn’t get to the bottom of, for my fierce pursuit of the muse. When it turned on me, like the monster it was always destined to be for me, I couldn’t believe the betrayal. I was the last to know how long passed the time to let go was. When I finally did let go, quite begrudgingly I might add, another life began.”
Early in recovery from her addiction, Wendy’s attraction to bedlam subsiding, she stripped the band down, went totally acoustic, and then added it back, piece by piece. Baker Lee ran into Don Rubin from SBK (EMI) outside the Bitter End, handed him a tape they’d recorded a few month’s back and Don called a few days later. He came down to the Bitter End, saw the show and offered Wendy a deal on the spot. A few months later they were in the studio with Rob Fraboni, swept up into the mainstream music business.
| WENDY WALL Self Titled Debut CD |
Wendy's self-titled debut CD Wendy Wall (1989 SBK Records/Capitol), featuring "Postcard to the Stars", "Sweet Imagination", "The Thunderhead" and "Nothing Lasts Forever" was produced by Grammy winning producer/engineer Rob Fraboni (Bonnie Raitt, Phoebe Snow, David Johansen) and was recorded with band mates Baker Lee, Nick Pellegrino, Dug Rock, Urbano Sanchez and Heather Mullen.
Garnering critical acclaim and enjoying popular enthusiasm, Wendy Wall was a New York Music Award Best Contemporary Folk Album winner and seven-fold nominee, including nominations for Best Female Vocalist and Best Songwriter.
“… as thickly textured and brilliant as a painting by Van Gogh. Her voice is what your lover sounds like in dreams, your mother's in memory, and your own in fantasy”
- Lee Anne Phillips, Amazon Customer
Videos from the debut CD were in regular rotation on VH1 and Wendy had the honor of appearing as the musical guest star on Late Night with David Letterman, The Joan Lunden Show and Nile Rodger’s Inner Visions. Break out track “Postcard to the Stars” -- a commentary on planet earth and the humans that inhabit it -- was featured on VH1’s Earth Day Special Event annually through the mid 1990’s. Wendy speaks candidly:
” When I was signed to the label, I did a few interviews at the Bitter End, with a focus on my beginnings, and ultimately, the record contract signing there, but for me it represented the place where I had bottomed out – big. I thought any minute someone would come and tell me I had no right to be there. The Bitter End was much more than a stage I played on and place I met my band, met Baker, honed the craft. It was full of people who saved my life, in a way, people who looked after me when I couldn’t look after myself, who made sure I didn’t end up in the wrong place, walked me home, helped me to get help and rooted for me the night the gentlemen in the limos came. I didn’t know how to say that then”
Though the record signing sounded like a scene from a Hollywood movie, the fairy tale ending was not part of Wendy’s destiny. During the mixing of the record, Wendy’s father was diagnosed with cancer and a few months later, just after the record was released, Wendy’s mother was diagnosed as well. Wendy’s father died in December of 1990, Wendy’s mother in October of 1991. A month later, the label dropped her. “But what a gift” Wendy says. “all that happened during that time I was signed. I was able to give them some happiness during an awful time. And I got to see, in retrospect, how not about me that all was” Wendy talks of a show she did at the Bitter End in May of 91, 5 months before her mother’s passing. “Of all the shows I did there, the most important was the one I did that May for my mother,, who had never seen me perform my songs and wanted to before she died. For all of you who showed up that night, who showered her with so much love, I’ve spent my life since remembering your faces, remembering hers, and I’ll always be grateful.”
The next years were full of twist and turns. Wendy signed to an independent label and the funding was pulled, she lost her own home and relocated to Brooklyn. Through a series of fluke coincidences she was reunited with an old flame who helped her find the studio and the team to record “Two Birds” in Los Angeles.. She, in turn, helped him to find his sobriety.
"I guess that's the story of my life, maybe a lot of artist's lives. If you're living life as an artist, then you're always in the process. Even when it feels like you're running up against a brick wall, it's carving you, every experience you have, every minute you breathe, everything you listen to, and everything you take in, is going to come back out."
| WENDY WALL Two Birds |
Produced by Wall and Peter Gallway (Laura Nyro, Cliff Eberhardt), the collection of original songs on Two Birds serve as sonic oases, offering both sustenance and a vantage point for putting life's twists and turns into perspective
A mix of poetry and rhythm, intimacy and nuance, heartbreak and transcendence, innocence and wisdom, delivered in a voice "that will haunt your dreams", called "shamanic and holy" Two Birds has many threads to explore.
"Audacious craft...raw essence and raw power...visually stimulating and reflective...Wall is a true poet at heart...fruitful melodies and in depth thought provoking musical poems.”
- Media Plus Magazine
“Wendy Wall makes songs of raw emotion and tender reflection. She conducts the players with a flutter of her diminutive hand in arrangements so artful as to be inextricable from the songs themselves. 'Two Birds' is a dense collection of warmly intense songs - phrases and melodies that spin in your mind long after the CD player has stopped."
- Marilyn Rea Beyer, former Music Director WUMB Radio – Boston
Neither the pending deal for that record nor the reunion proved lasting, although they parted lifelong friends. Wendy returned to New York with a heavy heart and a suitcase full of cd’s waiting to be heard. Wendy writes:
” When choices made with the heart unwittingly led me farther and farther from traditional business success, I decided I didn’t want to be bound by the whim of some single individual assigned with the power to change my life. I decided to form my own record label and create my own destiny. I conceived this idea in the mid nineties, and, in the late nineties formed a label with a few wonderful people. We put everything into it and launched it in 2000, the year of the millennium, the year of endless possibility. Three years later we were roadkill”. This last setback knocked her off her feet.
“Over time, I’ve slowly come to understand the fate of our declaration of independence. Caught between two worlds, advised by good people from the mainstream world, trying to work within a framework we couldn’t seem to fit into, on the threshold of a seismic shift in the industry through the internet and independent movement, we sensed, in the shifting tides, what wasn’t quite there yet. We encountered people with the best of intentions, some with not the best of intentions. Deals were promised and again, as had happened before, deals didn’t come through. Heart and soul was poured into a record we couldn’t release”
“It seems strange that that experience with our venture hit me the way it did. Maybe it was one disappointment too many, too long a fight. But it somehow threw into question for me faith, hope and possibility. I had written and recorded an album essentially about the power of good and the power of love - personal and universal - and walked away in the end feeling that through a series of instances of misplaced trust, I had put people I cared about, and a work I cared about, in harm’s way. I felt duped by my own belief system. I felt that my business venture and ideals were hopelessly naive.”
| WENDY WALL The Road To Paradise |
For Wendy, the forthcoming CD The Road To Paradise (national release: March 31, 2009) represents a return to roots, to longtime trusted friends - musical and personal friendships orginially formed in Greenwich Village and The Bitter End. The new CD is packed with players who started performing together as part of that thriving downtown scene, the authentic downtown family.
“What I finally did start to do was write. Then bring the songs to Baker, to the studio, to the band. I met with Stewart Lerman. He and his studio exuded warmth. We started to record and over the course of two years made a record I named ‘The Road to Paradise’ after a song I’d written. It took that long to make because resources were slim, but the time was good. Baker Lee, Kevin Jenkins, Steve Holley, Marc Shulman, Larry Campbell, longtime, trusted friends who supported the songs in so many ways.
We re-launched the website, just after starting the record, and people started writing me right away with words of support and that they were waiting for new music. They couldn’t have known how much that meant to me.
When I was on a major label, it seemed the message I got was that my ultimate worth would be measured in numbers. Even knowing that isn’t a truth, I think most of us take that in at some level. In many ways, I’m not naturally good at business. I lead from the heart and take everything to heart. I don’t have a tough hide and I hope I don’t grow one.
Stick around long enough and you’ll stumble across a lot of ways to get hurt in life. Then again, there are lots of good people. And lots of good in people. But it doesn’t go unopposed. It’s not always easy to learn the right things. To stay open. To still be kind. To dream again. And again. No matter what. I aspire to that. If I can do that, I succeed. The rest of it, if we get it, is the confetti.
Music has always made life possible for me. If someone needs to hear the story I’m humming half as much as I needed to hum it, randomness factors out. And it all makes sense”.
The Road to Paradise - 13 new songs written and performed by Wendy Wall.
Featuring:
Baker Lee, guitar, and co-arranger (Melanie, Sonny Terry)
Steve Holley, drums and percussion (Paul McCartney and Wings, Dar Williams, Joe Cocker)
Kevin Jenkins, bass (Cyndi Lauper, John Gorka)
Marc Shulman, guitar (Suzanne Vega, Edie Brikell, Jonatha Brooke, Patty Larkin)
Larry Campbell, banjo, mandolin (Bob Dylan, Roseanne Cash, Paul Simon, Joan Osborne)
Tommy B Thompson, background vocals, guitar, co-arranger.
The ethereal and dreamlike quality of the opening and closing tracks on The Road To Paradise provide perfect bookends to a lyrical and musical story that represents a time of further transition in the artists’ life.
“…we are what we were seeking” The Road to Paradise
“Wendy Wall takes in everything that's good and important about being human, distills it, sends it up to heaven for an edit then lays it down on us. Her music is an act of love” Fan quote
THE ROAD TO PARADISE | FEATURED TRACKS
“A Wing and a Prayer” has broad pop appeal with its jangly sort of country/Americana feel and its broader message of release.
“Wallflower Waltz”, the one entirely acoustic track on the CD, is a vocal delight – intimate, sparse, luscious.
“Fools Gold”, a crowd pleaser at the live shows, is positioned as an immediately accessible track. It’s the invitation, the open screen door, the driveway moment.
“Hugging The Coast”, with its early Springsteen-esque musical intro, clearly displays Ms. Walls’ signature ability to craft songs with a thoughtful, literary sense of poetry.
"A true bohemian chanteuse...wonderful songs washed in terrific pop melodies and inspired vocals..."
- New York Review of Records
"Aching vibrato... a bittersweet mix... her voice, rich and sensual, is instantly inviting... her lyrics communicate her experience in a way that makes the personal universal... let's hope she never stops."
- Richard Winham WUTC Radio Chattanooga
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