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Irene Sage: Don't Say Goodnight |
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Thursday, 02 February 2006 00:27 |
Irene Sage
Don't Say Goodnight
By John Sinclair
Irene Sage is a woman who has found her way. About to emerge from a two-year musical sabbatical with her first solo album, Don't Say Goodnight, the magnetic lead singer of Irene & The Mikes has survived the break-up of the popular acid-blues band and bounced back with a passion to launch the next stage of her career as featured vocalist, composer, and producer of her own recordings.
Don't Say Goodnight, recorded in New Orleans with an all-star cast, was designed to showcase the singer's impassioned compositions, powerful vocal delivery and impressive musical scope.
Her musical collaborators include guitarists Anders Osborn and Kenny Holladay, violinist Theresa Andersen, Dave Easley on steel guitar, Sally Townes on piano & keyboards, bassist Dave Spring, and drummers Mike Larkins and Pete Bradish. Mike Darby, Irene's former musical partner and leader of The Mikes, contributes his rhythm guitar to the mix, and the estimable Cornell Williams leads the back-up singers.
Irene's original material--some of it co-written with Spring, Coco Robicheaux or Sage's husband, Scott Conklin--ranges from blues-rock to country and gospel to modern pop, and she puts it across with feeling, strength and conviction. Frequently her songs struggle with real-life emotional issues and attempt to resolve the changes she's going through in her life and her music, seeking release in self-expression and solace in a hard place to be.
Still in her twenties, Irene Sage grew up in Arabi, just downriver from the New Orleans city limits, where she started singing as a member of a musical family. She hooked with Mike Darby as a teenager and took off with him to travel around the country as a musical duo. They came back to New Orleans when Irene was 18 and spent a lot of time in the French Quarter, playing in the streets and soaking up the bohemian ambience.
Their first group, Common Knowledge, made way for Irene & The Mikes, an acid-tinged blues band powered by Sage's dynamic vocals and raw, enthralling stage presence which quickly became a special favorite of the city's downtown club scene. They released a CD, Stop That Train, to popular local acclaim, traveled east to play Tramps in New York City, and got signed by Denny Cordell to Island Records.
But while the band prepared for its first Island recording, Cordell suddenly passed away, and the project went into limbo. Then everything started to fall apart, the band disintegrated, and suddenly the first stage of the singer's life was over.
"When the band broke up," Sage recalls, "I didn't know what to do. This had been my whole life for a long time, and I knew I wanted something else, but I really didn't know what it was. I had writer's block for about a year, and then things just started coming out.
I didn't know exactly what direction to pursue in my songwriting or in my music, so I just decided to follow my feelings and not worry about where they would lead musically."
Soon there were songs to sing again: Some sounded like country tunes, some were drenched in blues, some wanted to be rocked hard, some sounded like they were tailor-made for pop radio, and all of them fit the singer to perfection.
Now they needed to be recorded: Musicians were selected, arrangements worked out, and tapes rolled at Audiofile Studios until an album's worth of music had been laid down.
"It wasn't until after we finished mixing the tapes at American Sector that I started thinking about what I was going to do with them, in terms of getting them out," Irene chuckled.
"It seemed like I had been going in so many different directions, but then I realized that it was all a personal thing--all the music came right out of my own experience, whatever form it might have taken musically--and I started to feel more comfortable with the whole thing.
"I've listened to--and played--a lot of different kinds of music ever since I can remember," she muses. "If you asked me my influences, I would have to say Janis Joplin, definitely, and Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash--and the Beatles, man! I used to play that White Album over and over again."
You can hear all this, and more, in the debut album by Irene Sage. And there's quite a delicious pun encapsulated in the title tune. Irene explains:
"When I was in Irene & The Mikes, somebody always had to be smart and ask us to play 'Goodnight Irene.' I finally said, 'Man, somebody's got to write a tune called 'Don't Say Goodnight Irene' just to shut these characters up.' Of course Coco Robicheaux came back with the lyrics, I wrote the music, and now it's the title track on my first album."
One listen to Don't Say Goodnight will tell you Irene Sage has got the next stage of her promising career well under way. Celebrate the release of her premiere CD and the debut of her new group, the Irene Sage Band, in performance at Margaritaville on Saturday, April 18. Call 277-2989 for more information.
--New Orleans
March 20, 1997
(c) 1997, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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