2009 Arts » Arts Features
Born to play - Andrea Harsell finds her way with Rock & Roll Love Child
by Erika Fredrickson Missoula Independent, September 17, 2009
For several months, Andrea Harsell had only a chorus. She'd sing, "Ooooh, lemonade, I gotta find my way home," but she couldn't get past that one bluesy minor key line, couldn't turn it into a full-fledged song with verses. The local singer/songwriter let it simmer. She'd sit down to write other tracks, settling into a guitar riff, letting the words spill out. But the lemonade song haunted her.
"I'm like, 'What in the heck does this mean? Lemonade? Why are no other words coming?,'" she says.
Andrea Harsell’s new album combines gospel, rock ’n’ roll and a decade’s worth of songwriting. “What everybody loves about Janis [Joplin] is she didn’t care what other people thought,” says Harsell. “She just felt the music so internally with every cell of her body and let it out in that way. I’ve had times playing onstage where I am so in the moment that I’m not thinking, and it’s just bliss.”
One night, she ended up at a party and someone suggested that she write about a relationship gone sour. "It was a tortured way to look at it," she says. "But the next day I sat down and all the rest of it came out."
The now-finished "Lemonade" tells the story of a woman who follows her lover from Tennessee to Baton Rouge, working dead end jobs and leading a life she never wanted to lead, but intent on finding a better path. It's a salty, strutting country blues song with Harsell's smoky vocals searing through each line. And it's the second track on Harsell's new album, Rock & Roll Love Child, a collection of songs she's releasing this week but that has been in the works for the past 10 years.
Harsell's a well-known musician in Missoula, born and raised on the Northside. She was the lead singer of the bluegrass band Nine Pound Hammer, which put out an album in 2000 before breaking up. In 2003, she formed the Andrea Harsell Experiment, a 1960s- and 1970s-styled rock band covering Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, as well as doing originals that fused blues, country, folk and jazz. The band dispersed later that year after releasing a live album. Harsell has also opened for numerous touring bands as a duo with her lead guitarist, Louie Bond, and she's traveled solo to various festivals, including Telluride.
But Harsell says she's been stuck in a rut for the last three years. Busy raising two kids and with a husband often working on the road, sometimes gone for 30 days at a time, Harsell says she stayed home and rarely played live. She wrote a lot, but most of the songs were "the tortured kind." That's kind of her style anyway, she admits, but it was still hard for her to completely sacrifice her music.
"I always knew I was going to do music since I was really little," she says. "When you're young and you dream of it, you really don't understand how it happens that somebody gets on the radio. But it's just never been an option to stop playing or stop writing. It would be really weird. It would be like sitting on your hands."
Harsell decided that she would do whatever it took to include her music in her life. She began jamming whenever she could with other musicians. She joined her congregation's music group at All Souls church. And she decided, come hell or high water, she'd record an album.
Diversity is key to Rock & Roll Love Child. The first track, "Gotta Find," is a cross between Joan Jett's growl and Joplin's grit. Harsell sings, "Sittin' here wastin' my sweet time, gonna find me a woman gonna make her mine/Sittin here wastin' my sweet time, gonna find me a man gonna make him mine, now." And she shows her penchant for aggressive one-liners à la ZZ Top or Guns n' Roses when she adds, "We can stay the night, we'll roll around in the grass/Come on baby, baby gonna tap that ass."
Blues, folk and rock songs fill the album, interspersed with field recordings from around Missoula that Harsell's been collecting over the past five years. You can hear the sound of Rattlesnake Creek, cars driving through the Orange Street underpass, a squeaky bicycle wheel and raucous street conversations during Maggot Fest weekend. You can also hear the sound of beers popping open and the laugh of the pastor's wife at All Souls.
The last song of the album jumps to something completely different. "Waterside" features Harsell's 12-person pick-up choir, which includes the likes of Jay Straw, Kevin Van Dort, Mike Avery and singers from the Mason Jar String Band and Zeppo.
"That was kind of a struggle with this CD," Harsell says of fitting in all the different styles. "I want to do rock, I want to do gospel, but then I want to do the bluegrass, a little bit of country, a little bit of rock 'n' roll. People say, 'Stick to one genre.' But I don't want to do that. I asked advice and I got advice, and then I just went with my gut and just did it the way it is."
Harsell's giddy about the long-awaited release. The recording time helped form a new band, Andrea Harsell and the Night Lights, which includes power keyboardist Ryan "Shmed" Maynes of recording studio fame. And she's already set her mind to never let five years go by again before she makes another album.
"I'm trying to live a life as a musician and also the reality of paying the bills and having kids," she says. "And I just want it all. With music, it's kind of like now or never. You can sit there and think about it, but you have to actually make it happen."
Andrea Harsell and the Night Lights play a CD release party at the Top Hat Friday, Sept. 18, at 9 PM with Jaymi White, Wolf Redboy and the Mason Jar String Band. $5. $1 off cover with every donated food item.
Comments:
Great article Erika. I am intrigued and excited about Harsell's new album. I think it's perfect that she incorporated the sounds of Missoula into her recordings, bringing a piece of everyday life into her album...after all, Missoula is where the songs were born.
I'll definitely be at the cd release show to support this hard working mother, songwriter, and tenacious musical soul.
.Posted by montanamade on September 17, 2009 at 10:43 AM
Yeah! Even when I've seen Andrea play for late nights crowds of folks who will soon forget everything from the night, she still bares it all in her performance. Can't wait for the cd release!!!
.Posted by kier on September 17, 2009 at 7:52 PM
RAISED ON ROCK AND ROLL RADIO
By JAMIE KELLY of the Missoulian | Friday, September 18, 2009
Andrea Harsell was born when being a "love child" was groovy.
No, her parents didn't go to Woodstock or fall out of a Volkswagen bus onto the streets of San Francisco during the Summer of Love.
But she is the daughter of Rod Harsell, a Missoula radio veteran who always had cool tunes spinning through the background of his daughter's youth.
So while she wasn't raised on the radio, she was raised by a radio professional.
"I grew up with my dad in radio, so there was always a lot of music in my house," said Harsell, a lifelong Missoulian raised on the Northside. "I had the Joan Jett albums, the KISS albums. And I just knew that music was something I wanted to do."
And done it, she has. Harsell is a prodigious songwriter and performer attracted to a stage like a moth to a porch light. Since high school, she has embarked on numerous solo and group projects, and is now the author of her first full-length CD of entirely original and self-written material in "Rock & Roll Love Child."
The CD will be released at a party on Friday at the Top Hat.
For Harsell, the CD has been a five-year project, one that started with a simple wish to create the best music she could and record it with Missoula's best musicians.
Now complemented by a new band, the Night Lights, Harsell found a cadre of musicians who made the project all that more fulfilling.
"This is something I've always wanted to do," she said. "And I have a lot riding on this one."
The CD is a tightly recorded and arranged collection of 12 songs, ranging in style from straight-up rock to blues shuffles to rock ballads to gospel, reflecting Harsell's love of rock and blues divas from Joan Jett to Aretha Franklin.
The thickly textured gospel song "Waterside," featuring a full backing gospel choir, is perhaps the most ambitious tune on the recording.
"I just wrote it, but didn't think it was going to be on the album," said Harsell.
In fact, none of the songs on "Rock & Roll Love Child," the cover of which features Harsell with a Pat Benatar haircut and wearing Jett-like black attire and stockings, were written solely for this project.
Instead, Harsell had a mental library of around 35 or 40 songs she had written over the years. What she recorded over numerous sessions starting last fall at Club Schmed recording studio was subject to the emotion and whims of the day.
"I'd think about it on the drive over," said Harsell, who first surfaced in the Missoula music scene with her band the Andrea Harsell Experiment a decade ago. "They were all songs I wanted to record, so I started making lists, making lists, making lists."
The album features Joe Nickell (the Missoulian reporter) on drums, Louie Bond on lead guitar, Ryan Shmed Maynes on the keyboard and Matt Nord on bass, along with Harsell on acoustic guitar.
And, it also features what Harsell calls the "Waterside Choir", a collection of some of Missoula's best musicians who showed up to record the background vocals on the ambitious gospel song.
The CD was mixed and mastered by Jim Rogers and Richard McIntosh, "so I got the best of both worlds in recording and mastering," said Harsell.
Listeners will also notice the between-song sound clips, recorded at various locations around Missoula, from the Orange Street underpass to a hot, bustling night downtown. They serve as Harsell's personal love note to the town she still loves to call home.
"It feels like it kind of made this whole thing full-circle," she said.
Harsell, who like her father makes her living in radio (as a marketing consultant for The Trail 103.3), hopes this recording gets somebody's attention.
"I guess the biggest thing is I'm looking for some representation, as far as artist management and distribution," said Harsell, who is also a married mother of an 8-year-old. "I love my job, but music is what I've always wanted to do."
In addition to local music stores, "Rock & Roll Love Child" will be available on iTunes and CDBaby.
Reporter Jamie Kelly can be reached at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com
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