Quote: "If there isn’t a small part of you that desperately wants to live more passionately after hearing this CD, you aren’t really listening."
By Jennifer Layton, Indie-Music.com
April, 2006
Carolyn Hudson is a passionate siren, and the story behind her career makes her songs even more vivid. She was engaged to a nice boy and trying to live a nice life, but when the artist inside started clamoring for attention and making her realize she didn’t really love her fiancé, she left him and the ring behind and fled to New York City, where one of her friends lived. (She knew no one else in the city.) She immersed herself in the community of poets, painters, dancers and singers. Now she has emerged with her debut CD, Living in My Skin. Thank God the artist inside refused to be silenced.
She details her escape from conformity in the CD’s best track, “Which One is She,” in which she documents the phone call her jilted groom made to his father after realizing Hudson was gone:
And his Tallahassee dad clears his throat
And lights a smoke and he says
“Only freaks and weirdos move to New York City son,”
he says, “Which one is she?” ....
And his dad says, “Never knew her well enough
And this is just a guess but she seemed
Mighty independent son and don’t you want a girl
A little less, a little less, a little ... less?”
The difference between who she is and who she used to be is the underlying theme of this CD, summed up perfectly in a key lyric from “Dorothy,”: “My skin’s too tight for my soul.” Hudson’s music is dreamy, jazzy, sultry, and downright magical. All of her repressed desires burst to the surface in tracks like “Patiently For Roses,” a mostly spoken-word track about sexual frustration. She also acknowledges the contradictory nature of every woman’s personality in “You Have No Idea.” But she also has a sense of humor about it, as evidenced by “It Doesn’t Count,” in which she asserts that if the wrong man tells you you’re beautiful, it doesn’t count. Guys may scratch their heads over that one, and we women will acknowledge the lack of logic, but it’s still the truth.
The title track is divine. Hudson does the mystic crooning thing so well. Imagine a Sade song being produced by Steely Dan. Hudson sings with the bewildered joy of a caged bird suddenly freed and flying across the ocean. There’s a smile in her voice. There’s jazz and soul and satin sheets in her music. If there isn’t a small part of you that desperately wants to live more passionately after hearing this CD, you aren’t really listening.
Do we want a girl that’s a little less? No way. After hearing so much magic pour from the soul of this romantic refugee, I will accept nothing less.
********
"Silence and attention are the world's greatest commodities," Carolyn says, "People talk and talk about one thing when they really mean something else. I'm trying to reveal the 'something else.'"
Carolyn is a singer, a songwriter, a performer, an arranger, a producer, a lyricist, a bandleader and an entrepreneur. Her velocity is only increasing. Carolyn is recently based in Los Angeles but enjoys a true bi-coastal living as she shuttles between LA and her former home of New York City. She is building a following now on both coasts. She also finds time to write a monthly marketing column for other indie artists for CDBaby.com as well as articles for her hometown newspaper The West Hollywood News. In addition, her latest poetry is being published in several national magazines.
Carolyn recently moved to LA from NYC where her record release party was held at legendary Joe’s Pub in Manhattan - a 120 person venue. It was sold out. She sold it out again the following month. She performed in front of a crowd of 1,000 at Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan. She has played out consistently over the past six years in NYC at renown venues like The Bottom Line, The Bitter End, The Living Room, Rockwood Music Hall and Tribeca Blues. She is currently playing out in LA while working on a live record due for release in Spring 2006.
Carolyn says, "I moved to LA recently onto a tree-lined street in West Hollywood, tripled my square-footage, bought a dog, and planted a garden. I keep the windows open 24/7 and am living a life here that I couldn't have in Manhattan. However, I am still a New Yorker at heart!"
Carolyn discovered her singing voice later in life. It's a gift she attributes to an "interference of light" where her life changed overnight when she found her passion. After encouragement gleaned from a vocal workshop and a series of serendipitous events, she ultimately landed as the lead singer of a local cover band. She began weekly vocal training with renown vocal coach Liz Caplan of Liz Caplan Studios in New York City. After trial by fire in the world of live performance and building her vocal chops through training, she broke out and began writing her own songs as a solo artist.
At a slender 5'10", Carolyn's striking onstage presence brings to mind the classic sensuality of Sade mixed with the bravado of Alannis Morissette. Her live performances are an impassioned display of artistry and emotion. A supporter of her community, Carolyn has performed at the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival, produced by Robert De Niro, as well as the "Taste of Tribeca," an event which raises funds for downtown schools.
All the while, this renaissance woman successfully held a full time job as a marketing executive at a global consulting company. After finding talented producer Doug Maxwell (Joan Osborne, Judy Collins, Ronnie Specter), she was cloistered in the recording studio for nearly a year along with long-time collaborator Tony DeAngelis. "The three of us began with one direction in mind...and that was to go a Kate Bush-esque route with tons of electronic sounds and sweeping melodies," Carolyn says, "But the road we ended up going down was a stripping away and paring down of the electronic and brought in live players to do acoustic instrumentation for a warmer and more intimate feel." Living in My Skin is lifted by a stellar circle of musicians fresh off major tours. Players include guitarist Jon Herington, (Bette Midler and Steely Dan), guitarist Larry Saltzman (Simon & Garfunkel), and drummer Frank Pagano who played with Laura Nyro for 15 years. Backing vocalists who appear on the album are Janice Pendarvis who has made a career singing with Sting and Vaneese Thomas, daughter of legendary R&B singer Rufus Thomas. What she created was the debut album of an old pro. From the musicianship to the vocals, Carolyn found her voice and nailed it.
"I believe people don't buy music," Carolyn says. "Rather, they aquire it. When you truly connect with a lyric or a melody, you bring them inside you and it informs everything in your life." Carolyn continues,
"My fan is someone like me. Someone who has been there and done that. Someone who is tired of candy corn music. Someone who has stopped buying into the drama. Someone who wants to listen to good music but feel it at the same time. In a very real sense, 'Living in My Skin' is my swan song to draw my kind back to me."
Fun fact: Carolyn is the CEO of her own music label because of a vibrator. Box of Bees Media, LLC is the company she created to self-produce her record. She took the name from the historic fact that Cleopatra kept a buzzing box of bees at her bedside as a primitive sex toy.
With over 15 years in Marketing, Carolyn took her skills and used it to self-promote the record. The first thing she did was call upon an extraordinary group of friends who happen to be the Chief Sales Director at a Global Ad Agency, a Lobbyist on Capital Hill, a Communications Director at the Motion Picture Association of America, a movie producer, a Finance Director at IBM, an attorney with a top Manhattan lagal firm, and a legislative aide to the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. None of whom were above working both sides of the street - literally. These friends were her street team - passing out free CDS outside the Barnes aand Nobel in Union Square and catching people coming out of movies where her target market would go. She would hold monthly Box of Bees Sunday brunches at her Tribeca apartment where the first order of business was how best to get the word out about Carolyn and her music. Carolyn quips, "Second on the agenda was always lots of champagne, stories and laughing."
Rumi philosophy, Anne Sexton poetry, David Sedaris fiction, Charles and Ray Eames minimalism and Ed Ruscha art are cited as Carolyn's current inspirations. A wide swath of music lives in her heart including artists Seal, Ivy, Patty Griffin, Beth Orton, Laura Nyro, Kate Bush, Bonnie Raitt and Fleetwood Mac.
"My love for music is depth-less, "Carolyn confesses. "There are songs so delicious to me that I wish I could touch them, roll around in them, and swallow them so they become part of my flesh and I could eat them rather than just hear them."
A love of, and support for, the arts runs throughout her family. While Carolyn was growing up, her mother directed the performance center at a local college and often invited performers - dancers, musicians, and actors - back to the Hudson house. Carolyn remembers surreal moments like laughing with Marcel Marceau in her dining room, watching Jean-Pierre Rampal play his gold flute in their living room and sitting next to Vincent Price for spaghetti dinner at their kitchen table. Ballet, piano, choir, painting, modeling and acting were interests that occupied many years of her youth. Carolyn wasn't exactly a gawky teenager. She was active in school theatre and writing extracurriculars, dated baseball players and drove a '77 Firebird Camaro with 6 built-in Alpine speakers blaring at all times.
"Growing up, I had my little 45 player in my bedroom. I remember distinctly the first record that gave me chills and that was 'Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime' by the Korgis. I found them at a record shop in London and I was hooked on haunting melodies from that point forward. Oh, and I thought I was coolest kid ever to have discovered a group from overseas!," Carolyn laughs. "I still have my collection of beloved 45s."
While one grandfather taught engineering at MIT and wrote about fractals, the other once carried a spear in the chorus of Aida at the Metropolitan Opera and made a living as a painter in Manhattan. Her mother was born above a Greenwich Village club where Pearl Bailey's singing used to float up to the 3rd floor and sing her to sleep. Her cousins grew up performing with their bands in both Nashville and Florida.
Her father's love of rock & roll is etched in her genes. "Chicago, Fleetwood Mac, and The Rolling Stones were turned up loud in my home as a child," Carolyn remembers. "My dad has always referred to his age by saying, 'I'm three weeks older than Mick Jagger.'"
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