This year's Valley Advocate Grand Band Slam singer/songwriter winner Ella Longpre has been honing her craft for almost as long as she can remember. The Northampton songwriter and multi-instrumentalist remembers being a young child, gazing wistfully at an instrument kept tantalizingly just out of reach.
"When I was five or six, my mother had a Casio keyboard in her bedroom that had some really awesome beat banks—but no one was allowed to mess with it unless they knew how to actually use it," she recalls. "I had to teach myself to play the keyboard before I could start making demo tapes with the sample banks, which is what I really wanted to do. I had this vision of sending a tape to the record company and becoming the next Cyndi Lauper before I could even read."
Longpre, who plays piano, guitar, accordion, harmonica and melodica—"the easy ones"—specializes in haunting, affecting songs that exist across the emotional spectrum: dark, desperate, heartsick, dreamy, hopeful, ecstatic. She uses her expressive voice and large range to achieve each desired effect.
"People have compared me to all sorts of things, from Nick Cave to Ani DiFranco," she says. "I think that my music sounds like the past played on busted equipment."
The name of her latest project, dust savior, is taken from the Dylan Thomas poem "I, In My Intricate Image." "There's a line, 'Dust be your savior under the conjured soil,'" says Longpre. "We have to accept the ephemeral tendencies of nature, impermanence, but realize there are still trace elements of history beneath us in the ground."
Along with her mother's keyboard, Longpre's influences are culled from a lifetime of playing and listening to music. "[I'm influenced by] gospel music, all of it," she says. "Southern gospel, soul, Gothic chants—gospel music is a mammoth part of me. For seven years of my life I was stuck in 1994, mentally, so grunge rock is usually lurking somewhere in the background. In recent years, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Odetta have been strong influences on me. Also minimalism."
Longpre's lyrics demonstrate her love for language and storytelling. For her, there is an inextricable connection between words and sounds.
"Words, with their multitudes of meanings, can either illuminate or obscure a message," she says. "Sounds, like words, also carry meaning, and the meanings of these sounds, just like the meanings of words, change over time. I try to constantly be aware that, when I choose to make a sound, I'm not just making an aesthetic choice, or drawing from a vague cloud of artistic notion, I'm drawing from a history of sounds, from a whole biography of sound, and that the sounds I choose, the relationships between different sounds, affect a listener to a profound degree.
"I—anyone—can choose a combination of sounds that will scare the shit out of someone, or that can make someone miss an old lover. As a maker of sound, this is truly empowering to realize. If you're choosing to accompany these sounds with words, you have to economize, because the last thing you want to do is dilute this power."
She says that her inspirations lie in her immediate surroundings: "My past, the news, things I've heard or read in books. I sit down at the piano or with a guitar to reflect on images until they come out as a narrative in some sort of consistent pattern. The process is usually fluid and organic, but sometimes I have pray to Hoagy Carmichael and Bernie Taupin for guidance."
While Longpre often plays solo, she has collaborated with a laundry list of Valley musicians over the last several years: Justin Bard (who is now a member of dust savior), Jason Lavoie, Salvation Alley String Band, The Trials and Tribulations, Sitting Next to Brian, Abeja, Jason Bourgeois, Scott Alden, Carolyn Conspiracy, Thomas Matthew Campbell, Leif Mulch, Sebastian Renfield, Jesse Freidin, Ryan Quinn, Matt Hebert, Joseph Rogers and Christopher Carmody.
"Playing in a band means I get to choose how visible I am," she says. "Playing alone means I have to fully accept and perform my shortcomings. These are both good. When I play with other people, though, I can usually get them to carry stuff for me or buy me a slice of pizza."
As she has done throughout her life, Longpre is keeping busy. "Right now, Jason Lavoie and I are working on a project that has no focus, no time frame, and no real structure," Longpre says. "I have to record this whole album of new songs that I have just sitting in my head. I want to shift from playing with Bard to really collaborating with him. I'm working on a techno/disco album that's a tribute to Ossie Davis, with no vocals."
Dust savior appears with Hidden Cameras and Gentleman Reg at the Iron Horse in Northampton on Monday, Nov. 2 at 8:30 p.m. For more, visit www.myspace.com/ellalongpreasherself.
