"Web-toed lovers, hopeless parole skippers, "everyday aliens," the living dead...
That's just a sampling of what you'll encounter on LITTLE LEVIATHAN, the debut album from Michelle Lewis. Produced by Steve Fisk (Joan Osborne, Geraldine Fibbers), it's an album of irresistibly melodic and richly textured story songs starring a gallery of misfits, miscreants and unfortunates -- the beautiful, the bizarre, and the damned. LITTLE LEVIATHAN is a collection of songs that Michelle Lewis was destined to write, because when it comes to being the outsider -- of not quite fitting in -- Michelle Lewis doesn't just sing about it, she has lived it.
Michelle Lewis spent the first 11 years of her life in New York City, living a childhood that was offbeat by anybody's standards. "My dad, Morty Lewis, was a total bebop dude, a big band sax player for Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. And my mom, Annette, was a session singer for radio and TV jingles."
Michelle grew up singing. By the time she was in kindergarten, she'd turned pro. "I sang jingles for Oreo's, Coca Cola, you name it, I was totally exploited!," she recalls with a laugh. "And pretty soon I became a regular performing kid on Sesame Street."
In an effort to try to give their kids a more "normal" upbringing, Michelle's parents transplanted their brood from funky Manhattan to the treelined suburbs of Rivervale, New Jersey. "I was 11 and my folks thought my brother and I should grow up in a nice middle class community."
Of course, it didn't quite turn out that way. And the artist who would later write "Nowhere And Everywhere" -- a song about the unexpected freedom she discovered by not fitting in anywhere -- began a unique and supremely contradictory adolescence.
"I'd ride my bike to school and be with the regular kids," says Lewis, "but then they'd go home to 9-to-5 type parents who were organizing bake sales, while I'd go home to my musician parents, where anything could happen.
"For instance," she recalls, "one day I came home from school and my father yelled for me to come upstairs. And when I got there, he was standing next to my brother's clock radio, and he asked me, 'What's this song?' "I told him it was Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side,' and as we listened to the saxophone solo, he said, 'That's me playing, that's my horn.' See, it turns out he'd played sax on an early demo of the song, which was later inserted into the final version."
It was the kind of home environment that would naturally spawn another generation of musical Lewises, right? Just a matter of time before Michelle flowered into a performer with a burning ambition for greatness, right?
Wrong. Though most of the kids around her would have given their orthodontically-improved teeth to become professional musicians, Michelle Lewis had zero interest in pursuing a career in music. In truth, the whole punchline to her childhood is that, to the utter amazement of her middle class wannabe parents, Michelle -- their talented offspring whose genetic code was virtually written in musical notation -- actually yearned for a career in the straight world! "I wanted to be a shrink," says Lewis, "and so off I went to Columbia University." But like her parents' misguided notion of suburban bliss, Michelle's dream of psychoanalytic success and middle class respectability would never materialize.
Whether kicking, screaming, or singing like an angel, Michelle Lewis was gonna turn out to be a musician.
When Michelle graduated from Columbia, she found that her family's background was impossible to escape: when she needed a job an uncle found her one -- at a jazz label. No matter how hard she tried to stay away, it was impossible to not fall back into the music biz.
Having made a name for herself by jamming with early Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors at Columbia campus concerts, she was asked to sit in with a number of budding new acts at various clubs and rehearsal hangouts in lower Manhattan.
At the same time, as a way to pay the rent, Michelle wrote lyrics for dance track producers, crafting rhymes and catchy pop tunes. It wasn't long before BMG Music signed her to a publishing deal in 1994. Recorded by international pop artists, Lewis' dance-pop songs became monster hits abroad: * Singer Deni Hines won an ARIA (Australia's Grammy) as Best New Artist in 1996 for her recording of Michelle's "It's Alright."
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Eternal's version of "Think About Me" went triple platinum in the UK.
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The up tempo single, "Live Without You," recorded by the Todd Terry Project featuring Jocelyn Brown, was a massive hit in Europe and Japan.
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Michelle herself received a JUNO (Canada's Grammy) for Best Dance Song of the Year for penning "Deeper Shades of Love," a #1 hit for the artist Camille.
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"I Will Be Your Friend," became an album cut on Amy Grant's 1997 album "Behind The Eyes."
But as gratifying as her international pop success has been, Michelle Lewis realized she needed to write songs just for herself -- sophisticated material conceived from the inside out -- gutsy, heartfelt music that is a truer reflection of who she is and where she has been. As a result, Michelle discovered the difference between toiling in the "family business" and the extraordinary fulfillment that can come from being an artist.
"Writing songs for other people was a great education in the craft of songwriting," Lewis says. "But the time came when I realized I needed to tell my own stories. So to keep my sanity, I wrote the songs that became LITTLE LEVIATHAN."
A unified set of songs -- imaginative variations on a theme -- LITTLE LEVIATHAN would present flesh and blood characters who learn that restriction can become release, that alienation can be seen as a kind of freedom, and that deadening pain can be turned into something incandescent and alive.
To actualize her vision of LITTLE LEVIATHAN, Michelle was careful when choosing a producer. "I wanted Steve (Fisk) because he'd done so much good stuff already with Geraldine Fibbers and Soul Coughing, and with his own bands Pigeonhead and Pell Mell. He's a great sound designer and he knows how to capture the essence of a song." Complementing Michelle's dynamic voice and guitar is lead guitarist Teddy Kumpel, who also co-wrote some of the songs. Drummer Rich Pagano (Marry Me Jane), bass players Tony Scherr (Lounge Lizards) and Keith Golden, and Andy Ezrin on keyboards also came aboard the project. Last but not least, the most impressive instrument on LITTLE LEVIATHAN is Lewis' classic pop voice. Using it to inject her own tales of estrangement with a sense of humor, Lewis' empathy for her characters becomes total, her observations dead-on, her wordplay mesmerizing, and her vocal phrasings -- in which teetering piles of words tumble perfectly into place -- downright magical.
