Melody Gardot’s Melodic Therapy
Melody Gardot overcomes
life-threatening accident to make beautiful music.
“Oh,
that’s so beautiful! I’m on the banks of the Seine right now. There’s a winter
sky, grey and blue pastel, with a bright yellow setting sun. Ah, I love it
here.”
Melody Gardot is in Paris,
laughing happily over the phone, waxing ecstatically as she rides through the
City of Light during a tour in support of her new CD, My One and Only Thrill
(Verve). And she’s not sounding at all like someone who is still suffering the
aftereffects of a near-death, life-transforming accident.
She is, in fact, a lot more
focused on her pleasure at being back in France. “It’s the only place,” she
says, “where I’ve ever gotten off the plane and felt I was at home. [I’m
surprised] I was born where I was. Because I feel as though if my spirit were
to have chosen where I was to be born, it would have been France.”
Then, interrupting herself,
Gardot adds, “Oh, look. There’s my favorite café!”
Despite her enthusiasm, however,
the consequences of the accident are still an intrinsic part of her
life—directly, as she continues through her recovery, and indirectly, as an
element in her art and her story. Five years after the then-19-year old student
was struck by an SUV while riding a bicycle to a fashion class at Community
College of Philadelphia, she has established herself as an important new
talent. Comparisons to Norah Jones, Madeleine Peyroux, Laura Nyro, Joni
Mitchell and Shania Twain have been bandied about.
Herbie Hancock invited her to
sing Joni Mitchell’s song, “Edith and the King-Pin,” for the Live From Abbey
Road TV series. The New York Times’ Nate Chinen, in a review of a live
performance, wrote, “Smoldering becomes Ms. Gardot, whose voice carries a soft
allure even on brighter fare.” The BBC suggested, “You owe it to your ears to
discover this gem for yourself.” And Business Week, in a rare musical
observation, described her first CD, Worrisome Heart, as “a place where Billie
Holiday meets Tom Waits.”
A slender blonde with dark,
arching eyebrows and a cool, Peggy Lee manner, Gardot must wear dark glasses to
compensate for hyper-photosensitivity, earplugs for severe
Hyperacusis/Tinnitus, and use a cane, which she calls “Citizen Cane,” for
stability and balance. But none of these intrude on the dark seductive timbre
of her voice, the quality of her music or the emotional electricity of her
performances. If anything, the dark glasses and the cane, combined with her
affection for, as she puts it, “nice shoes,” provide an intriguing air of
timeless elegance.
She also makes clear, on her
MySpace page, her dislike for the word “disabled,” a word she considers to be
“self-demoting.”
“I see myself,” she writes, “in
this way: ‘I am able to do some things and unable to do others.’ That’s all.
The technicalities are just as important as you make them. All you need to know
is why I need the things you see me with, as most people do not need them.”
But Gardot has had, nonetheless,
a difficult journey. The impact of the SUV, which was making an illegal left
turn, caused multiple pelvic fractures as well as head, back and spinal
injuries. Unable to walk, or even sit up comfortably, she spent a year mostly
lying in bed. Her state of mind, combined with the pain she was experiencing,
didn’t improve when a physician suggested music therapy as a possible aid in
dealing with the cognitive impairment that had been caused by her head
injuries.
“The truth is I was devastated
when I was encouraged to play,” recalls Gardot, “because I thought it meant I
would have to sit at the piano. Which wasn’t possible, because I had fractures
in the front and the back, in my pelvis, and sitting was incredibly painful.
Even getting to a doctor was a fiasco. It took 20 minutes to get there, and two
days to recover from it. It was a really difficult time. So when the doctor
mentioned music, it was just kind of both inspiring and deflating in the same
breath, because it was hopeful but impossible.”
Impossible for her to play the
piano, yes, but there are other ways to make music. Gardot’s mother suggested
one, asking, “Why don’t you try the guitar? I have one, you know.” But even
that was daunting.
“Basically,” she says, “I learned
to play the guitar, on my back, in bed. It was the only way, since I couldn’t
sit up. And it did help my situation, if only because it took my mind off the
pain for a few minutes.”
But the awkward position, lying
on her back while holding the guitar, was compounded by the fact that she was
still a pianist.
“I really had no idea how to use
this instrument,” Gardot continues. “I mean, mechanically I’m a pianist. With
the guitar, you use your left hand differently, with this gripping motion. And
your right hand is sort of clawing, instead of moving fluidly. At first, I took
on the approach of someone like Stanley Jordan, flipping the guitar down and
finger-tapping. But it sounded wrong, it sounded boring, it sounded like I
wasn’t going to be able to develop what I was hearing. So I worked at getting
my hand around the instrument and I figured out a way, even though I don’t use
my thumb and I don’t bar chord.”
In addition to the sheer physical
demands of learning a new instrument in such demanding circumstances, Gardot
was plagued by memory lapses that are still, although to a lesser extent, a
recurring problem.
“The simple truth,” she says,
“was that I couldn’t remember a thing, not even from the beginning of the day
until the end. So I couldn’t make progress. Because you can’t make progress
unless you can look back and reflect on what you’ve done. And with the guitar,
I couldn’t remember what I had done. Every day was a new day, with a new
instrument and a new challenge. And to learn it what I had to do was break it
down. And, finally, a song popped out.”
That song, along with five
others, became the appropriately titled EP, Some Lessons: The Bedroom Sessions,
Gardot’s first recording. The title piece, “Some Lessons,” is a stunning
introduction to an extraordinary new talent: a blues-phrased paean to life from
someone who has come dangerously close to the edge. In it, she sings:
Well, I’m buckled up inside
It’s a miracle that I’m alive
To think that I could have fallen
A centimeter to the left
Would not be here to see the
sunset
Or have myself a time
Aside from its telling content,
what’s impressive about the song, as well as the others on the EP, is the
striking sense of maturity in Gardot’s voice, her phrasing and her capacity to
tell a story. Yet, remarkably, prior to the accident, singing and songwriting
had not been present in her résumé. The daughter of a single-parent mother, she
was “cooking and taking care of my own behind by the time I was 7, because my
mom was a jack of all trades, working three jobs at once and doing photography
on the side.” Raised in Philadelphia—central Philly, she specifies—she had no
particular exposure to music other than piano lessons. But, although she was
considering a career in fashion, it was in those obligatory piano lessons that
the first indication of her considerable native talents first manifested
itself.
“Music was funny for me as a
child,” she recalls. “Because the first time I experienced jazz was a mistake,
a kind of intended mistake, actually. I was learning to play piano when I was
9, taking lessons from this beautiful teacher. One day he came over and I was
playing a classical piece I had learned a week earlier. I think it was
Tchaikovsky. I was playing it very fast, playing it very quickly so he couldn’t
hear my mistakes.
“When I finished, he said, ‘What
are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Playing this section here.’ He asked me to play it
again, and I did. He looked at me and said it again: ‘What are you doing?’ And
I said, ‘I’m adding notes.’ And he said, ‘You can’t add notes to Tchaikovsky.’
I didn’t understand what he was talking about, so I played it again. And then I
said, ‘See? I can.’”
Fortunately, Gardot’s piano
teacher was not only open-minded, he was also sympathetic to improvisation and
to jazz. The next time he came for a lesson, he arrived with a different music
book, opened it to a page titled “C Jam Blues” and asked Gardot to play.
“I remember sitting there playing
it,” says Gardot, “and going, ‘Hey, are you kidding me? This is easy.’ I loved
it. Somehow I knew that jazz was harder than that, but it was fun. And thank
goodness he was smart enough to see what I was inclined for.”
By the age of 16, her piano
playing had developed to the point where she was handling a repertoire reaching
from Radiohead and the Mamas and the Papas to Duke Ellington. Her professional
career, like the discovery of her improvisational abilities, began almost
randomly on a night when her car was nearly out of gas and she was in need of a
job.
“I guess my karma was right,”
Gardot explains. “I walked into this place, liked it and asked if they had
music. They said, ‘Yeah, but our piano player just quit. Why? Do you play?’ And
I was like, ‘Yeah!’ I sat down and auditioned and I got the job. And I started
playing there every weekend from the time I was 16 until I was 19.”
She may not have suspected it at
that time, but Gardot was apprenticing the techniques as a performer that would
make it possible for her to make a remarkably quick transition to the confident
onstage manner that almost immediately characterized her post-accident career.
“My only parameter as a young
pianist,” she says, “was that I played tunes I liked. And then, as the weeks
went on, I gradually learned how to go from being a wallpaper act to doing
something that was actually worthy of attention. I did that by tailoring what I
did to the people that walked into the room, by learning how to read people,
check out their composure and think, ‘OK, what do they really want to hear?’”
Ironically, it wasn’t until after
the accident, however, that Gardot began to receive some attention from the
local Philadelphia media. The EP, Some Lessons: The Bedroom Sessions, released
in 2005, received airplay on WSPN, and City Paper Philadelphia acknowledged her
in the periodical’s 2005 People’s Choice Awards. At that point, her visibility
expanded dramatically and her career took off. Her first full-length CD,
Worrisome Heart, nearly sold out on Amazon.com on the first day of its release
in February 2008.
Her new album, My One and Only
Thrill, to be released at the end of April, propels her into the majors, with
Larry Klein producing and Vince Mendoza providing arrangements for a large
orchestra. It arrives in a quarter that also sees new releases from Diana
Krall, Madeleine Peyroux and Kelly Clarkson, among others.
But Gardot’s attention clearly
focuses on the quality of the music rather than the sales competitiveness of
the product. Her working method is unique, embracing each song as a complete
entity.
“Everything comes to me at once,”
she says. “And, without sounding definitive or creepy, it comes to me in about
20 minutes: music, lyrics, melody, how I imagine the arrangement, everything.
It’s almost like a bodily function thing, where everything happens with great
urgency. You must sit down and catch it. And if you don’t, it will dissolve.
Only in one case on My One and Only Thrill did the lyrics fail to be captured
in that initial sitting. And that was only because I got distracted, or they
just got caught up in my head.”
It takes a self-assured producer
to work with an artist with that kind of complete conceptualization of a song.
And, serendipitously, as Gardot puts it, a producer with those qualities found
her.
“Larry heard me on XM Radio,” she
explains. “He heard the music, and wanted to get together. First and foremost
it was most important to me that I liked him, and that concern was immediately
put at ease when I met him in New York. He’d done a lot of work with singers,
which helped put my mind at ease. And then there’s that little factor of me
hearing everything complete in my head, which leaves little room for
alteration. With the wrong person, that can be a battle; it can be a breaking
point. But Larry is someone who supports a vision, or who can create it if he
needs to. He’s not one-sided, and he doesn’t have to go a single way.”
The specific way that Gardot had
in mind for My One and Only Thrill encompassed, she says, romance in many hues.
And not just about romantic love.
“In fact,” she says with a
giggle, “sometimes it’s not about love at all. It can be about having a moment
with someone that can feel like an eternity. It can be like when you’re walking
in the park, and you feel as though the world stops around you and you’re the
only two people who exist. Or maybe you’re not even with someone.” She laughs
again. “Romance happens when birds land on your window sill, and meals end with
wine.”
Capturing a set of
songs—including “Les Etoiles,” her first song conceived and written in French,
as well as her view of “Over the Rainbow”—coursing through the full range of
romantic subtleties called for very specific kinds of settings. Gardot found
the answer when she heard some recordings with Mendoza’s arrangements, even
though she was completely unaware of his history.
“I just knew that I liked his
work,” she recalls. “And it wasn’t until Larry told me about him that I
realized he had worked with Joni Mitchell, Björk and Elvis Costello.”
Characteristically, Gardot was
very clear about how she wanted the album to sound, that she wanted to have
strings, for the sake of “expression.”
“The cornerstones of what makes
music good for me,” says Gardot, “are simplicity, melody and sentiment. Now,
when you add strings to the equation, people automatically go, ‘Wait a minute,
simplicity with 70 people? I don’t think so.’ It’s a far-reaching concept in
that sense, I guess. But what it was really about was adding strings that would
support thematic ideas, expand upon thematic ideas and add new ones, without
losing touch with those cornerstones. And I think that’s what I got from
Vince’s arrangements.”
With the new album in the stores,
a busy schedule of appearances, enthusiastic audiences and growing critical
acclaim, Gardot’s career is obviously on a fast track. But although she speaks
openly of her accident in conversation, she rarely mentions it in her
performances, preferring to let the music speak for itself. Nor does she seem
especially curious about the strangeness of the accident-driven transition that
has taken her from life as a fashion student who played piano in a bistro on
weekends to her present role as a rapidly rising young singer-songwriter.
Asked about it, Gardot simply
replies, “You know, there’s a saying I repeat often. It goes like this: Good
writers write, great writers write what they know. At the time, before the
accident, perhaps I knew nothing. And now, I guess I do.”
