Cosmopolitan
1971 US
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COSMO
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Melanie
has often been compared with the young July Garland and with Edith Piaf
because she puts her life into her songs. And because, even when she comes
close to whispering, her emotions are so strong and open. But Melanie, both
as a writer and singer, is also so distinctively individual that after you
hear her once, you will never mistake her for anyone else. At twenty-five, her songs tell us,
she has retained the wonder of childhood while becoming a woman who often
exorcises loneliness with fantasy but is a chronic optimist about the risks
of reality. As she sings in her newest and most wide-ranging album, Gather Me
(Neighborhood Records), "I want to give and ring the living bell.`' Growing up in New York and New
Jersey. Melanie Safka began writing songs when she was very little. And she
was always listening—to her mother. Who was a jazz singer: to recordings of
Billie Holiday, Lotte Lenya, and folk singers from the Ozarks; to any
vibrations of honest, life-affirming experience. Her family was not always
together, but Melanie kept trying to be together in herself, measuring her
years by what her music told her of them. |
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By the
time she was fifteen, Melanie. More resilient than the waif she seemed to be,
sang in Greenwich Village folk clubs, passing the hat around to see if she
was connecting. She then scuffled through nights in a New Jersey bar, trying
to break into the New York music scene by day, sitting for hours in a mid
Manhattan drugstore between disappointments. About
four years ago, the magic, not all of it benign, began to happen. She started
to record and make concert appearances here and in Europe (where her haunting
innocence at first made a greater impact than in America). With success came
attempts to polish her into a "star," but she broodingly resisted
any changes that made her in any way a stranger to herself. For a while, she
was lonelier than she had ever been. But Melanie has learned that she can
survive success. "I used to be tragic," she said recently,
"but now I like to laugh." Unlike many who have "made
it," Melanie keeps looking beyond the lights to see individual
listeners. "I love it when people call out requests. It's like a
conversation to me." |
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Melanie |
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