Gracie Curran and her band High Falautin have been working on a debut CD. “It’s gonna be bluesy souly. We’ve have two songs done. It’s going to be our first,” Curran said. “We’ve been writing and playing a lot so I’m very excited. We have an unbelievable producer. That’s what I’m very excited about. We have so many unbelievable guests playing on it. Johnny Blue Horn is going to play a little bit on it.”
Curran is up in the air whether to cover an Etta James song. She didn’t want to do it at first because you can’t do it better than Etta, but she wants to pay tribute to her main influence and inspiration. “I’m a big lyric writer,” Curran said. The south shore singer has always been a lyricist. When her mother made her move her stuff out of the house, she stumbled across a big box of her old writing, from second grade.
“I was probably seven or eight years old,” she said. “I’ve been writing ever since. One of the song I found the line says, ‘I know a boy who couldn’t be dreamier, but that he died of leukemia.’ I was like, ‘What was my experience like in second grade that this was what I was writing about?’”
Curran and her band have finished two songs. Her song writing is influenced by everything in her life. “The first two songs I couldn’t get out of my head. I sang them nonstop for two years, no lies.” Curran nudged her guitarist to start writing as a way of getting the two songs she was obsessing over out of her head.
“I have to get these songs out of me after they’ve been bumping around in there. So that’s what kind of prompted us to light a fire under our rear ends.”
Curran’s guitarist Tommy Carroll is writing the music for her lyrics. The High Falutin band Curran always plays out with will be the main band on the CD too. The band members are all helping out with the arrangement of Curran’s and Carroll’s original songs.
Joe Bellomo is the drummer and Geoff Murfitt is the bass player. The High Falutin band came together in 2006 and halted when Curran fell in love with a boy and took time off. After a while Curran noticed that something was missing in her life. Her boyfriend was still playing out in his band, so Curran came back with a vengeance. She realized she needed to do the band thing seriously. She called Geoff Murfitt first.
“I just loved him. He just instantly made me pee my pants laughing every time I see him,” Curran said. “He’s a good bass player, obviously. He was like the perfect person to get in touch with. Tommy, I’d known. He’d played with Blind Billy and the Spectacles and he’d been around. He’s just like a powder keg. You don’t see it coming almost. He just kills. Joe I had played with. I had never completely set the scene. I’d always gone out, watching live music.”
So, Curran and High Falutin got it together last year. After a busy summer, they made it to the finals of the 2010 Boston Blues Challenge, as hosted by Boston Blues Society. “We were glad to make the finals. It was a very pleasant surprise. We just decided that to do all this and not have anything recorded. We know what we can do when we actually make music,” she said.
This new CD comes from frustrations in Curran’s life and from her being in precarious situations. “I can’t get out of my own way at all. It’s just frustrating in that I kick my own ass sometimes. I write a lot about relationships. More than anything that’s what makes people feel the way they do.”
Her first song to be released will be called “Can’t Get Out Of My Own Way.” It could be about, well, it is better to let Curran explain it in her own energetic, scattered manner: “Damn, that frustration. You’re just trying to leave your house and you can’t find your keys and you had to be there an hour ago.” Curran said her A.D.D. plays into her frustration songs.
Curran also has a heartbreak song coming on the CD too. She was once ditched by a guy in Seattle after she moved out there to be with him. “It ended up being the best year ever,” she said. “I ended up finding music really, that year, really being exposed to different kinds of music that year. I lived in Renton, where the Jimi Hendrix memorial is located. Curran played local clubs there and tourists would catch her at
local jams.
“They’ve got so much music in Seattle, it’s awesome. There’s so many unbelievable bands. It’s just a strong music scene. I was just very much exposed to it, and I got the bug to get back into it.”
Luckily, Curran is a happy person these days. She learned to sing, as a child, from her mother, a choir director at the family‘s church. “We sang in church all the time, but I was a little shit, so I’d get kicked out a lot. I don’t think I appreciated it. But she was a singer and was a cabaret singer and just loved it. There was always music in my house.” Her mother listens to everything from Bette Midler to Carly Simon and she was a Liza Minnelli impersonator.
Some years ago, Curran’s mother was stricken with thyroid cancer and ensuing surgery left her alive but unable to sing. This is another motivating factor in Curran’s life. “For somebody who sings now, I can’t imagine that,” she said. “That is tragic.” Curran’s relationship with her mother will play into one of the themes on the upcoming CD.
Curran’s stage image is buttressed by sparkly sequin tops and a vintage microphone that looks like it was from the 1930s. She also sings in an old-fashion style that reminds of Etta James. “Etta is probably my biggest inspiration. I just feel her when she sings. I just feel her voice. When she sings, I know exactly where it’s coming from. I think that blues in general. I think that’s why I love blues more than any other genre. I feel the blues so much differently because it just comes from a different place.”
Curran commented on the Etta James versus The White House flap when that “skinny president, the one with the big ears” invited Beyonce to sing “At Last” at the presidential inaugural. “They don’t make broads like that any more,” Curran said. “She’s just tough as nails. She’s not a diva, there’s just no bullshit.”
The vintage, old-fashioned microphone is another trademark image associated with Curran. “I love it. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it,” Curran said. “She’s pretty. She’s good looking. I went into a Guitar Center. I think I was buying cable or something. It was actually before our first show. The guy turned it on for me, and I drooled all over myself. I ended up buying it that day and playing it that night.” Curran has been singing into that microphone ever since.
Curran visited the Windy City of Chicago last winter, and she checked out all the blues clubs out there. She started at Buddy Guy’s Legends where she was allowed in by a young man who overlooked the fact she didn’t’ have a ticket for Guy’s regular Thursday night show. The young man turned out to be Guy’s son, and through him Curran got to meet Guy’s family. “People line up every morning at eight in the morning to get good seats to the show,” said Curran, who mentioned she got in because the son knew she was someone who would appreciate what the club was all about.
Curran went to a different club each night, and what she saw among the six string slayers made her appreciate her guitarist, Tom Carroll, even more. “Tommy is so impressive. He’s so quiet. He doesn’t say much. But he’s on fire. I think we’ve only seen 20 percent of what he can do,” Curran said. “I came back and I was like, ‘Tommy can hang with these guys.”
The guitar player thing was another factor that inspired her to get her act together towards making a CD. There was also a local radio personality who had told her to put something together on a CD so he could invite her on his radio program.
Curran has also been inspired by Sharon Jones of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. “She’s a no bullshit broad,” Curran said. “She was a prison guard at Rikers and she was in a wedding band. She decided to make an original album and she ended up selling 30,000 copies, on vinyl.”
The blood, sweat, and tears Jones put into her career inspired Curran to step up her own efforts. “I have to be sweating after every show,” Curran said. “She gives you the idea that it’s possible to transition out and be able to do music full time. That was huge for me.”