Alison Harris Channels Sebastopol Wilds with Debut Album
Sitting on her grandfather's back porch in Sebastopol, Harris watches the pines and bay trees along the creek line. It's a sight she knows well. Harris was raised in the quiet coastal burg, in a world that sometimes seems frozen in time, far removed from the sound and fury of the cities just to the south. And east. And north.
She lived in Chico for a year or so. "Staying out late, drinking too much, getting into trouble," she says. But Harris always seems to come back here. She visits her grandfather's house at least once a week. Her parents still live nearby, in a vintage trailer outside neighboring Laguna de Santa Rosa. But it's more than family connections that draw her home. These winds, streams, fields and redwoods all gold and yellow, infect her soul. you can hear them in her music.
For a long time Harris resisted calling herself a folk musician, afraid of the mellow sounds the label implied, but ultimately came to embrace it as her destiny.
"It took a long time to out myself as a folk writer," said Harris. "I thought it made me sound to sleepy. But the mellow pace of life really gets to me. It's a beautiful area; the weather is absolutely perfect."
Her debut CD, Smoke Rings in the Sky, is permeated by the molasses pace of Sebastopol life- from dreamy southern lullabies to lonesome drifter ballads, these are songs meant to be heard sitting on the veranda in the twilight hour as the warm breeze plays through the cattails. But even her more up-tempo music, like the infectious ditty 'Train Hopper," feels like it comes from another time, like sea shanties or Depression-era anthems of itinerant hoboes.
Her music feels like it has the weight of ages behind it, which might be because the Harris family history is inextricably entwined with music. Her father is an elementary school music teacher, her cousin Damon fronts bay area blues trio Chow Nasty and her grandfather founded the indie record label Omega, on which both Alison and Damon play.
"Grandpa calls it the mad bug," said Harris. "The whole family's all got a little, whether you want to call it a streak of mental insanity or just imagination."
Harris grew up practicing the piano and violin. She started singing in choir at age six- something she pursued all the way through her years as a music major at Cal State Sonoma. She began writing music when she was 13, finding that she was more interested in creating her own songs than learning others' by rote. Inspired by the husky Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch (and pushed by her cousin Damon), Harris finally plunged into the family business.
"Some things I write about seem so personal to me, but people come up after the show and say, "Wow, I really relate to that," said Harris. "Even if people have different lives, there's a commonality of experience. When I perform, I don't put on a crazy show like some people- it's more a medium to go into emotions."
With her musical blood it's easier to communicate the depth of her feelings in song than in words. For Harris, songwriting is about mining the deeper recesses of her own personal soul, though in doing so she accidentally taps into something universal.
-Mike Rosen-Molina
Mike Rosen-Molina - The Synthesis (Aug 11, 2008)