Deb Talan

From Acoustic Live! in New York City and Beyond
November 2001, Volume 3, Issue 6

Monthly Listings Guide

It's Friday, September 14th. After four days of watching horrific images on television and facing new realities too awful to contemplate, we accept an invitation to gather at the Bitter End to listen to a musical offering, free of charge. In order to lift spirits, to do SOMETHING, musicans Greg and Steve Tannen and friends take the stage. Among them is Deb Talan. Her turn comes and a moment of revelation arrives.

She's strong... Her voice has a ribbom of steel running through it. It moves through the aural passages like quicksilver. It's fine sandpaper edge hones the song's emotional content. In response to September 11th, she sings:

Are you somewhere, safe as houses
Close your eyes, count one, two, three
Run and hide, now are you ready
Ollie, ollie in come free
Itsy bitsy spider crawls... up the clear blue glass
Down the broken walls
And all the games we played as children
To fight against the dark...
Red, red rover... four leaf clover...
Ashes, ashes, all fall down...
All fall down... All fall down...

The song we're listening to, "Safe as Houses," co-written with Steve Tannen, is riveting and appropriately child-like, full of horror and wonder. A sample of the song can be downloaded from her web site, www.debtalan.com. Click on "Sound," and scroll down.

Upon listening to her second CD, Something Burning, we find that her songs are full-blown, mature works of art, belying her youthful appearance. There's no doubt that we're seeing the emergence of a major talent.

After we learn about her background from her web site, we're not surprised at how good she is.

Deb, classically trained in clarinet and piano, began writing music when she was only ten years old. By the time she graduated from high school, she had written numerous pop songs and composed a score for a local production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. She began playing guitar in her senior year in college.

She wrote and fronted for an upbeat, pop band in Portland, Oregon, called Hummingfish for five years. While still in Hummingfish she moved toward a solo career and put out her own CD, Songs for a Misfit Heart. Performing two songs from this CD, Deb won second place in the Rocky Mountain Folk Festival Troubadour Contest in 1996. In 1998, she organized a series of successful, in-the-round shows featuring women songwriters from local bands (including herself).

Having begun her solo career, Deb decided, in February of 1999, to head for Boston, Massachusetts. Deb took a year off from performing while finishing her second solo recording, Something Burning. When it was finished, she began performing in noted area venues such as Johnny D's, Club Passim and others. Her fan base in the Northeast grew.

Recently, Deb received Acoustic Guitar Magazine's "Homegrown CD Awars" for Something Burning along with two Boston Music Award nominations and won the Songwriters Showcase Competition at the 2001 Rocky Mountain Folk Festival. Although she now has a loyal Boston following and sells out shows easily at Club Passim, she's relocated to New York, seeking to expand her fan base. We're lucky to have her here.

www.acousticlive.com