Deb Talan

The Boston Globe: Sound Bites, June 26, 2003

The Migrations of a pop songbird
By Jim Sulivan

Life is complicated. Most pop songs are not.

Singer-songwriter Deb Talan does not write songs that are complicated in the sense that they’re difficult or disjointed. The western Massachusetts-based, classically trained Talan is nothing if not mellifluous, easy on the ears. But on "A Bird Flies Out," her third album, she’s drawing from a pretty deep well of mixed emotions.

I get bored with one emotion," Talan says from the home she shares with her partner/manager Steve Tannen. "I do see most of the songs as having some sort of tension. If there’s no tension at all, if a song is purely sweet or purely angry, it doesn’t hold my interest very long. (the song) 'Sincerely’ is about being at the end of your rope and having a really dark outlook, but having certain things that keep you in the world, sticking around." (The song is dedicated to Talan’s parents.) "It sounds upbeat, bluegrassy and happy, but with dark ruminations going on in it.

Talan, who celebrates the release of her new disc tomorrow night with a show at the Somerville Theater, grew up in Amherst, studied music, composed the music to a high school production of Shakespeare’s "Twelfth Night," majored in religious studies at Brown University and spent most of the ’90s in Portland, OR, playing in the jangle-pop band Hummingfish. In 1999, she moved to Boston and two years after that to Northampton. She and Tannen built a home studio with "the money we saved from not getting parking tickets in Boston."

Asked to explain her migratory habits, Talan says, "Part of the western movement was wanting to see different parts of the country, and Portland turned up being a great spot for a while. I was interested in teaching and got my master’s in elementary education while at the same time I got in this band. Over the course of six years, I became more and more serious about music — it had been a big part of my growing up, too — but I felt I was suppoed to do something more serious, and I gravitated back to music as being something more central in my life.

"One very powerful theme" on her new album, she says "was looking for love and wondering where, and if, it was going to turn up. Searching, seeking feeling — I can tap into that place. A lot of this album has to do with relationships, which is the source for a lot of people, about needing to connect with other people, needing to be heard, understood." Talan began playing open-mike nights at Club Passim and in coffee shops when she moved back to Boston. Over the past three years, she was nominated for three Boston Music Awards. She says the 12 songs included on "A Bird Flies Out" were weeded out from a larger pack; she chose the ones that tended to hang together in groups of three or four.

For Talan, a song is a way to discover how you really feel about something. "It’s almost like mapping things after the fact," she says, "to see more clearly where you are. I keep having this vision and I’m trying to resonate into depths that allow me to live more fully, and I hope I can touch those places in other people too."

She says her religious studies at Brown have helped her in songwriting, not as they pertain to religion — she was raised Jewish and ended up, she says "in no religion" — but in terms of thinking things through. "Those things still are a part of me," she says, "a kind of spiritual, psychological inquisitiveness. Not based in any faith."

Her folk-based, richly layered songs should appeal to fans of Beth Orton, Shawn Colvin, and Suzanne Vega. Talan’s song "Tell Your Story Walking" (inspired by Jonathan Lethem’s novel "Motherless Brooklyn") was included on the multi-artist "Songs Inspired by Literature: Chapter One" album. She has not held a day job in a couple of years. "Forgiven" was played during the closing credits of the film "Lovely and Amazing." Her other songs were used in the WB series "Felicity" and "Dawson’s Creek."

Talan’s backing band Friday will include guitarist Megan Toohey, keyboardist/harmonica player Jabe, dobro, mandolin, guitar player Jim Henry, drummer Jeff Berlin, bassist Richard Gates, and backing vocalists Meg Hutchinson and Kris Delmhorst. Tannen will also join the band, and she will join his (which is Gates and Henry) for the opening set.