--= Reportagens =--

Letters to Cleo sail on, solo

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

Getting dumped by a major label may be the best thing that ever happened to Letters to Cleo. The well-liked local popsters might not appear to be in the most enviable position these days. They recently split with their label Revolution (formerly Giant) after three albums -- each one a musical step forward, and each a worse seller. They don't have another deal in the works just yet, don't have any high-profile shows coming up, don't even have a drummer. So why are the band members having such a good time? It all hinges on where you draw your priorities.

"Look at our history -- we've gone from getting discount beer at shows to free drink tickets to a free case of beer to 'just ask.' It just keeps getting better," notes guitarist Greg McKenna when we talk (over coffee, of all things) at the Middle East. "We can sit around lamenting the fact that we're not on a label anymore," adds singer Kay Hanley. "But look, we've put out three records -- that's not getting fucked over. Beyond that, I blame the climate more than I blame any individuals. But we've still got enough money to pay our rent, and to buy a fancy dinner once in a while. And it supports our alcoholism just fine." Adds McKenna, "All we wanted at the start was to open for O Positive on a Thursday. So by now we've exceeded any expectations we could have had. I don't want to be famous anyway -- screw fame, it's annoying."

In fact, the Cleos haven't spent the last few months sitting around drinking beer -- or even smoking dope, though they did contribute an enjoyably gung-ho song on that topic ("Let's Get High") to the forthcoming Hempilation 2 comp (on Capricorn). Instead, they're turning up everywhere. Hanley just wrapped up a successful run in the Boston Rock Opera's Preservation, which may yet wind up playing in England if author Ray Davies has his way. Guitarist Michael Eisenstein and bassist Scott Reibling began work last week (with former band drummer Stacey Jones) on a solo album by former Veruca Salt singer Nina Gordon. Hanley and McKenna will take the time to demo songs for the next Cleos album.

Meanwhile, soundtrack offers have been rolling in, and they'll be involved in at least two films next spring. Oh, and there's also a new Letters to Cleo album, sort of: next week will see the CD release of Sister, their original demo cassette from 1993. Recorded when the band were nowhere near as tight as they are now (and including an embryonic version of the local hit "I See"), the tape's become a desirable item in fan circles -- even though the band have had few nice words for it over the years.

"It's not very good," Hanley admits flat out. "And yeah, I have a few misgivings about putting it out. But from a fan standpoint it's a missing link to what we were doing before Cleo became Cleo, even if I never listen to it myself. Honestly, I doubt we'd be doing this if people weren't swapping the tape on the Internet, so people have generation after generation of terribly dubbed Sister tapes. Then I heard that people were offering to burn CD copies for each other, so it was time we stepped in and did some quality control."

The original tape wasn't quite album-length, so the CD version will be beefed up with some more recent tracks, mostly cover versions that appeared on comps and soundtracks -- though alas, their ace cover of the Cars' "Dangerous Type" remains under license to Sony for the soundtrack of The Craft.

More film soundtracks are underway, including the January release Jawbreaker (for which they've recorded yet another version of "I See") and next spring's Ten Things I Hate About You, for which they've covered two great pop nuggets, Nick Lowe's "Cruel To Be Kind" and Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me." As for the latter film, Hanley says "It's one of those dumb -- no, I shouldn't say that. It's one of those popular teen flicks, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. Adds McKenna, "It's gratifying to have these gigs, after what happened with the last two albums. It's like people are saying, `No, you don't really suck.' "

It's no secret that major-label deals are getting harder to hold on to. Just ask the increasing number of Boston bands who've been dropped recently. But more bands are proving they can survive without one. Juliana Hatfield sold out the Middle East two weekends ago, though she's technically unsigned (she licensed the Bed album to Zoé/Rounder in a one-off deal). And Letters to Cleo are finding themselves in more demand than when they were signed. They figure they can't be the only people in the business who don't get along with Irving Azoff, the long-time industry shark (and Eagles manager) who ran their label.

"I know I was singing the praises of Revolution last year," Hanley admits. "It was the battered-wife syndrome -- `He's changed this time, I know he has!' I know that people who wanted to work with us wouldn't approach us when we were with Irving. Because we didn't hustle for those film soundtracks we got, they just came to us. After we had a very public parting of the ways with Revolution, people must have figured that it was safe."

The relative flop of last year's Go album is still a surprise, however, Didn't the label grease enough palms to get it played on the radio? "I know they did, because I saw it happen," says the always-frank Hanley. "And I know I had to kiss a lot of people's asses. Guess I should have sucked their dicks instead."

They figure they won't bother seeking out another label until they're ready to go back into the studio, which should happen next spring. And the drum chair is likely to stay vacant: a number of part-timers have been in since Stacey Jones gave notice three years ago. Jones came back for a handful of recent shows, though he's now fronting his own band (said to be the object of a major-label bidding war). Tom Polce and Jason Sutter (respectively with Señor Happy and Jack Drag) have also been aboard. And more recently it was the ubiquitous Mike Levesque (of Talking to Animals and scads of sessions) who sat in for their Paradise opening slot with Cheap Trick. In the future they'll go the R.E.M./XTC route, bringing in hired hands as needed. "At this point I can't imagine anyone else coming in," says Hanley. "I've been with Greg for 10 years and with Michael and Scott for seven, so who else could fit in?"

Not that there haven't been some discouraging moments over the past year -- including a recent one where they read a CMJ review noting that Hole's big-selling Celebrity Skin sounded like Letters to Cleo. "As it does," says Hanley. "There have been times when I was ready to walk out at any second -- millions of times like that. But really, there's no question anymore of walking away from the band. The band is who I am. It's what I've done since I was 18 and I'm 30 now, so that would be walking away from my entire life's work -- and from my relationship with the other people in the band. They're my brothers [and, in Eisenstein's case, her husband]. I've got nothing to be bitter about. We've had a great ride. And the ride continues."

RICK HARRIS

For my money, former Knots & Crosses member Rick Harris is up there with the best roots guitarists in town. A master of the less-is-more approach, with a lyrical touch influenced by Richard Thompson and Robbie Robertson, he was largely responsible for the simmering tension that lay behind his old band's quietest moments (he currently plays in Todd Thibaud's band). He's also the one member of K&C who hasn't released a solo album (since the 1994 break-up Carol Noonan has done three albums and Alan Williams one). Now he's partly rectified that by the release of Demo -- a five-song EP that he circulated among the industry last year and is now putting up for sale.

The EP finds his knack intact, and fans of Knots & Crosses will be glad to hear that he hasn't cheered up a bit. His band always took the dark and haunting option, and he continues to do so here, though the musical roots have shifted from Celtic folk to country, and his voice has taken on an appropriately grizzled tone. Harris writes mainly of love affairs that have either crashed and burned or are about to. And, repeating an old K&C trick, he saves the cathartic guitar solo for the very end of the disc, on "You're the One," a plodding Thompson-esque ballad with vocal harmonies by Jennifer Kimball. Harris's big solo heightens the romantic desperation of the words -- the wailing tone he uses carries as much weight as the notes, and every lick sounds as if it were being pulled from a deep and painful place. He throws two extra minutes of the same solo on as a bonus track, but that still ain't enough.


TELEVISION
New show on the block

BY BRIAN GOSLOW


TUNE IN NEXT TIME: Hanley, Conway, Barett, and other local musicians could soon be coming to cable.


Boston-based Scout Productions hopes a roundtable discussion among Dicky Barrett (Mighty Mighty Bosstones), Kay Hanley (Letters to Cleo), Jen Trynin, Billy Conway (Morphine and Treat Her Right), and Joey McIntyre (NKOTB) will serve as the pilot episode for a syndicated cable-TV music program spotlighting regional music scenes across the United States and Canada. The five Boston music-scene stalwarts spent last Wednesday at the Embassy Club on Lansdowne Street discussing the city’s musical heritage, their careers, and various aspects of the entertainment industry for the first episode of Musical Chairs.

The biggest challenge for the show’s producers — whose Danvers State Hospital–based horror film Session 9 opens in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles on August 10 — is selling a network on a series featuring regionally known artists. " That’s the reason we picked the group [of musicians] we did, " says co-producer Sean Baker. " It’s an eclectic group of people who bridge the gap from a national success [McIntyre] to a local legend [Trynin]. "

Co-producer Dave Metzler sees the program, which will have an interactive Web site, as a Behind the Music–meets–Politically Incorrect way of showcasing a city’s music scene. Eighteen " lipstick cameras " built into the show’s set will provide an array of unique angles, allowing Web-site visitors to produce their own version of the program. The site will also offer information on the participating artists, clubs, and attractions, and allow visitors to order music aired on the program.

Wednesday’s afternoon session began with musicians and audience mingling in a relaxed coffee-bar setting as two dozen film-crew members worked to capture five conversations at once. The afternoon’s highlight came during a discussion of whether performers’ set lists should be loaded with hits or an artist’s latest material. Displaying the savvy of a seasoned sit-com performer, Barrett playfully coaxed a reluctant McIntyre into singing New Kids on the Block’s " Cover Girl, " causing some faces in the audience to melt before the head Bosstone’s mock screams stopped the performance.

" It wasn’t all about the music, " said program moderator (and FNX Radio Network news director) Henry Santoro after the taping. " It was about Boston as a city to live in and as a cultural mecca, and comparing it to other cities they’ve seen on the road. "

A localized version of musical chairs ends the program. After hearing a 10-second sound bite, participants have to name either the title, the band, the album, the year, or a band member’s name. After the Lemonheads’ " Big Gay Heart " brought blank stares, Mission of Burma’s " That’s When I Reach for My Revolver " started the elimination process before Juliana Hatfield, Human Sexual Response, and Cars classics brought things to a final battle between Conway and Hanley, who simultaneously leapt out of their seats to identify the Lyres’ " Help You Ann. " Producers hope you won’t have to wait until this season’s drama ends across the street at Fenway Park to find out who won — they’re aiming to secure a host network next month.

Issue Date: August 2 - 9, 2001


No more Letters

The Cleos close out a Boston era
Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

Sometime in 1995, I visited a shady record store and wound up paying 20 bucks for a bootleg Letters to Cleo CD -- a good one, too: Babes in Paradise, from the Paradise gig in September 1994 where they covered Weezer's "Sweater Song" as an encore. That's when it hit me that this home-town band were on the verge of making it: nobody bootlegs bands who aren't popular. It also struck me that even though I'd first met these folks a couple years earlier, when they were still wide-eyed about the Boston scene, and had maintained a friendly relationship, even felt a bit big-brotherly toward them at times, I was also turning into a fan.

Then again, Letters to Cleo, who announced their break-up last week, seemed to be friends with everyone who came to the shows. Singer Kay Hanley's Dorchester crowd was big enough to fill clubs in the early days; later on the band remained the most approachable of local rockers. They were that kind of band, and they played that kind of music. Their spirit was caught nicely in, of all places, last year's teen comedy Ten Things I Hate About You: they're on stage at a party singing Nick Lowe's "Cruel To Be Kind," with Hanley looking especially alterna-rock glamorous. The star of the movie is fighting with her boyfriend, and Hanley comes to the rescue by jumping off stage and singing it directly at him. Sure, it's the kind of semi-cheesy moment that always happens in teen-romance films. But it's the kind of thing you can imagine her doing in real life.

Letters to Cleo embodied a period in local history that I'm already starting to miss -- call it the great Boston pop surge. Never mind that the rest of the country was still reeling over Nirvana's crash-and-burn and the imminent decline of indie rock. Somehow Boston in the mid '90s wound up with more than its share of warmth and optimism, guitars and hooks. The left-field success of Juliana Hatfield and the Lemonheads brought the A&R types to town looking for more, and it was there for the taking: Gigolo Aunts, Jen Trynin, Fuzzy, Tracy Bonham. Everybody got signed; everybody got dropped; everybody more or less survived (though Trynin's still laying low and the Aunts have broken up). There's still good pop out there, much of it connected to the Q Division studio. But the scene shifted after the commercial success that eluded all of the above wound up going to a suburban metal band who stole their name from an Alice in Chains song.

Letters to Cleo seemed among the most likely to make it -- and in some ways, they did. They created three albums for major labels; they became TV stars for a short while (when their "Here & Now" video was featured on Melrose Place); they sold out their last few rounds of local shows. But pop success is a tricky thing in this era of music-biz consolidation, and it's hard to tell who's famous and who isn't. So it was that the Cleos did Ten Things I Hate About You while they weren't signed to any label. And now that they've pronounced their touring/recording career a dead issue, they still have enough film and TV gigs to keep them going: Hanley is in Los Angeles doing vocals for a forthcoming Josie & the Pussycats movie, and the entire band are providing songs for a Warner Bros. cartoon series, Generation O -- about an eight-year-old rock star who'll be voiced by Hanley.

For their part, the group members never seemed convinced that they were all that big a deal. When I first interviewed them, in 1993, guitarist Michael Eisenstein explained, "When I think of Boston bands who are popular, I think of Morphine, or O Positive, or the Mighty Mighty Bosstones -- definitely not Letters to Cleo." And when I phoned Hanley in Los Angeles last week, her initial reaction was, "My God -- I can't believe that many people are interested." True, nobody's really that modest, and the Cleos would always admit under prodding that being rich and famous didn't sound too bad. But they developed a talent that befits a band who deal in uplifting pop songs: the ability to take things in stride.

In that sense, the quintessential moment in the Cleos' history may be their appearance at South by Southwest. I don't mean 1994, when they played in the wake of the "Here & Now" video and packed a big outdoor club. I'm talking about the previous year, when they'd just signed their first publishing deal and started work on their first album: they showed up in Austin ready to rock the house, only to find out that their show had been canceled. I saw them at the convention center that morning, and you won't often find a more frustrated band. But I also caught a couple of them hanging out in the local clubs that night. Having schlepped all the way to Texas, they were at least going to get a little fun out of it.

So when they triumphed in Austin a year later, it was a moment they'd earned -- they sounded as if they'd stored up all their energy from the canceled show a year earlier. By then their jangly pop sound was getting spiced by their love for rowdies like Kiss and Cheap Trick. And Hanley, who'd never been shy on stage, was now evincing a rock star's cool swagger. "Kay's my hero," noted the woman standing near me -- this was local filmmaker Kaylyn Thornal, a long-time friend of Hanley's who'd later direct the women-in-local-rock documentary Payday. But on this night, she joined the local contingent in feeling like a fan.

There were other notable shows, like a two-night stand at the Paradise in 1998 where they played virtually every song in their repertoire. And there were other frustrations: guitarist Greg McKenna now admits that of their three major-label albums -- 1993's Aurora Gory Alice, 1995's Wholesale Meats & Fish, and 1997's Go (all on industry bigwig Irving Azoff's Giant label, later renamed Revolution) -- each of the last two sold about half what the previous one had. Nevertheless, I'd maintain that the intensely hooky Go is the best of the lot. The band were never big on kissing up to the industry (try asking them about their short-lived Budweiser sponsorship), and they always maintained that their association with Azoff didn't do anybody any good. They proved it by releasing the Sister album last year through Wicked Disc. Although it was largely just a reissue of their embryonic demo cassette, it's now on the verge of outselling Go.

It seems fitting that Letters to Cleo played their final show to help out a friend: they headlined the Mikey Dee tribute/benefit at Axis on May 4. And they didn't steal the occasion by letting on that it was a farewell. "I hope it wasn't lame that we didn't play a proper last show and do every song we ever wrote," Hanley says. "I know this is a cliché and I know that people in bands say it all the time, but when Greg [guitarist Greg McKenna] and I started the first incarnation of this band, in 1988, there was never any ambition to do anything but play. Opening for O Positive on Thursday at T.T.'s -- to us that was the pinnacle. The other cliché is that you stop doing it when it's not fun anymore. For me it's not fun anymore and it was only going to be a matter of time before people would be able to see that, and then we'd look stupid up there on stage."

The band took a hiatus last year when Hanley and Eisenstein had their first daughter, Zoe Mabel. During that time the members took up various projects that will likely continue. Bassist Scott Reibling produced a few local bands; now he's just signed on to do the Gravel Pit's next album. McKenna started doing demos for a solo project. And drummer Stacy Jones, who left to join Veruca Salt in 1996 but has bounced back into the Cleos line-up a few times since, now fronts his own band, American Hi-Fi. Jones also recruited Eisenstein and Reibling to play on his former Veruca Salt bandmate Nina Gordon's solo album, Tonight & the Rest of My Life (Warner Brothers). Indeed, after a few years of revolving drummers, Letters to Cleo played their last gig with the surprise addition of Orbit drummer Paul Buckley.

For Hanley, things never quite came together after the hiatus. "We had started writing a new album, which we were going to work on this summer. And we started playing again, doing a bunch of out-of-town college shows. And that was when I said, `This is completely unacceptable.' We played one Buffalo show where we hopped into the Winnebago with the baby, forced her to sit in there, then drove back and hit a snowstorm -- it was fucking terrible. Then there was a show at Penn State where I had to leave her with my mom, and I sobbed the whole time. And that made me rethink my priorities."

Not everybody in Letters to Cleo is as ready to call it quits. McKenna admits that he still loves the band and hopes Hanley will change her mind. Meanwhile, he's keeping their name alive by putting together a live album and a B-sides/rarities album. Add in the Generation O soundtrack and there could be three Cleos albums over the next year. "There's nothing in life that I like better than playing with these guys, so it's going to be hard for me to play with anybody else. For me it was a really painful process when we finally severed it. I know that Kay is going to be huge, just monstrously big when she puts out a solo album. I mean, my project could be huge too, but I kind of doubt it. For me, writing words is going to be the hard part, because I worked so long with Kay and she's so good. I think I'm still looking for her approval. I can hear her saying things like, `You rhymed fire with desire, don't do that!' "

As for Hanley, she is indeed laying plans for a solo album. "My idea is to put it out in an unostentatious way on a small label. I can decide later on whether I want to be a pop star or not." Of course, there's no shortage of folks who will happily point out that she's been one for years.

Kay Hanley
By Linda Laban
Special to LethalSports.com

"Smoke a few cigarettes and have a glass of Jack Daniels and scream," advises Kay Hanley. It’s her recipe for singing that led the gutsy power pop of Hanley’s former band, Letters to Cleo, to considerable fame in the mid-‘90s. It is also the mantra she used while dubbing tracks for the singing voice of Josie (played by Rachael Leigh Cook) in the chick-power flick “Josie and the Pussycats.”


The film’s producers were so impressed with the initial five songs Hanley recorded for the film that several more songs were tracked earlier this year to create a full-fledged soundtrack album, released on Epic Records this spring.
Executive produced by r&b kingpin Babyface in his first ever rock-and-roll project, and helmed by ex-Gigolo Aunts Dave Gibbs, the CD features a cover of the garage rock classic "Real Wild Child" and The Beatles’ "Money." Alongside those are several original compositions, including the Hanley co-penned (with husband and ex-Cleo guitarist Michael Eisenstein) "Shapeshifter." Also on board in a songwriting capacity are several rock luminaries: the Go-Go's Jane Wiedlin, Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger (who produced the additional songs too) and Matthew Sweet.

It was Gibbs who recommended his old pal Hanley for the part – though originally she was hired to record only the Pussycats’ backing vocals in Los Angeles. By the time she got there, however, the original Josie singer was out and Hanley landed the big gig.

Currently recording her debut solo album in Boston, while also taking care of her 2-year-old daughter, LethalSports caught up with zippy Kay Hanley at her home on Boston’s South Shore.

LethalSports: So who ended up doing the Pussycats vocals?
Hanley: I did a lot of them, and a singer named Bif Naked did a couple of songs, and the actresses did a couple of background tracks themselves.

LethalSports: Yeah, I read a magazine article where the actresses (Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson) claimed that they did sing some parts.
Hanley: All three of them did, not much, but they did. On one song, "You’re A Star," where there’s this group yelling part, they’re in it. Then there’s a big "na-na na-na," and there they are.

LethalSports: Cool, they managed a na-na-na. Who played the instruments?
Hanley: Michael Eisenstein, my husband, he played guitar and bass. Our friend Jason Sutter, who has been in a million bands, played drums.

LethalSports: What does your daughter Zoë think about all this movie stuff?
Hanley: She’s too young to understand, but she loves the music. When we go to the Y in the morning the babysitters will say, "Josie and the Pussycats," and she goes "Mama!" She knows.

LethalSports: Had you seen the film before you did it?
Hanley: No. We did that first batch of songs before they had filmed a single frame. We were done with that before Josie even started filming. I like to think that we influenced the film more than they influenced us. Who knows?

LethalSports: The producers were obviously impressed enough to then make a full album.
Hanley: Yeah. Either that or they were too cheap to pay for Blink 182 or Everclear to add songs to it. We weren’t expecting them to go that route -- although I thought from the start that that would be a great idea. Had I known that they were going to do that, we would have tried to get a few more of our songs onto it.

LethalSports: This doesn’t seem much like a Babyface project. Were you working closely with him?
Hanley: For a lot of it, it was basically him, me and an engineer at his house. I think the reason he got involved was because his wife Tracy was a producer for the film, and he was kind of itching to do something different. He loved it, you could see. You’d think that a guy like that who is so successful and has gotten so far in the music business as a person can possibly go … I was forever changed by the experience. I will try never to be so jaded that I think that there is nothing else for me to achieve and learn. ‘Cause this is a guy. Ah, it blew me away. It was cool to be a part of it.

LethalSports: What a shame you didn’t get to go to any big, snazzy premiere.
Hanley: Yeah, but me and my mom went to the local theater on a Saturday afternoon. It was great!

Kitties Rule, Boys Drool
by Metal Mike Saunders
"Here and Now" in 1994 was Letters to Cleo's only MTV and radio hit, with lead yelper Kay Hanley's rapid-fire trademark chorus "Thecomfortofaknowledgeofariseabovethesky/ couldneverparallelthechallengeofanacquisitioninthe . . . here and now" creating a lasting vocal memory to this very day.

Unfortunately, the MTV video image of pigtailed Hanley zooming up and back on some wack tractor rig must've annoyed as many people as it amused. LTC's second album, Wholesale Meats and Fish, tanked their commercial career, and a horrible record deal consigned their third album, Go!, to oblivion and the band to can't-get-off-the-label sub-Antarctica, where they eventually packed it in around late 2000. It's an easy guess that no one in underappreciated, underpromoted LTC ever made a cent over rent money in the band's 10 years.

Jump to 2001: Every time Rachael Leigh Cook opens her singing pipes in the wonderful, wacky Josie and the Pussycats movie, my favorite singer-no-one-ever-heard-of Kay Hanley's propulsive, driving vocals shoot the whole damn soundtrack so far into newwavehardrock outer-space heaven that no one's ever going to find it. I swear I can almost hear Kay yelling, "I'm gettin' paid! I'm gettin' paid! I'm gettin' paid!" in all the margins. (And yeah, she even covers "Money" with the spoken intro, "This 'un's for all you SHOPPERS!") And you think, man, there are happy endings and poetic justices in this world. I printed off all 40 Josie customer reviews from Amazon.com, and 19 of them mention Hanley or Letters to Cleo, pretty amazing considering the act sold only 400-500K albums in their entire career. (Tho that's probably fou

Oh yeah. Josie and the Pussycats is the best album you're gonna hear all year. Buy it or be forever left waiting ticketless at the clue-bus station. See the movie twice or be turned into a frog, or an extra from Eddie and the Cruisers. (Your call—I only run the world cuz I'm the king, and those are the rules cuz I said so. Though no one is the Boss of Me to a cat.)

The kickass guitar and bass on the 11 Josie cuts (eight originals, the theme, two blast-furnace covers) are supposedly handled by geek-boy Matthew Sweet, how about that? The guitar has that heavy, slightly metallic tinge like 1977 Teenage Head or somebody; really works for me. The drummer is just atomic—total balls to the wall. And Kay's vocals, recorded properly for the first time (= big budget and big-time producer/engineer) are the megaton bomb. On two or three cuts, she ends with a "yeoooooooWW!" just like those early Muffs things. Funny—she had a baby right before the soundtrack gig. Maybe puttin' on some weight gave her extra vocal heft. (That's what latter-day Debbie Harry swears by, anyway. Fat = phat, or something.)

Eleven cuts; seven better than excellent, including two great hard rock-pop songs written by Beastie Boy (Counting Crow, whatever) Adam Duritz and a terrific pop song written by the Fountains of Wayne guy who wrote "That Thing You Do!," Adam Schlesinger—who in fact also produces the last six Josie tracks, following Babyface's opening five. Plus, amazingly, the best cover of Johnny O'Keefe's '50s tune "Real Wild Child" ever cut. The songs average well under three minutes each, very Green Day/Blink 182 in their no-frills no-solos tautness.

Kay Hanley actually re-creates that "brand new" sense of blow-up pop of the great early new wave records. Even Green Day and Blink 182 at their most popular never got there, partly because their singers aren't in the same league. I recall Hanley's press explanation of the soundtrack's evolution being "The music started out very punk rock, then as it was rewritten and rewritten it got totally new wave, Go-Go's." Off the rails—if you wanna use velocity, bpm, and launch distance as the yardstick—Joan Jett at her best ("Bad Reputation") might've been one-tenth this catchy and hard-rocking in her wildest dreams (she didn't have the songs). Any other late-'70s/early-'80s femme-vocal new wave act? Not even close enough to the same universe. (Somewhere, the Runaways will watch the movie on a time-travel monitor and go, "Aw, fuck! I knew it was a mistake to let that cretin Kim Fowley write the songs!")

I remember when LTCleo showed up unexpectedly in 1999's Ten Things I Hate About You, in a club scene. I went, "Wow! Jeez—that's Kay Hanley! But who are those dorks?" (It was Letters to Cleo in really bad late-'90s alterna-clothing.) But they were doing Nick Lowe's "Cruel to Be Kind," I think. And Kay used to put on a Cheap Trick T-shirt in the early '90s for important Boston gigs, 'cause it "put her in the mood." I totally gotta respect that kind of gestalt insight. Y'know, any trendy twit can like the Buzzcocks or Descendents. To zone in on something that was popular—now, there's a Def Leppard move.

The thing that tipped me off at ground zero on how good the Josie soundtrack might be was back when I was digging for info on the Generation O! (Saturday-morning WB-channel cartoon that had nine to 11 LTCleo songs specially written and recorded for it last fall) promo kit CD—the last batch of stuff the group did before giving up and disbanding (Hanley needed the time to be a proper mom, i.e., no touring). The cartoon's lead character is an eight-year-old girl who's a big rock star, and her song titles = the names of the episodes, conveniently enough. (The promo CD has just three songs, though. Time to troll Google.com for a CD-R of all the tunes . . .)

Then, during spring break this year, MTV was running (and rerunning and rerunning) this 30-minute show, a little like Say What? Karaoke, with the Josie and the Pussycats actresses as judges, rating four wannabe-J&TP girl trios (for some sort of spring break prize, plane tickets or hotel rooms or plain old drinking $$$): First round on clothes (to send one trio home) (all the clothes sucked if you asked me), then on an "interview" (to send another packing and leave two). The two "finalist" groups would then compete at a one-minute lip sync, with real instruments, of one of the songs from the movie. And wow, it was an awesome, seriously great song.

"3 Small Words" is the title. "Punk rock prom queen, brown paper magazine, hotter than you've ever seen, everywhere and in between/I'm a 10-ticket thrill ride, don't you wanna come inside. . . . Three small words and five long days, for all your lies to come undone/Those three small words are gonna make you pay, 'cause you can't see that I'm the one." The lyrics I can't understand are where Kay Hanley rips off fast lines kinda like in "Here and Now." No other girl in the world has her way of biting off words a little ahead of the beat. She almost sounds giddy. It's better than any LTC song ever; just kicks megabutt.

The movie itself is a funny and rocking caffeine launchpad—a bit like that nutty Get Smart episode where a hit alien rock band were pawns of an evil plot to take over the free world. Except in Josie it's just America that's being mind-controlled. Sublimely moronic: Record company attempts to brainwash the youth via subliminal messages on the unsuspecting hick-town Pussycats' debut album!

The real Josie album was #16 for sales the week the movie came out—not amazing, but pretty good considering the movie did only a mediocre $5M gross its first week. But the flick will certainly have a huge run on VH1 in the infinite future, judging by That Thing You Do!, which doesn't have one-sixth the soundtrack, not to mention Tara Reid (she's da drummer)'s lower-than-low-cut hip-huggers. (She's got such skinny hips it's ridiculous—a workhorse for jeans modeling. Keepin' it in the family, as the homeguys say. "I'm Carson Daly, and I'm gettin' married to the drummer of Josie and the Pussycats, slipping down today to #9 . . . ") Those J&TP clothes are pretty wicked cool, too. '70's retro is usually lame, but this stuff is timeless. Tho I dunno about the stupid cat tails.

At Target I noticed a Josie clothes display (for this month at least) right next to the Powerpuff Girls and 2 Girls sections: Columbus, I think we got a shipload of 12-year-old girls networking to form new-century rock bands. And since slacker grunge boys and worse put guitar rock into the DOA zone, maybe this is a flicker of opportunity to revive it the right way.

Hey—I wonder what Britney Spears will think of the movie? Maybe it will inspire (or speed up) her eventual move to go "rock." (Remember: She originally thought Jive was gonna want her to do "Sheryl Crow-type stuff," ow ow ow.) The Josie Web site links to the company that makes the band's nifty white guitar—a "snow leopard" model. Maybe Britney will be playing one next year, ha ha. I can just see her absentmindedly prop-strumming, like Mick Jagger in 1978.

And maybe now they'll finally make an Archies movie someday, so Betty and Veronica can get their props! I nominate Kay Hanley as lead singer for that one, too.

Interview

If you don't remember Kay Hanley from her former band Letters To Cleo, here's something to jog your memory. Remember the cool band that played on the roof at the end of "Ten Things I Hate About You?" Well, that's Kay singing lead.

But it's probably the hot upcoming "Josie and the Pussycats" movie that will really make you sit up and take notice of Kay -- even though she doesn't appear on screen. Kay does, however, provide all the sweet vocals for Rachael Leigh Cook's Josie.

We caught up with Kay to talk about everything Josie.

Getting the gig
When fellow Boston musician David Gibbs (Gigolo Aunts) moved to L.A., he started working on the Josie project. So when they were looking for someone to sing the parts of the Pussycats, Kay came on board. Little did she know, she'd end up singing the lead. "By the time I got to L.A., they had fired the original Josie [voice] that they hired," Kay says. "And that set the wheels in motion for me to audition for the Josie thing and I got it. It was totally cool!"

Band camp
If Rachael Leigh Cook looks more like a rock star than Gwen Stefani or Courtney Love, you can thank Kay. "We had what they called 'Band Camp,' because none of the girls knew how to play instruments when they started," Kay says. "So band camp was designed for them to learn how to look authentic -- you know, like rockin' out. So Rachael and I were set up in this big mirrored room with microphones and unplugged guitars and we just lip synched to songs all afternoon for a couple of days."

Rachael rocks
So did Rachael pick up her stylin' rock moves quickly? "Yes," Kay says. "You [could] tell that she was just going to kick ass at it. I think she was a little overwhelmed at the prospect of having to actually learn how to play guitar -- she'd never played before and I think that was freaking her out. But the actual pretending of how to play guitar and holding a guitar and jumping around and singing a song, if you have any rhythm at all that comes kind of naturally, I think."

Lending out her voice
It won't be weird for Kay seeing her voice coming out of someone else's mouth—she's got experience. "My husband and I wrote all the music for a cartoon called 'Generation O' which is on the WB network," Kay dishes. "It's about an 8-year-old rock star and I sang all of the songs in the voice of an 8-year-old child. So now, every Friday at 3:30 the show is on and if I turn it on my voice is coming out of the mouth of an 8-year-old cartoon character. So I have a little bit of practice in [seeing] my voice come out of a mouth that's not mine."

What's next
Kay plans on releasing her debut solo album late spring/early summer. And hopefully her "Pussycats" experience will win her some new fans along the way. "I'd be stoked if more people knew who I was and more people could listen to my material—that would obviously be a fantastic byproduct," Kay admits. "I hope that happens."

New sound
So how's her solo stuff going to differ from Letters To Cleo? "I guess it will be different because I'm older and slightly wiser, and I'm a mom," Kay says. "Things have changed a lot and just my life experiences, and how I look at the world is much different, so obviously that's going to have a big effect on the kind of stuff that I'm writing. It's mellower, the songs are longer, the subject material has, hopefully, a little more depth to it—there's not as much bratty sarcasm as there was. Not to say that it's all serious, intense music—it's still pop, but with a little more depth."
By Kathy Keeley

Kay Hanley: New Moves
The Halloween party at the Institute of Contemporary Art proved an elegant occasion for Kay Hanley to launch her new band. Dressed in a fluorescent orange jumper with horn-rim glasses -- the effect being a cross between a superhero and a librarian -- she opened a show that included the Spurs and the Gravel Pit, playing a 40-minute set in the ICA's basement for a tightly packed and heavily costumed crowd. "When my last band played its first gig, there were only three people there," she noted.
Of course, her first show with the Cleos took place eight years and four albums ago, and since then she's gotten married, had her first child, and grown up as much as one might expect in that time -- not enough to get old and cynical, but enough to become more reflective in her songwriting. Indeed, the phrase "When I was young" turned up repeatedly in one of the six new tunes. One might also note Hanley's confidence on stage, as she got fans to bring her beers and shushed those who talked during the ballads -- but she was doing that before anyone had heard of her.

The set included only two Cleos songs, "Find You Dead" and "Veda Very Shining" (done as a medley). The new material (written by Hanley with occasional help from husband and ex-Cleo partner Michael Eisenstein) harked back to the longer, slower numbers on the band's first album, Aurora Gory Alice, except that she's better at bringing off slow numbers than she was then. "This Dreadful Life" sported a double-time chorus in the vein of Letters to Cleo's "Here & Now," but with a moodier effect. The closing "Galápagos" was hampered by feedback problems but stood out as the gutsiest of the new tunes (a seven-minute pop song is gutsy by definition) and the best vehicle for Hanley's deepening voice. At the other extreme, "Happy To Be Here" opened the set with a sprightly rockabilly shuffle.

Her bandmates were all familiar faces: Expanding Man and Loveless member Dave Wannamaker on lead guitar, Gravel Pit and Gentlemen member Ed Valauskas on bass, Orbit's Paul Buckley on drums. And it's no shame to say that the result sounded like Letters to Cleo with different players (in fact Buckley was in their last, short-lived line-up). Wannamaker was only sitting in for Eisenstein, who's on tour with Nina Gordon, but his big-rock touches fit in nicely, complementing the band's pop base with touches of heavy lead guitar and Pink Floyd slide.

The big surprise was that Hanley played rhythm and acoustic guitar throughout, something she's done before only in the joky side-project band Uhmellmahaye. The guitar around her neck kept her from strutting on stage as much as she did in the Cleos days, but it did allow her to try on a few different rock moves -- an arm swing here, a lean into the guitar there. And those left no doubt that she's still more of a superhero than a librarian.

Brett Milano
Best Local Act
Best Local Female Vocalist
Best Local Album
Best Local Song

Letters to Cleo, Kay Hanley, Go!, "Anchor"
Joy toys
Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear. Way back to, say, 1994, when grunge ruled, the Rat seemed a permanent cornerstone of Boston's rock landscape, and storming the nation's airwaves was a horde of Hub-based acts fronted by singers with little-girl voices and backed by big guitars and thumping drums. Today, it seems the last of those bands still standing is Letters to Cleo, and for their perseverance alone, they might have deserved to be named Best Local Act. But the veteran band, who parted ways with their label, Revolution, last month, have also proved themselves time and again to be among Boston's best musicians, live and on CD. Kay Hanley, who is named Best Local Female Vocalist in this year's poll, always gets her props, but she has the invaluable collaboration of a crack ensemble -- Michael Eisenstein and Greg McKenna's furious guitars, Scott Riebling's dexterous bass grooves, and drummer Tom Polce's thundering stomp.
For that, the Cleos were rewarded this year by winning the Best Local Album category for their third full-length effort, Go! . A high-octane, candy-apple-red speedster of a CD, Go! is an encyclopedia of playfulness, full of snarling wit and delightful retro-Velveeta touches, from '80s-style synth arpeggios to lava lamp-era Farfisa organ and mellotron to producer Peter Collins's Phil Spector-ish wall of sound on the album's lovely centerpiece, "Co-Pilot." And there are countless bold, ear-grabbing noise-pop hooks that, in an era of musical listlessness and uncertainty, sound like heroic gestures. Among the year's releases, Go! stands out as one that believes in the power of pop to matter in your life.

Distilling the band's appeal into three minutes and 25 seconds is "Anchor," voted this year's Best Local Song. It's a nice little poison pill disguised as candy, featuring those aforementioned chirping synths (courtesy of ex-Car Greg Hawkes), a dash of lethal lyrical disdain delivered by a sweetly smiling Hanley ("Only God can help the one/Who put the magnets in your head"), an unironic bridge of "doo-doo-doo" vocal harmonies, and the band's trademark explosive shifts in tempo and dynamics. Of course, even with a lyric sheet, this terse ditty is no less inscrutable than the machine-gun verbosity of past hits like "Here & Now," but whatever Hanley may be singing about, she sure means it.

The earnest, laserlike clarity of Hanley's voice has always made her the Cleos' most prominent weapon, as well as a perennial Boston favorite. Once saddled with a mild case of high-school-poetess gloom, Hanley has discovered in recent years a sexier, more mischievous side, singing like a girl who has a funny, dirty secret. (This year, she even abandoned her traditional waif-wear and started dressing the part of the rock glamour girl. Watch out, Courtney.) Her singing on Go! is colorful, brassy, tender, seductive, insinuating. She and the band have rediscovered a rare quantity in today's popscape: pure joy.

-- Gary Susman

JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS
This playful film adaptation of the ’70s Archie comic strip strikes a sporadic chord. A Charlie’s Angels–esque girl-power flick directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, it’s a sort of Behind the Music in present tense, except the satirical take leaves out the standard alcohol binges, downward spirals, and final-hour reconciliations; instead, Josie’s band make it to the tunes of conspiracy theory, subliminal messages, and farcical product placements. What? The film prances all over the place with an unnecessary teased-out subplot. Just show us the cute girls singing those fabulous songs by local rock star Kay Hanley, of Letters to Cleo.

Teen dream Rachael Leigh Cook wails with style as innocent heartthrob frontwoman Josie; she’s backed up by bassist Valerie (Rosario Dawson) and ditzy puppy-lover percussionist Melody (Tara Reid). But as these things go, we all love the villain the most, and indie-film goddess Parker Posey’s take on record-industry shrew Fiona is truly inspired. Blink for a second and you’ll miss the torrent of pop-culture cuts, boy-band jabs, and MTV disses. Then again, with closed eyes, you can focus on the best part of the film: the soundtrack.

By Nina Willdorf

Second winds
Kay Hanley’s post-Cleo career, plus Joey McIntyre

BY MATT ASHARE

It’s a little before 8 p.m. on a school night in May at Q Division studio in Davis Square, and Kay Hanley is diligently working her way through one of the trickier vocals for her debut solo album, which has been tentatively titled Cherry Marmalade and is due for release in the fall. “Chadie Saves the Day” is an almost jazzy number she’s been playing out since the beginning of the year, and it calls for the kind of subtle inflections and sophisticated shadings that would have been lost in the brash bubblegrunge crunch of her long-time band Letters to Cleo. Her husband, ex-LTC guitarist Michael Eisenstein, patiently pages through a rock mag in the studio’s control room while producer Mike Denneen, who’s also been working with Hanley since the Cleo days, listens intently to her voice, offering words of encouragement and advice between takes as he tries to coax a keeper out of her. Not that she’s making him work all that hard: in the era of Pro-Tools digital recording, an engineer can correct for flaws in pitch, rhythm, and even phrasing, but Hanley’s nailing the track so consistently that he’s pretty much letting her fine-tune the performance herself.

A few minutes later, having secured a couple cans of 50-cent beers from the Q Division soda machine, Hanley’s ready to give her singing voice a break and do a little talking. She has a lot to talk about these days. For starters, there’s the unexpected success of the Babyface-produced soundtrack to the flopped kid flick Josie and the Pussycats. Although you have to read the fine print to find out that Hanley (not actress Rachel Leigh Cook) does, in fact, sing all the Josie parts, and that she helped pen a couple of the tracks, the 100,000 units the disc moved in its first three weeks would seem to suggest that there’s still a market out there for a voice like hers. And on the family front, Hanley and Eisenstein, who are in the process of raising their first kid (Zoey), have just become first-time homeowners in the fine city of Quincy. In other words, Josie couldn’t have come at a better time for the unsigned Hanley and Eisenstein, especially since they’re planning on launching her solo career themselves.

“The plan has been to just put the album out ourselves and do a Web-heavy push for it,” she explains. “With what we’re doing, if we sell 10,000 records, then we’ll easily recoup what we’ve invested. From that standpoint it doesn’t make any sense at all to sign with a label, because unless something drastic happens, then I’m not getting on the radio. Our publishing company is helping to foot the bill for the album . . . and they’re a lot more behind it now that the Josie record is doing so well. So I’m feeling comfortable writing this completely schizophrenic record.”

If you caught any of the handful of gigs Hanley did around town the first half of this year, then you know what she means by “schizophrenic.” (Her future bookings include a full-band gig on June 25 in Newport with Dar Williams and an “acoustic thing” with Eisenstein at the Lizard Lounge on July 11.) A few months back, at a stripped-down Kendall Café performance (with her steady band of Eisenstein, Gravel Pit bassist Ed Valauskas, and Orbit drummer Paul Buckley), she leaned heavily on acoustic-guitar-based country-inflected material that suited her voice surprisingly well. Then in March, when she played a NEMO-sponsored showcase at Karma, it was back to the kind of hook-laden guitar pop that was Cleo’s bread and butter, with a couple of country tunes and ballads mixed in for variety. The tracks on the Josie disc are also in line with the kind of melodic alterna-rock Cleo specialized in.

“My joking plan for the solo album is to do it in three acts like a play,” Hanley says. “I’ll have the Americana section — the countryish stuff — be act one. Act two is the space-rock, proggy, weird-time-signature kind of stuff. And act three is ’93 revisited, which are the songs that would have gone on a Cleo record eventually. I haven’t completely gotten that stuff out of my system. Doing Cleo was something that formed my entire life — it was my life since I was a teenager. And it’s hard to walk away from something that’s so much a part of you. At the same time, it became oppressive, feeling the pressure to rock, having certain things expected of you. There was just no way I was going to be able to change in Letters to Cleo, and I had to change.”

Even as Letters to Cleo were winding down after a run that had included one modest modern-rock hit (“Here and Now”) and a pair of solid major-label-funded albums, Hanley was discovering new sources of inspiration. “I started buying Hank Williams tapes at truck stops and listening to jazz for the first time in my life. I mean, I stopped listening to contemporary rock a long time ago. So all the stuff that I’ve been writing the past couple of years has been all over the place. And of course, when Michael writes a song with me, he’s kind of purging too — he’s got all this stuff that he needs to get out of him.”

The past couple years have provided Hanley and Eisenstein with opportunities to grow outside a traditional band setting. First there was Generation O, the hip, rock-oriented children’s cartoon show for which they were retained to provide the rock. Hanley and Eisenstein were given three scripts at a time and had a week to write and record material for them. Then came Josie, a project for which Kay was originally picked to be a back-up singer. “Babyface had already hired a Josie. But by the time I got out to LA, they had fired her. So I auditioned for Josie, and Michael and Zoey and I were stuck in a hotel room in LA for almost a month last summer waiting for them to decide. It was nice, but we couldn’t go anywhere. Finally we took off, and a week later they called and brought me back out.”

In the end, not only did Hanley get the lead but Eisenstein was brought in to beef up the guitars, and the two even got to put one of their own songs, “Shapeshifter,” on the disc. Having already endured the mixed blessing of being associated with a questionable Hollywood product — “Here and Now” became a hit after it was included on the Melrose Place soundtrack — Hanley wasn’t upset to find her role in the Josie soundtrack played down. “It was definitely their decision and one that I fully endorsed. The last thing I want to do is go on the road playing Josie and the Pussycats songs. I’ve already lived through trying to live something down. I mean, I still answer questions about Melrose Place, and that was six years ago.”

Nevertheless, she and Eisenstein, who currently plays guitar in Nina Gordon’s touring band, aren’t averse to doing more behind-the-scenes industry work. “Writing for other artists is something that really interests me a lot. That work is out there for us, and that’s where I see myself ultimately. I mean, I’m not going to be skinny forever.”

For the time being, though, Hanley is looking to see where a solo career might take her. A recent gig at NYC’s Mercury Lounge, which took place on the same day Hanley and Eisenstein more than held their own as guests on Howard Stern’s radio show, brought out a number of industry types, but Hanley remains reticent about taking that route again. “It’s nice to see that people are still interested, but I wouldn’t do the same kind of deal I did with Cleo. It would have to be something really special. So we are checking out the options. But, whatever I do at this point is completely for me. And I like having no pressure to produce a single or sell records — except, of course, for this house that we just bought.”