Elise LeGrow takes liberties playing Chess
Toronto R&B singer’s album reworks hits by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Lee Andrews
If not everyone likes Elise LeGrow’s startling cover versions, she can live with that — in fact, she’s rather pleased.
“The enemy is indifference,” the 30-year-old Toronto singer says over an afternoon beer in a west end rock ’n’ roll bar. Her upcoming debut album, Playing Chess, is designed to be provocative. Aided and abetted by a distinguished crew of performers and producers, she takes serious liberties with canonical Chess Records songs.
LeGrow, whose alto sounds both urgent and worldly, found an unorthodox way to pay her dues: In her early 20s, she would sing jazz standards to dinner crowds and then altrock originals with her band Whale Tooth — sometimes in succession, on the same night, on different floors of the Drake Hotel. (She’ll be at the Drake Underground this Sunday.)
Her compulsive genre-hopping left her no clear-cut path to success.
“All of it was real and it was all me,” she says, “but a lot of people (would ask): ‘What’s your endgame?’ ”
Her ambitions to make organic-sounding music didn’t jibe with the record labels she approached. They would play heavily Auto-Tuned pop for her and ask, “Have you thought about doing something like this?”
A soulful, self-released EP in 2012 proved a useful calling card (with unexpected staying power: One of its songs is now being adapted for an Indonesian shampoo commercial) and a meeting with New York producer and S-Curve Records founder Steve Greenberg last year kickstarted her career.
“I did not have high expectations, (but) I was blown away,” Greenberg says, describing her voice as “absurdly good . . . You feel like the people on Chess Records have lived hard lives and Elise’s voice suggests this notion.”
LeGrow can tap directly into a song’s emotional heft, whether it’s raw, sultry or somewhere in between.
In 1994, Greenberg had co-produced Joss Stone’s debut, The Soul Sessions, which also took the unusual step of introducing a singer and songwriter to the world via oldschool covers. LeGrow’s voice, Greenberg says, “is so special that rather than wait to develop an album’s worth of originals, (I thought), let’s get the world to fall in love with her as a singer.” The well-connected producer brought in the likes of the Roots drummer Questlove (who asked to play on LeGrow’s version of “Long Lonely Nights,” a hit for his father, Lee Andrews), his bandmate “Captain” Kirk Douglas (who contributes swooning guitar to “Sincerely”) and the Dap-Kings’ celebrated horn section (who have backed Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones).
Together, Greenberg and fellow Soul Sessions producers Betty Wright (herself a soul legend) and Michael Mangini encouraged LeGrow to rethink Chess’s early rock and R&B staples.
She recast Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” as a wistful ballad, with a tune that Greenberg dreamed up 40 years ago as a teenager — he had read the lyrics but never heard the song. Recently, in London, England, LeGrow sang it on U.K. chat show Later . . . With Jools Holland, on a night when the likes of Liam Gallagher and LCD Soundsystem played, too.
She felt “a sense of wonderment: ‘How did I get here?’ ”
There’s since been the odd naysayer on social media, but LeGrow welcomes any strong reactions. She recalls Questlove’s reaction to another of her reinventions: Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” with an altered melody and a menacing, stretchedout groove.
“He said, ‘You didn’t tell me you were out for blood.’ That was probably the coolest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”