Erica Mantone ready to take her place: center stage
Erica Mantone’s voice builds as she sings, “Quietly and slowly/You will come to know me/I’m happening before/Your eyes.” It accelerates from a calm-but-firm hush to a thunder clap on her 2021 single “Undone,” a soulful nugget of Americana buttressed by organ swells and guitar twang.
For Mantone, it is all happening before our eyes. If she feels hesitant about putting out her debut EP, she winks at the situation with the release’s title: “I May Have Asked for This.”
Like many in Boston, I became friends with Mantone
through her behind the scenes work — producing shows for Boston Rock Opera and the festival Bust Out Boston. Then I learned about her impressive vocal might through her side work — she’s a three-time Boston Music Award nominee for Session Musician of the Year. But only in the past two years has Mantone emerged as a singer-songwriter-band leader.
“Part of me wanted to do this so I could prove to people that I shouldn’t do it,” Mantone said with a laugh. “There’s still an inner monologue of doubt that goes on when I listen (to ‘I May Have Asked for This’). But I love the production and musicianship, I’m just not sure my voice is center stage material.”
Mantone is wrong. Thankfully Henley Row Studios tag team Dan Nicklin and Nate Leavitt know that too and have championed Mantone — Nicklin and Leavitt co-wrote tracks for and produced and performed on the record. Together the three talents and strong artistic personalities crafted a gem that’s completely comfortable moving among acid-fried soul, Motown homages, spooky noir turns and high-andlonesome ballads.
“We have a deep system of checks and balances,” Mantone said ahead of her
May 14 release party at the Burren Backroom. “The three of us working together, it’s almost like we are three siblings who have been working together all our lives. And I don’t mean that in the hokey way, I mean it in the no one gets away with (expletive) way.”
“We were constantly picking on each other,” she added with a laugh. “But we didn’t let anything slide.”
If one of the three didn’t like something from the sessions, it didn’t make it on the record. Often there were intense artistic debates, sometimes over if “I May Have Asked for This” lacked a cohesive sound (it doesn’t — even if the songs swing wildly from style to style, Mantone’s distinctive voice and the duo’s warm production pulls the listener through from song to song). The long process, the joy and the occasional butting of heads ultimately improved the record.
“Doing the vocal recording sessions with Dan were really tough, he really pushed me,” Mantone said. “But every now and then we would align and capture it. One of my favorite parts is the end of ‘Undone,’ when I’m doing that Joni Mitchell-style improvisational stuff.”
The moment Mantone is talking about comes after she sings, “Try and try again/One day I’ll see a better ending.” The jazzy vocal improv closes the raw tune with a wonderfully ethereal quality, a tender sonic and psychic catharsis to cap a song that puts you through the wringer.
The combination of lyric and delivery prove Mantone should be fronting her own project and writing more. Sure, she can keep backing up other people. But we know now that she thrives at center stage, so she can’t let session or side work get in the way of her own art. Hey, she asked for this.