Pianist mines world of politics for song lyrics
Election results will determine set list for Thursday’s show
The Artist’s Life is a recurring feature that spotlights the talent who help make up the rich tapestry of the Bay Area’s cultural life.
For their Thursday, Nov. 8, cabaret show at Feinstein’s at the Nikko, pianist Lauren Mayer and collaborators Sandy and Richard Riccardi left the set list up in the air until two days beforehand.
The determining factor? The midterm elections.
“I did a song about Beto O’Rourke,” Mayer says. “I love him, and the (Ted) Cruz campaign just keeps shooting itself in the foot, so I made fun of him. If (O’Rourke) wins, I’ll put that song in.” If the Democrats perform poorly, “it’ll be more of a commiseration set. If we win at least one house, I’ll do more celebration.”
Having multiple set lists on hand is no problem for Mayer, 59. The private vocal coach and music director at San Francisco Conservatory of Music has a vast oeuvre. From her San Mateo home, she’s been writing, recording and posting a parody song about politics or current events every week since 2012.
Titles include “The Sexual Harassment Prevention Song” and “Just Another Middle-Aged Jewish Mother With a Crush on Steph Curry,” both of which she’ll perform at Feinstein’s, and “I’m a Jew, and I Know That Ain’t Christian” and “Dear Internet Trolls.”
It all started when she sent the song “It’s a Scary Time to Be a Jewish Mother” (the Jewish mother identity is a frequent trope) to a now-defunct political commentary website whose name she can’t remember.
“They said, ‘Do you have any more?’ I jokingly said, ‘Sure, how about one a week?’ ” They agreed. Mayer thought, “Well, let me try.”
“I’ve been writing songs for a long time” — since she was a kid, growing up in Irvine, she says — “but this was the first time I made myself do it regularly. A lot of my songs were garbage, but it took the pressure off. Because if I’m doing it once a week, I’m not going to be writing brilliant songs every week. As a result, my writing has gotten so much faster.” She needed only about an hour to write “I Didn’t Come From Your Rib, You Came From My Vagina,” a title she borrowed from a photograph of a sign at a demonstration for Planned Parenthood.
For Mayer, the benefits of disciplined weekly posting have extended beyond a more fluid creative process. It’s “how I have channeled my frustration with current events,” she says. “A lot of my friends who are similarly liberally oriented can’t even watch the news. They get too angry. This gives me something constructive to do with it. I hear all the time from people, ‘I was so upset, and you helped me laugh at the news, and now I can deal with it.’ ”
“I’m not curing cancer. I’m not endowing some great thing like Bill Gates,” she adds. “I can’t do that.” Songwriting “is what I can do to try to make the world a little better, not to sound too Pollyannaish.”
But songwriting isn’t how Mayer supports herself. At San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she’s music-directing “The Threepenny Opera,” which runs Dec. 6-7. It’s a chance to see “the stars of tomorrow,” Mayer says, for free admission.
Mayer is also a writer, director and facilitator for the theater-based training at Stanford’s Sexual Harassment Prevention Office. Theater, she says, can teach in a way PowerPoint can’t. In one of Mayer’s scenes at a recent training, an actor talked about how much an assault “had affected her studies, and there were people weeping in the audience.”
Mayer has done corporate theater, including events for Hewlett-Packard and Wells Fargo all the way to “a convention of funeral directors, where I was a tap-dancing casket.” (That crowd loved it, by the way. “They really let their hair down,” Mayer says.)
A freelancer through her adult life, Mayer says her survival strategy is to be “the Madonna of the Bay Area — not in terms of my talent or anything” but in the way that Madonna “keeps reinventing herself.” When the piano bar and cabaret scene dried up, Mayer went corporate. When companies switched from inperson meetings to videoconferencing, she got into vocal coaching.
As a vocal coach, Mayer had missed performing, and her Feinstein’s midterm election show is part of an antidote to that. She also recently sang with her son, drummer Ben Visini, at Hotel Utah and will perform her cabaret act about married life, “Yes, Dear,” with her husband, Scott Grinthal, at San Francisco’s Society Cabaret on Feb. 16.