Part intention, part accident
Storm Large wants to bring ‘happiness’ to her audience through a mix of genres
Years ago, Storm Large made a promise to herself when deciding to get back on stage and sing again.
It was around 2002, and she had recently moved to Portland after years in San Francisco performing in rock and punk bands. She said the “brutal” music industry began to break her heart, trying to dictate how she looked and sounded.
Large went to Oregon to housesit for a friend, with the idea of possibly enrolling in a local culinary institute. In a post 9/11 world, she said, she wanted to have a career that was more of a “public service.”
After a friend convinced her into getting back on stage, she said she started to revisualize music as her service to humanity. But she gave herself some conditions.
“I was like, I’m just going to do it. It’s going to be fun and I’m not going to deal with any (bad people),” Large said in a recent phone interview from Iowa City. “It’s just going to be for pleasure, maybe money and absolutely no (bad people) anymore. Life is too short.”
Since then, she said her music career has exceeded her wildest dreams. The singer gained a following as one of the finalists in the 2006 CBS competition show “Rock Star: Supernova,” and has performed in symphony and concert
halls all over the world both as a solo artist and as part of the band Pink Martini.
Large, who is mostly known for her takes on classic songs across genres from standard jazz to metal to French classics, will be in Santa Fe tonight. She and her band, Le Bonheur, will perform at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.
The name of the band, which is also the name of her latest album, means “The Happiness.” The moniker fits with Large’s love for bringing joy and laughter to the audience.
“Especially in this (expletive)-up, dark (expletive) period in our history — where I can fill a room full of people who don’t know each other, who don’t know me, and just open my mouth and vibrate my meat and my bones and my teeth and my tongue, and move my ass around, and people can just sort of exhale, feel better, laugh and forget this (B.S.) and reset their energy,” she said.
The direction of her shows like the one in Santa Fe largely depends on the “mood” of the night and what the audience is feeling. At other shows, Large says, she’s played games with her band, like “Stump the Singer,” where the musicians play a tune and she has to join in with the right song, and sometimes it can turn into a full-on rock concert.
“I take my job very seriously, but I don’t take myself very seriously,” she said. “So I try and have as much fun as possible and get people to have as much fun and experience as much as possible.”
She will perform songs from her 2014 album. “Le Bonheur” has some originals, as well as Large’s interpretations of tunes from all over the map — the 1930s’ show tune “The Lady is a Tramp,” Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and Black Sabbath’s “N.I.B.” She described her artistic process when reinterpreting songs as 50 percent intentional — like when she translated “N.I.B.’s” chorus into Spanish and made it a dark love song — and the other half is accidental.
“I don’t set out consciously to be like ‘I’m going to take a song that everyone
knows, and I’m going to change it and I’m going to be so clever,’ ” said Large. “It just sometimes happens kind of naturally.
“But with musicians especially, when you’re constantly thinking about music, performing music (and) writing music, you can hear a song, hear an intro, maybe it’s in a car going past you, and it hits your ear in a different way. It can trigger something in your mind like muscle memory.”
Because the show is so close to Halloween, she may add some “haunted songs” to the setlist. Large mentioned having the old countrywestern song “Long Black Veil” — a “wonderful, kind of spooky, beautiful love song” — in her repertoire, as well as an original she wrote about the story of Charity Lamb, an Oregon Territory resident who murdered her husband in the 1850s. She was the first woman ever to be sent to the territory’s penitentiary.
Large said that when she first heard the name of the murderess, “I thought it was going to turn out she was this famous stripper or burlesque dancer or hooker or something. With the name Charity Lamb, I was like, ‘Oh she’s gotta be a ho, right?’” she said with a laugh.
“But she was an axe murderer. She predated Lizzy Borden by like fortysomething, 50 years, and murdered her husband at the dinner table. She was horribly abused and kind of crazy, they said, because she had just been beaten by her husband forever and finally killed him with an axe.”
Storm Large’s Santa Fe concert starts at 7:30 p.m. tonight. Tickets range between $35-$55.