RESOURCES:
TRANSCRIPTION:
John Bommarito: Today on The Song Break on 89.1 WEMU, I'm happy to welcome a new to me and perhaps new to you artist, who is getting ready to release a new record called "Imagination," October 30th on Decca Records and is coming to Detroit very, very soon. It's Stella Cole! Welcome to WEMU, Stella!
Stella Cole: Thank you so much! Thanks for having me!
John Bommarito: Total pleasure! Pleasure to meet you! Well, let's get a little background on you. You grew up in Springfield, Illinois and lived near Marge and Homer Simpson. Correct?
Stella Cole: Yes, I did. I think they actually did a poll of which Springfield in the U.S. was the real Simpsons one, and I think Springfield, Illinois lost, unfortunately. Abraham Lincoln did grow up around there in New Salem, Illinois. His law practice was in Springfield. So, like, that's our main claim to fans, the Lincoln stuff. The Simpsons stuff, it's questionable. But, yeah, I grew up in Springfield, Illinois, stayed in Chicago, or stayed in Illinois, I'm sorry, for college, went to Northwestern outside of Chicago, and, yeah, then moved to New York after college. But I am a Midwest girl at heart.
John Bommarito: I get it. I feel it. I moved to Florida briefly but had to come back because this is where I belong.
Stella Cole: Yeah.
John Bommarito: Had I come to visit you and your parents back in, let's say, 2010, what would I have seen you doing if I'd come over to your house? What would you have been doing at home at that point in your life, some young version of Stella?
Stella Cole: 2010, I probably wouldn't have been home, honestly, because I would have been at some play practice somewhere after school. I feel like I always was missing family dinner to be at a rehearsal for some sort of musical theater. My first role was in the first grade.
John Bommarito: Really?
Stella Cole: I was a zebra in the community theater production of "Children of Eden." Huge breakout moment for me! I wore a really big paper mache head But, yeah, I just was always in some kind of theatrical production when I was growing up. I wanted to be on Broadway. That was a dream originally.
John Bommarito: I think I'm seeing your next album cover in my head now. Stella Cole as a zebra. No, that's not true. That'd be silly. So always, always the path. You're on the path you've always meant to be on is what you're trying to tell me.
Stella Cole: I hope so, yes. I've been obsessed with old movie musicals and Broadway music from the 40s and 50s since I was very, very young.
John Bommarito: Well, how did you fall in love with that music? Who was the person who nudged you in that direction?
Stella Cole: No one nudged me in that direction. I think my parents. I don't remember this because I was a toddler, but my parents told me that when I was three years old, I saw a little movie called "The Wizard of Oz" for the first time.
John Bommarito: I've heard of it. Yeah.
Stella Cole: Yeah, I know. It's a good one. Very unknown film. Little known. Niche No, I saw The Wizard Oz for the first time when I was three. And, apparently, I was just like obsessed with it and begged to watch it every day after that and wore my Dorothy costume and my red slippers around the house for years and wore it to school in the grocery store and had a Wizard of Oz-themed birthday party. I was just like obsessed with it and was learning all of the music to that, like memorizing songs and scenes from that and from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, like very young. So, I was obsessive with it.
John Bommarito: Well, Sound of Music was definitely on in our house quite a lot, as was, I'm sure we watched Wizard of Oz as much, but Sound of Music stuck in my head. And if you're like me, when anybody says the Homer Simpson, back to that for a second, says "D'oh!", you say, "A deer. A female deer." Right? You almost can't not do it. It's like the natural response.
Stella Cole: No, of course. It's just what you say. Yeah, I love that movie. I mean, many of those movies are still my favorite. I always joke my taste hasn't changed since I was three years old. Like, if I'm nervous or having a bad day, it's like straight to watching a Julie Andrews clip. And it just like brings me back to a feeling of like a shot of pure joy for me.
John Bommarito: Well, as a young lady, what kind of a culture shock would it have been for you to learn that there was music that didn't sound like that? Because, obviously, the pop music of the time sounded nothing like that. Your friends were not listening to the same things you were.
Stella Cole: Yeah. Middle school was a weird time. I was like, "What? There's like other stuff? What's going on?" I think when we got to the point where everybody was like developing their music taste more, I always had this issue where my friends would show me music in middle school and high school, and I'd be like, "What are they even saying? Like, you can't understand the words they're saying. They're not enunciating it." I was used to Julie Andrews and Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. I was like, "What's going on? Why can't I understand any pop music on the radio?" Like, I was into it always, even when it made me sound weird.
Song excerpt "Singing In the Rain" from Imagination.
John Bommarito: My guest today on The Song Break is Stella Cole with a new album on the way called "Imagination." Your breakthrough, from what I've read, came through during the pandemic on TikTok. How did that work out for you?
Stella Cole: Yeah. So, the lockdown for COVID started when I was a junior in college, and I moved home to live with my parents for what we thought was just going to be a month or two and ended up you know how that story goes.
John Bommarito: Yeah. I kind of do.
Stella Cole: It happened to a lot of people. Yeah. So, I essentially was just like completely removed from my community, and I missed theater, I missed singing. I was studying theater and musical theater in college among other things. And I was on a walk with my dad one day and I was like, "I really miss singing." I was watching all of my old comfort movies again and like weeping to them being like, "God, these are so good! They're giving me hope in the world!" And my dad was like, "You are such a great singer. Like, you should post some videos on YouTube and just put stuff out there." And I was like, "No, that'd be humiliating. What if my friends saw? That would be so embarrassing." I would be embarrassed to seem like I was trying or something. And so, there was this new app called TikTok that I didn't think many of my friends had yet. And so, I downloaded it ,and I was like, "All right." I think the caption of my first or second video was like "LOL, I don't know what I'm doing. Hope my friends never see this." But I started posting videos of me singing all my favorite music, and people started liking them and finding the videos. So, here we are now!
Song excerpt "As Time Goes By" from Imagination.
John Bommarito: Is that what also led to you getting signed by Decca Records?
Stella Cole: It is, yeah. That was definitely years later. But, yeah, I think I moved to New York and figured out, after building a following on the internet, it was a different thing to build some legitimacy in the jazz scene in New York and in the music scene here and meeting people and making a few records and figuring out what touring was all about and establishing a career in real life also. And then, when both of those things came together, yeah, I've been working with my third album I released with Decca at Universal, which is so crazy.
John Bommarito: That is pretty cool! Did you ever work a job that wasn't singing or acting? Did you have like an office job at some point?
Stella Cole: I never had an office job. I thought a lot of times in the first year of being in New York, like maybe I just need to do something like that, but I was a dog walker. I love dogs. Dogs are great. And I loved walking around, but I would like be listening to music and trying to learn new songs and practicing like voice exercises that my teacher had given me when I was walking around with dogs. I was so distracted. I'd always be late in returning people's dogs. Like, I dropped somebody's keys once because I was like doing vocal warm-ups. I was not a good dog walker, so I didn't have a lot of focus. I didn't have what it took.
John Bommarito: Just the hypothetical thinking about Decca Records is the place you work and if it were an office, suddenly your coworkers are Andrea Bocelli, David Bowie, Diana Ross, Chris Stapleton, Ella Fitzgerald, Gregory Porter, Nina Simone, Ringo Starr, Tori Amos. That's a pretty cool office to work in.
Stella Cole: It would be. I mean, that would be an office job that I would absolutely love to have.
John Bommarito: Some of them are no longer with us. It would be a little creepy, but pretty cool.
Stella Cole: Hey, that's okay. I'm down to talk to the ghost of any of those people.
John Bommarito: It's a good place to put your records out on. On a well-respected label.
Song excerpt "It Had To Be You" from Imagination.
John Bommarito: The new album, again, is going to be called "Imagination." It's due out on October 30th, almost a spooky day to release an album. Some of the songs on "Imagination" appear on your previous album, "Live At Café Carlyle." Is this a first time putting them in the studio kind of thing or you'd already planned to release these songs and just happen to be ones that you recorded for that record because you always performed them live?
Stella Cole: The ones that I have recorded before either live or I think two of them are on my album, "It's Magic," that we released last August. So, two summers ago, we were recording "It's Magic," and my original plan for that album was for it to be half songs with strings with a small orchestra and then half songs with my trio who I tour with because I wanted to represent what we did like 150 shows last year or something. We've become really solid touring together for about three years now, and I wanted to put that out there as well. And once we got everything recorded, it was just clear that the strings songs didn't fit with the trio stuff as well. We needed more string stuff. So, some of the stuff that we'd recorded already with the trio, we had these last-minute string charts made for them and ended up making that whole album. And this is something that we recorded originally meant to be part of "It's Magic." And now, we're putting it out into the world. And I'm excited about that, if that answers your question.
John Bommarito: It does. Since I don't have credits for the album in front of me because it's not actually out yet, can you tell me who...people you recorded with that people might recognize their names because they've worked with other people?
Stella Cole: My trio that I tour with, my pianist Michael Kanan, my bass player, Mikey Migliore, and drummer Hank Allen-Barfield. My pianist has been a touring pianist for a long time. He played a lot of time in New York. And a lot people saw him play with Jane Monheit when she was touring, or he toured with her like 10 years ago or something, and was part of her touring band. Jimmy Scott, great singer, so she's been around for a while, and they're great. I love those guys so much.
John Bommarito: You yourself toured with Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox. How fun was that?
Stella Cole: [I did! It was a fun and ridiculous time because I did a tour with them in the U.S. And then, we went straight to Australia and New Zealand after that. It's my first touring that I had ever done, and I was suddenly on a tour bus and in Australia. It was like foreign. I just was like, "Where am I? What has my life become?" It went from dog walking to doing that. So, it was pretty weird and amazing.
John Bommarito: Talk about culture shock, like we did earlier. That's definitely a culture shock. Who else was with you on that tour? Any other vocalists that we would recognize from that tour?
Stella Cole: A lot of the PMJ people. This wonderful singer, Allison Young, who does a lot of stuff with them. She's been putting out her own music, and we have a lot the same collaborators. But, yeah, Effie Passero, I think is big in the PMJ world now, so it's fun. The singers switch out a lot, actually, on the tour, so I toured with like nine different people or something throughout the six-week tour. But yeah, it was amazing! We love PMJ! It was a fun time!
Song excerpt "Uptown Girl" by Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox featuring Stella Cole.
John Bommarito: My guest on The Song Break today is Stella Cole. New album October 30th on Decca Records and a date at the Detroit Opera House, September the 3rd. Let's just hypothetically say, because you just finished this record recently and you probably aren't even thinking about the next record, but what modern artists do you think you could interpret in a Stella Cole way?
Stella Cole: I've done a Billie Eilish song on my first record, which is interesting. I think I actually like modern artists more than people expect me to. I listen to even like the pop girls, like Ella Langley and Sabrina Carpenter. I love Olivia Dean. She's one of my favorites, Raye, Sienna Spiro. So, I really love a lot of modern music, and I've actually been working on writing some original songs for my next album. I'm trying to write some songs that sound... I can't say that I'm trying to write songs that sound like standards because that is an impossible task. They're the best songs ever written, so I've always been intimidated by trying to take my own original music seriously. But I've been working on that lately, so I think that might be my version of interpreting a modern song is like making my own with people. You know, Rachael and Vilray?
John Bommarito: Oh yeah.
Stella Cole: I just met Vilray. We hung out and filmed some videos the other day, and he's super-inspiring. I'm like, "Maybe I'm going to put some Vilray songs on the next record," because I just think he writes--
John Bommarito: He's a great songwriter!
Stella Cole: Modern standards the best of anybody. So, yeah, I've been really excited of meeting new people and experimenting. But no one freak out. I'm not going to stop singing "Moon River" and "Over the Rainbow." Well, yeah, just exploring. It's been a really cool year creatively. I think I'm growing a lot.
John Bommarito: No fault of your own, but I'm sure you've never listened to my program. But the premise of the program is the great American songbook meets the modern day songbook for lunch, essentially. And I'm having to define what that modern day songbook is because that great American songbook as we all know is defined. What is the modern day songbook? So, to me, it's a song that gets covered a lot. It could be a modern standard. It could be a Beatles tune or a Sting tune or James Taylor or Joni Mitchell. I mean, these are songs that even jazz artists have covered over and over.
Stella Cole: Yeah!
John Bommarito: So, I am starting to see a shift where people are taking Billie Eilish songs or the other more pop stars and say, "Hey, I can make that a jazz song." So, you can help write that modern day songbook with me as you figure out who to cover.
Stella Cole: Hey, that's absolutely the hope. I love James Taylor. I've done James Taylor covers before many times. I mean, Dolly Parton. I've been wanting to sing some Dolly songs. I grew up on Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn and great Nashville country music. So, yeah, there's so many opportunities. I keep threatening to make a country album. I don't think it's going to happen in the next year, but I do love country music. So, we'll see.
John Bommarito: There's plenty of career ahead of you, Stella.
Stella Cole: I appreciate that.
John Bommarito: September 3rd, Detroit Opera House is the date. You haven't been there I imagine as of yet. Have you?
Stella Cole: To Detroit?
John Bommarito: Detroit Opera House specifically.
Stella Cole: No, not Detroit Opera House. But I'm very excited about it.
John Bommarito: Yes. Well, then you can't picture that versus where you've already played. But think about the most remarkable, magnificent place you've performed, and tell us about that.
Stella Cole: Speaking of opera houses, I performed in this insane opera house in Monaco. We were eating dinner by the theater, and the Prince and Princess of Monaco were passing through the courtyard. And everyone like stopped and music played. And we were like, "What is going on?" It was like the most beautiful old European theater I think I've ever seen. So, that was a pretty cool one. And then, we have done the Cafe Carlisle twice now in New York, which is very exciting and meaningful for me. I love that room!
John Bommarito: Which is why you released a record recorded there, I imagine.
Stella Cole: Exactly! That was a big part of it, funnily enough.
John Bommarito: Well, Stella Cole, I appreciate your time on The Song Break today. Good luck with the tour! And I look forward to seeing your stop in Detroit on September 3rd and the eventual, because we're not quite to October yet, release of "Imagination." Good luck on all that! I really appreciate your time!
Stella Cole: Thank you so much! So wonderful to talk to you!
John Bommarito: [00:14:42] You as well!
Non-commercial, fact based reporting is made possible by your financial support. Make your donation to WEMU today to keep your community NPR station thriving.
Like 89.1 WEMU on Facebook and follow us on X (Twitter)
Contact WEMU News at 734.487.3363 or email us at studio@wemu.org
