Rachele Eve
One could say that Rachele Eve’s songwriting began with a broken leg. After an unfortunate sports injury had her bedridden for two weeks, Rachele picked up the guitar for the first time and has since not put it down. At age 17, Eve joined local Detroit rock band Avenue playing numerous stages in the Detroit-area. The band was featured on the nationally syndicated Mitch Albom Show and Fox 2 Morning News. Soon after the band released their Answer My Call EP in 2004, Eve decided to pursue a solo career, in which she independently released her first EP, Wishful Thinking, in 2005. She gained a following at Birmingham Michigan’s The Blue Martini, as well as performed in Washington D.C. at the Angels in Adoption Gala hosted by the Congressional Coalition of Adoption Institute, with other performers such as DMC from the influential Hip Hop group Run DMC.
Attracted to Chicago’s diverse music scene she set out for the windy city a year later with a hope-filled bag. On the search for a much more intimate yet driving sound, it was not even a month until she met her partner, Nikolai Giefer, a drummer and producer that relocated to Chicago after Hurricane Katrina. The two released Winchester Sessions, a collection of six new compositions, later to be revised under the name Joys and Toys. Unlike other duos, the balance of Rachele Eve’s organic lyrical and vocal expression and Nikolai’s adept syncopation made for a symbiotic relationship, both innate and unprecedented.
In October of 2007, Giefer introduced Eve to his former professor and record producer John Snyder, a veteran in jazz recording (Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis, Etta James) and founder of Artists House Music Foundation. A couple months after Snyder’s visit to Chicago, he invited Eve down to Louisiana to record. After months of seeking out local musicians and fundraising for the album, Rachele Eve, Nikolai Giefer, and multi-instrumentalist Packy Lundholm ventured down to Dockside Studios in Maurice, Louisiana in July 2008. The three of them cranked out fourteen songs in four days, making up Rachele Eve’s first full-length album.
Entitled Mouth of Feathers, Eve’s coins the music as “desert rock,” a place where she gained much of her vision for the record. The distinct and unabridged instrumentation rivals between a modern and vintage soundscape, colored with distorted guitars, toy piano, accordion, Wurlitzer, Hammond B-3 organ, clarinet, and cello. All behind her seamless whisper-to-wail vocal inflections, the lyrical component of Mouth of Feathers illustrates more abstractly Eve’s personal journey through being her own worst critic, finding a new love, and trying to make sense of society’s strange antics. Rachele Eve’s influences that are especially prominent on Mouth of Feathers include: Fiona Apple, Feist, Jon Brion, Regina Spektor, and Bob Dylan.
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