Sweet Soubrette is really Ellia Bisker and her ukulele. This Brooklyn songstress’ debut album is as invigorating as ocean spray; Bisker has written a modern-day sea-chantey, but this time from the siren’s point of view.

Bisker’s lyrics are just as brilliant if not just as brine. Others have called her a “dangerous femme fatale” — tender then venomous, audacious then introspective, but never apologetic. In Bisker we have an honest woman of our generation, singing lyrics that remain confident in their unwillingness to be watered down or glammed up. Bisker taps at the edges of that part of the glass ceiling reserved for rock ‘n’ roll and smiles at you while she does it.

We caught up with Sweet Soubrette to talk about the songwriting process, the recording process, and the always-entertaining ukulele.

By: Nora E. Lindner

NL: What did you grow up listening to? Do you see any connection between it and the music you play today? 
SS: My dad likes to collect old stereo equipment at garage sales. You could play music in almost every room of our house, including the kitchen and one bathroom. So I grew up steeped in my parents’ music, which they played all the time — a cocktail of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, sixties rock and roll, folk songs, and show tunes from Li’l Abner to Andrew Lloyd Webber (I strongly recommend this combination to parents wishing to raise songwriter children — it’s like pop music primordial soup). When I was in high school I got really into the bad-ass women of 90s alternative rock, like Liz Phair and PJ Harvey and the Breeders. I have been hugely influenced by all these sources. The music I write is very lyrics-oriented and I use my songs to tell stories, like the folk and show tunes. The Beatles taught me a lot about melody and harmony, and Bob Dylan is an inspiring model of songwriter as poet (Leonard Cohen too). And my songs tend to have an edge to them, and a lack of apology, that I picked up from those cool lady rockers.     

NL: When did you start playing ukulele? Formal training? First performance? 
SS: I got a ukulele as a gift from a stranger at the end of 2005 and taught myself to play by using online chord charts to learn all the Magnetic Fields songs I knew all the words to, which turned out to be a lot. My first official performance was in the spring of 2006 at Galapagos Art Space in the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus’s Winter Cabaret variety show, which was appropriate since I had been working with the Bindlestiffs behind the scenes since 2003 and they had taught me basically everything I knew at that point about performing.    

But I had an unofficial debut a couple months earlier, when I went to the now defunct CB’s Gallery for an event a friend was hosting that was supposed to include an open mic. When I showed up, the friend said, “Oh, honey, you just missed it.” I figured, oh well, and started drinking scotch and sodas. After I had had two of them in quick succession, suddenly I heard my friend announce me as a special guest act. Surprise! My memory of the performance itself is a blur of swimming faces, bad tuning, and awkward fingers. It was at least brief. Then when I went backstage to put the uke away, Nick Jones (lead singer of serialized pirate puppet show rock opera band Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, and a total hero of mine) was getting ready to go on, and he looked at me and said: “Welcome to the small-time.” I think that was the moment I started becoming a performer.

NL: Where does the name Sweet Soubrette come from? What was your original concept for the band? 
SS: A soubrette is a stock character from comic opera — it’s usually described as the flirtatious chambermaid. The word comes from a type of soprano singing voice that those characters tend to have. On the vaudeville stage, young women who played and sang were also sometimes called soubrettes. This seemed in keeping with my act when I was mostly playing solo and trying out a very theatrical, flirtatious, over-the-top stage persona. My original concept for the band was really this alter ego as a solo act, singing songs of doomed romance, but I also wanted an alter ego as a performer that could later function as a band name. When I started performing I was in grad school and couldn’t work around anyone’s schedule but my own. Since finishing my degree I’ve put together a band, which has changed the music and the presentation, making it more rock and less cabaret.  

NL: What’s your song writing process? Where do you get your inspiration? What’s your favorite song of the EP and why? 
SS: My songwriting process really varies. The quirky ones come easiest, since I’m someone who does well with an assignment. Sometimes I come up with the assignment myself, like with “Unlucky in Love,” where I decided to make a list of every unlucky thing I could think of and apply it to a bad relationship. Other times it comes from somewhere else — for instance I participate in the Bushwick Book Club, monthly songwriting series where everyone reads a book and then has to write a song inspired by it. With my more serious songs there’s more of a process of trying to figure out what I’m actually trying to get at, which is sort of like when something is bothering you but you’re not exactly sure what it is. Sometimes a line comes into my head and I’ll carry it around for a while, let it run in the background and marinate, and then when it hits a critical mass I’ll build out from it in a more focused way, make myself sit and pick away at it. I like rules and structure and rhyme. I find a rhyming dictionary helpful for clues to where the song might go next. Some songs take a long time to write. Others fall out more or less complete. The process for each one is a little different. 

NL: Have you found any significant challenges in being a young woman in the mostly male-dominated music industry?  
SS: Well, I think in some ways you can be more visible as a woman in music, in that there are fewer of us getting attention in the field so if you can stand out you stand out more (of course this is totally a back-handed advantage, if it is one at all). Being respected and taken seriously as a musician, songwriter, artist, band leader can be challenging when you’re dealing with engineers, venues, bookers, other musicians. And as a woman you run the risk of having your music pigeonholed as “chick music,” like your songs would only be interesting to female listeners. But really I think the disadvantages are not so much the obvious things and more the things you don’t even know about — where you’re not being invited to play on a bill, not being suggested for a gig, not being asked to sit in on someone else’s set. Not getting opportunities to participate on equal footing.     

NL: In your song “Homewrecker” you explain your “disrespect for domestic tranquility” and how you are “messing with the social order” — refreshingly unapologetic. Do you see your music as empowering in that sense? 
SS: Well first of all, “Homewrecker” should be taken with a huge grain of salt. It starts out very unapologetic, even bragging, but by the end I think it’s clear this character is in over her head and suffering because of it. That said, I do like to write from the bad woman’s point of view — “Siren Song,” from the (possibly deadly) mermaid’s perspective, and “Pacemaker,” from the heartbreaker’s, are two other songs in this vein. And on the second album there’s a song called “All That Glitters,” which is sung by a gold digger. It is definitely fun to write first-person songs for these characters who are usually being sung about by other people, usually men. Giving them a voice can be empowering. 

NL: Your songs seem so personal, especially about the doomed romances of your life. Is it hard to expose yourself like that? Are there some songs you wish certain people wouldn’t hear? 
SS: As a singer-songwriter you are usually singing in the first person, and people assume that the songs are all about you and that they are all true. In fact it’s more like being a novelist — you take bits and pieces from your own life, but you also take other pieces from things you read, things you hear, things your friends say, conversations that stick in your head. The distinction between those bits and pieces isn’t obvious to the listener, and it shouldn’t be if you’re telling a coherent story — the fact and the fiction are all mixed up. That’s the saving grace for me. I try not to reveal which parts are the true ones. Especially when my parents come to my shows. 

NL: You’re in the process of recording your second album, Days and Nights. Tell us more about it.  
SS: Days and Nights really expands on what the producer of Siren Song (Tim Cohan of MH Records, formerly of the indie pop band Tryst) and I were doing on the first album. Siren Song started with just me and a ukulele, and then we embellished those tracks with additional instrumentation, programming, effects, some loops and beats. Days and Nights was recorded with my band — the arrangements on most of the songs are ones we came up with together in rehearsal and refined in performance, so the core tracks that we brought into the studio were already incredibly rich.   

I’m extremely lucky in my band — they have all trained at high levels and are far better musicians than I am. Heather Cole has played classical violin since she was a 4-year-old Suzuki kid. She also plays bluegrass, klezmer and Irish fiddle and comes up with parts that are just brilliant. Bob Smith plays upright and electric bass, toured with the indie rock band Trunk Federation in the 90s, and now is the director of a public school music program. Mike Dobson went to the Hartt School and Mannes College of Music for percussion, can play anything you can hit with a stick, and works mainly symphony orchestra and professional circus music gigs when he’s not playing with me. The combination leads to some really interesting arrangements. So Days and Nights has a sound that’s more developed and more full, with more people’s ideas brought together.   

The subject matter on Days and Nights is a little wider, too — there’s a song about girls growing up together, and a whimsical lullaby in French, and a song about being childless in your 30s that’s so devastating that people laugh when we play it in concert. Fun! Doomed romance still plays a major role, but I think it’s a little more thoughtful.  
 
NL: Any other future plans? 
SS: I’m always working on something. I’m hoping to play some gigs outside of NYC this spring. I’m also planning a trip to Italy, where hopefully I’ll get to play a show or two.  An Italian fan who wrote an amazing review of Siren Song two years ago has offered a place to stay in Rome, and a musician friend of his who plays ukulele is working on setting up a couple of gigs there. The international ukulele community is amazingly, surreally generous, and I’m continually amazed and grateful.