Review: Vanessa Daou, “Joe Sent Me”

"Joe Sent Me" is the first Vanessa Daou album since 2001's "Make You Love"; it is also her first record not to be produced by Peter Daou. It sounds both familiar and very, very different to her previous work. The voice is different; less sweet, less processed, more raw and with a slightly rough edge. The sound is very different too, and that’s a good thing.

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“Joe Sent Me” is dramatically different. There is jazz, and there is electronica, and there is Vanessa’s voice, but that’s about all that connects those records. “Hurricanes” reminds me of Air’s “Virgin Suicides”. “True” is Vanessa’s voice and acoustic guitar — SHOCKING!!1! “Black And White” sounds like some strange collaboration between Goldfrapp and a jazz band. “Life Force”, incredibly intrinsic sonically (this is very much a headphones record) and “Manifesto” wouldn’t fit on any previous Daou record — and I suspect that’s why it opens the album, a true manifesto of a new sound. “Love Lives In The Dark” sounds like Massive Attack (and oh my, the thought of Vanessa working with Massive Attack makes me ecstatic). This is very much a new record by an artist who hasn’t said her final word.

The sexiness and sensuality, always present in Vanessa’s records, take a new dimension here; she isn't the androgynous girl who sung “Sunday Afternoons" anymore — she is, very much, a very grown up woman. The girl is still present in the songs like "Heart Of Wax"; but it is a very different person who wrote "Joe Sent Me". "And don’t be thinking/you're the only one/who knows” she warns, and shivers go down my spine. "Here’s the pen you gave me/to write my poetry/I said I’d give it back to you the day you stop inspiring me/Here’s the glass, it’s empty" begins “Black And White” and, again, the thrill is almost physical. Those lyrics were worth waiting seven years for." Typing in Stereo

read also: "Love, Vanessa" at Typing in Stereo

Adventures in Daou

"Vanessa’s hotly-anticipated new album, Joe Sent Me, is about to hit the virtual shelves over at Daou Records, and the Mercer Dance Ensemble (M.D.E.) will be celebrating by presenting an evening of dances set to selected cuts and remixes.

The concert, Joe Sent M.D.E., will premier at Kelsey Theatre on the Mercer County Community College campus this May. Dance Program faculty Janell Byrne will choreograph and direct, with guest choreography by Elixir co-founder Jody P. Person and others." Elixer Productions

Bettie Page, leaving Radiance

Vanessa Daou, Bettie Page, 1996, acrylic & pencil on paper, 7 X 9 "

"After light enters the ocean, it interacts with the phytoplankton, dissolved organic matter, particles, and water molecules. Some of it is eventually scattered back up through the surface. This light is called the water-leaving radiance, and it can be detected from space." link

When I began writing my album 'Slow to Burn', based on the life of 11 female artists, I made a long list of the women artists who had in one way or another made a powerful impression on me. On my list was Bettie Page. Though not an Artist in the traditional sense of the word, with her body and through the projection of a complex inner essence and purpose, a combination of girlish innocence and churlish experience, she tapped into & expressed a mode of being which had until then been hidden. Some argue that she played into the gaze of a man's prurient desires and in so doing degraded her gender, but it could be argued just as convincingly that Bettie Page liberated even that gaze and made it OK for a man, or a woman, to desire a woman with her proclivities. I wrote 'Evening' with these thoughts in mind.

Bettie Page changed not only our perception of women, but our conception of them. Neither right nor wrong, like her infamous bikinis which she designed and sewed, they are her own, they are based on profound and deep penetration into the nature of women who preceded her and who would come after. Sometimes with an elegant pose, sometimes with a brutal one, sometimes with a tossed off smile, sometimes with one that is fully thought, Bettie Page is a an inspiration not only for tattoo artists, but for all artists who want to learn from example how to navigate a world that makes its rules which the heart, mind & muse cannot obey.

Bettie Page leaves us not only a legacy of her images, but also with an undying philosophy of sexuality that continues to leave its radiance around on the world. In this profound gesture there is beauty which is more than the picture perfect image that she presented, it was her ability to take an idea about humanity, an idea of her own design and making, about the nature of sexuality, photography & pornography, and in the end, to reshape history.

To be an artist is to make a mark: a brush stroke that says something about the hybridity of experience like Iona Rozeal Brown, poetry that renegotiates our relationship to the past like Czeslaw Milosz, prose that reshapes the way we Love like Erica Jong, even a fragment can fill our imaginations the way Sappho does. Finished or incomplete, visible or ineffable, virtual or tangible, we leave our impressions on the world.

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Evening (from Vanessa Daou - 'Slow to Burn', MCA/Krasnow Entertainment, 1996)
inspired by the life of Bettie Page

Evening slips into my room
Echoes in the corridor
Street lamps turn a shade of blue
Lovers whisper in the dark

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

Evening knows my every move
Your fingers running through my hair
Crimson lips a crimson kiss
In the strange electric air...

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

Evening (I miss you most of all)
Evening (A silent raindrop falls)
Evening...evening...

You make me ache
By the way you bow your head
In the neon glow
Flashing open through the window
On the unmade bed
On the unmade bed...

Evening brings the hunter home
And the sailor from the sea
One by one each breath we take
Slips into eternity

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

© 1996

"Vanessa Sent Me"

"Ca fait presque dix ans maintenant que j'écoute Vanessa, j'ai même la fierté de voir mes mots à son sujet en bonne place sur sa page de news. Cet album est une petite merveille et je ne regrette vraiment pas de l'avoir attendu huit ans. Mieux même, il tombe à pic pour m'accompagner dans l'écriture d'Améthyste tellement il correspond à ce que je ressens en écrivant cette nouvelle histoire." ohmydahlia.com

Desire Lines

"In winter, desire lines appear spontaneously as tramped down paths in the snow. I love that these paths are never perfectly straight. Instead, like a river, they meander this way and that, as if to prove that desire itself isn't linear and (literally, in this case) straightforward." Wordspy


"A desire path, or desire line, is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. The term was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his book 'The Poetics of Space'." wikipedia



It's called 'social networking', but I like to think of it as 'social communicating', or 'social inter-connecting', a giant, growing, interlocking, orgiastic, infinite conversation.

To be a recording artist means being involved & entwined in this ever expanding exchange, in the lives of those who are drawn to our songs and voices, who play it on their stereos, listen in their headphones, who hear it, interpret it, ingest it, digest it. That is why I make music, sing songs, write poems; why I use words to get my 'message' across, as a means of communication.

A few years ago, I typed the word "desire" into google and saved this snippet from a long thread:

Google group (May 11, 2002)

K: The mind interprets relentlessly. Desire will never be quenched, desire being the very thing that keeps us alive.
M: Yes, and this is exactly the point. To be without desire is to die, and then there is no self.
K: And this desire is the movement of becoming, the grasping at "what should be" (the object of desire) which is entirely conceptual, arising from the present condition of "what is as it is."
M: Desire is always dissatisfied with the present, hence it will never find any satisfaction in any imaginary future.

This 'search for desire' runs through every thread of every online communication - it drives it, propels it, whether it's on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, or Blip. Wherever there's a conversation, there is something exchanged, something given and taken, and in the creases and the folds of this fabric, there is something shared, and in this sharing, there is meaning.

I thank everyone for their postings, comments, messages, kudos, pokes, 'hottie votes' ;) twitters, blips, and virtual gifts.

With Love,

Vanessa

Tom’s Essay by Suzanne Vega

"I was imagining it as a kind of French film soundtrack, something vaudevillian on piano, like a background to a Truffaut film. But I didn’t play piano and didn’t know anybody who did. So I kept it a cappella, and began to sing it this way in my live show. This detail, singing the song alone with no accompaniment, affected everything to come." Link

Pop Making Sense by David Byrne with Tony Peregrin

"Sultry New York siren Vanessa Daou has too many numbers that suit the atmosphere for a romantic night. Whether it is something with a smooth jazz vibe from Two to Tango; the works of Erica Jong set to a groove on her solo debut, Zipless; or the poetic temptation from her most recent outing Make You Love, this woman puts sexiness into everything she sings. Daou uses her cooing voice to buoy on the rhythm on numbers like Dear Anne Sexton and Cross That Bridge. A much-awaited new album is expected later this year per Daou's MySpace page." Link

Eastvillageradio Interview with Brion Vytlacil's Future Music

Anji Bee: Chillcast #127: Sensual Ladies

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Artist's Statement

There are sounds, words, objects, subjects , gestures, and expressions that have a certain and intangible resonance. I find this quality in manifold things: in anything slow motion, a flickering bulb, in a Cracker Jack wrapper, the color chartreuse, in smoke rising. I suppose I am attracted to the notion of time, how it passes, how ideas are changed, interpreted, corrupted, when and which things go from from trash to artifact.

I'm interested in the aspects of desire which give urgency to the act of creation. I sometimes search for words in Google in order to find patterns and explore the poetics of similar and shared experiences. The word 'desire', for instance, yields phrases that reflect this unified experience: the Desire of Ages, the garden of Desire, crippled with desire, uncertain objects of desire, A Streetcar Named Desire, the new objects of our desire, the exploration of desire. I often compose poems with words from other languages known or unknown to me, or languages on the fringes of experience like Esperanto. I agree with Michael Gottleib here, "The old tools don't work anymore, at least for the time being."

Detachment from the physical aspects of reality is a consequence of technology, yet, remote and intangible uploads jar and jostle with the real lives of strangers. This juxtaposition, of public and private space, personal and universal, distant and up-close, resides at the heart of every web page. Despite its public accessibility, the internet provides the viewer with, at its core, true intimacy and immediacy of experience.

Before I write a song, it is often one word or thought that drives me: that thought might then become a drawing or a painting or a poem before it becomes a song. The mixing of media on the web says something to me about the clash or meeting between fields or layers of thought, creating alliances between things or making them acrimonious. My desire is to express something that engenders a feeling which is new, unfamiliar, untrodden, transcendent, sublime, unruly, private, passionate, fragile, exquisite.