It sounds like a Downstate-driven cliché but it's undeniably true. The Hudson Valley is, let's just come right out and say it, the mealy-mouthed mecca for an awful lot of cloying, sappy, and overly earnest graduates from the James Taylor School of Musical Macramé. Thus, the CD review inbox here sometimes looks more like an oven for the aural brown bread served up by these well-meaning but uninspiring types, and as a music editor you learn to approach the releases whose accompanying bios say "acoustic-based singer-songwriter" with trepidation. Every once in a while, though, you do actually come across an artist working in said medium who's intriguing. Unique. Even great. And Johanna Warren and Sasha Pearl, both still in their 20s, are two such finds.
In terms of style, as singer-songwriters the two couldn't be more different. Warren is soaring, metaphorical, melodic; Pearl is rustic, plainspoken, captivatingly endearing. But, besides their shared underground/outsider stance, the two women are united by their common links to Hudson's lively music scene; until very recently, both lived in the area. "The general lifestyle [of Hudson] is really conducive to having a creative life," says Warren, who's lately been staying between tours with her father in Westchester County. "There's a really good community of artists and a social support network in town, and the surrounding natural beauty is very inspiring. Also, the rent is pretty affordable, so I didn't have to work that much and had more free time to concentrate on my music—not like when I lived in Brooklyn." Pearl's reasons for gravitating toward the Columbia County capital are perhaps more directly related to her art. "I was psyched when I started playing in Hudson, because I discovered there were a lot of people in town that liked my music," she says. "Before that, it was just me playing to whoever else happened to be in the bar. And my mom." (Pearl's mother is a musician herself, an accordionist in Balkan folk ensemble Caprice Rouge.)
The daughter of an academic, Warren, 24, was born in Decatur, Georgia, and also lived in Massachusetts before coming to the area to double major in Spanish and visual arts at Bard College from 2007 to 2011. "Moving around definitely shaped the way I think about myself and my relationship to the rest of the world," the waifish singer and guitarist maintains. "I'm glad I got to see different places, and I learned early on about self-reinvention. When you move to a new place and don't know anybody, you can be who you want to be, lie about who you were. You learn you don't have to stay any particular way, your choices are endless." Indeed, even as a young performer Warren has already made a few identity changes, going from being the vocalist and bassist in high school cover bands to leading Sticklips ("a name I came up with when I was 16 for my MySpace page"), a Bard-born collective that released one CD, 2012's Zemi (Independent). She took piano and flute lessons before picking up the guitar in her early teens, and names the Beatles as her earliest inspiration. "That's how I learned about vocal harmony, chord structure, [compositional] changes," she explains. "I internalized the Beatles' music and I could reference it to understand any other music. But I didn't really start writing complete songs until the summer after high school graduation. Before that, I would tell people I wrote songs but it was really more like song fragments." Other, arguably more apparent, influences—Elliot Smith, Joni Mitchell, Joanna Newsome, Modest Mouse—came later.
[audio-1]Around the time of the recording of Zemi, the full-band incarnation of Sticklips managed only a few local and campus gigs before it became to clear the singer—and her audiences—that she really didn't need a band. (For a time she continued to use the moniker for her solo guise, but has since been retired it.) And, admittedly, when witnessing one of Warren's powerful and starkly transcendent performances it's hard to fathom why she ever felt the need to buttress herself with other players. All part of a rising artist's quest, obviously. But that isn't to say that the handful of musicians on Zemi don't do the songs justice—the disc's eight tracks are delivered with a sublime sympatico that's gripping nevertheless, and perhaps it's the gorgeously lulling "Lyrebird," with its sparse drums and soft electronic drones, that gives the closest snapshot of Warren's solo craft. "Johanna is one of a rare breed of gifted people where you could tell how great of a singer she is just by hearing the sound of her speaking voice," says producer Kenny Siegal, who recently recorded Warren's version of Harry Nilsson's "Without Her" for The Town: A Tribute to Nilsson, Volume 1 (Royal Potato Family Records), which is set for release in November. "Her music is awesome, very psychedelic and melodic. I think she's an amazing artist, over all."
The songstress spent a month in Brooklyn earlier this year, where she met musicians who play in Iron & Wine, the vehicle of acclaimed singer-songwriter Sam Beam. After catching Beam's ear, Warren, who also received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to translate the complete works of Salvadoran author Claudia Herndandez Gonzalez, was asked by the band leader to perform as a back-up vocalist on tour dates. "[The tour] was amazing," recounts Warren, who appeared with Iron & Wine on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" and is reconnecting with the band for more touring in the coming months. "Just to be out drinking some place after one of the shows and be standing next to this guy whose music I listened to when I was 14 years old was incredible."
Pearl, 27, is an unmined Hudson Valley jewel. A Tivoli townie throughout her childhood years, she likewise claims the Beatles as musical founding fathers. "I wanted to be Ringo and I wanted to marry George Harrison," she jokes, also expressing a passion for the early country sounds that are most audible in her songs. "I love how when you listen to Hank Williams every song has the same three chords but it doesn't matter, because his lyrics are just these incredibly beautiful poems." Pearl moved to New York following her junior year in high school, and, on a plane that recalls Woody Guthrie, has since worked a dizzying variety of jobs—everything from bar tender to film projectionist, pizza maker, and, currently, farm worker at Sol Flower Farm in Millerton. A musical journeywoman as well, she also tried her hand at a variety of instruments before settling on ukulele as her main axe, playing percussion in her elementary school band, studying drums with the patriarch of a neighbor family, and "[trying] guitar lessons, but the teacher gave up because I didn't practice." At 20 she acquired a chord organ and formed a duo with her guitarist roommate called Enchanted Castle, and it was that outfit that performed "Ernie and Sylvia," the first song she composed. "It's about my grandparents," says Pearl. "I wrote it when my grandmother died and my grandfather had moved into a retirement home. He said he kissed her good-bye when she died and it was like kissing a piece of ice."
[audio-2]Sad? Sure. But also sweet as hell. And sadness, anyway, makes sweetly reliable fuel for many a songwriter. Evidence of such painfully wrought creative riches abounds on Friendship Street (Independent), Pearl's debut. One of the disc's many brilliant tracks that jumps out is "Bruiser." In it, against a carny-esque waltz the singer's bittersweet drawl spins a darkly humorous yarn about the pitfalls of barroom romance: "My vision was double / But what do I see / A handsome Adonis was looking at me / He sat down beside me and opened his mouth / I was bored to tears by what came out / In his arms was the dullest place I've ever been / I wished for an oven to put my head in." "It would be cool to figure out how to write a happy song, but I mostly only want to write songs when I'm sad," Pearl explains. "I'm in a good relationship now and I have a happy heart, so I haven't written many songs lately."
For most of the past two years Pearl's been less active as a solo artist and more busy singing and playing tenor banjo and tenor guitar with folk-roots unit Pocatello, a group that this year put out a self-titled seven-inch EP produced by Tommy Stinson and released on the Replacements / Guns 'N Roses bassist's Done to Death label. Pocatello also includes another Hudson-area singer-songwriter of note, guitarist Liv Carrow, who met Pearl after months of buildup by mutual friends. "We both had all these people telling us we needed to meet and play together, saying, 'You guys are so much alike!'" says Carrow. "So of course we were both, like, 'I don't wanna meet this person.' [Laughs.] But when we finally met we ended up totally hitting it off and playing music in my kitchen all night. One of the things that's great about playing with Sasha is that she knows so many weird, old songs. I'm more into English folk music, but she can play all these American ragtimey, country, and sailing songs that I'd never heard. What she says about mainly writing songs when she's sad is true. I think songwriting for her is more about expressing emotion than it is about the songcraft itself."
What does Warren want people to get from her songs? "Mostly, I just hope they listen," she says. "In this day and age, people's attention spans are really dwindling and I'm worried that not enough people really listen to music now. Just sit down, close their eyes, and listen."
"I'm comfortable just being a storyteller," says Pearl. "Being a songwriter for me isn't a conscious choice, I never even planned to make an album. But I hope when people hear my songs they find they can cry in their beer to them. And then have the beer come out their nose from laughing along."
Johanna Warren will perform with Andrea Tomasi at the Spotty Dog Books & Ale in Hudson on August 10. Friendship Street by Sasha Pearl is out now.