Rita's
On a Roll
Toronto's pre-eminent blues belter Rita
Chiarelli is gearing up for a very busy summer with major festival appearances, a western tour and the launch of a new CD
on NorthernBlues Music, Breakfast at Midnight.
Singer/songwriter Rita Chiarelli reveals more of herself on her new CD, Breakfast At Midnight, than she has on her previous recordings. But while her lyrics may be highly personal, the themes of her latest original, song collection - desire, romantic obsession, heartbreak and love lost - are universal.
On one of the CD's most passionate tracks, "I Can Change For You," Chiarelli pleads with someone she has fallen for hard and who has, in return, cold-shouldered her: "I'd go to church on Sunday, I'd get down on my knees I'd pray, I'd stop all my drinking if you want me this way."
She says she initially wanted to change the song's lyrics because they sounded "pathetically desperate" but reconsidered. "I asked myself, `Do I want to say this? Do I want to let people know that's how I felt?' that I could be down on my knees and say `I care about you so much.'
"And then I thought, you know what, this is a great song. This is the way I felt. Anyone that's loved that way before can relate to it, and I decided to leave it exactly how it came to me. It takes courage to say I'm capable of being an idiot for love."
From her 1992 recording Road Rockets, to Just Gettin' Started (1995), What A Night Live! (1998), and the new Breakfast At Midnight, Chiarelli says that over the years she has grown more honest as a songwriter. "As I continue to write, it just gets truer and truer to who I am and what I'm about, and how I'm feeling at that time.
"Road Rockets was a very true album for who I was at the time and how far I could go within myself at the time. As we get older and as we grow a little deeper and discover who we really are, we reveal more of ourselves, and I think Breakfast At Midnight is pretty revealing."
Chiarelli is a gifted storyteller and lyricist. Poetic imagery such as "I drank with every hero, I smoked every dream, I lived each postcard and heard every scream," (from Breakfast At Midnight's jazzy "Midnight In Berlin"), abounds in her songs. "When I was a kid, I used to write poetry. Teachers would tell me I ought to continue that," she says. "I wrote poetry to people I was very fond of, and it always seemed to be a way of moving them."
She wrote the lyrics for the achingly beautiful "If You Were Cryin' Over Me," on Breakfast At Midnight, before she wrote the melody. "Ninety-five per cent of that song came in one sitting. At first, I thought it was really just a poem - all real, all written about someone," Chiarelli says. "I left that for a long time. Then one day it just all came together; all of a sudden a melody with those lyrics came to me."
Musically, Chiarelli's says her songs are often a combination of blues and other genres, including rock, rockabilly, country, cajun and jazz. " I just naturally expand and combine boundaries. I think my music sometimes goes from being pure blues to a hybrid - of bluesy country, bluesy jazz and rockin' blues. It's something that really happens naturally. I don't work at doing it like this. It's sort of what songs come out."
Breakfast At Midnight, on the NorthernBlues Music label, was recorded mainly live off the floor with Colin Linden and Kevin Breit on guitars, Richard Bell on keyboard, Al Cross on drums and George Koller and Pat Kilbride on bass. "I loved that they (the musicians) came in and had 20 different instruments between them, and Colin would say, `I think I'll play the 1952 Dobro on this one,' and just the different choices of sounds," Chiarelli says. "It was a wonderful experience."
During the recording session, while she sang "Midnight In Berlin," which she wrote for Long John Baldry, Chiarelli was unhappy with the performance she was giving but she continued singing anyway. "When we were finished, I thought everyone played so brilliantly," she says, "and I thought it was one of my best vocal performances of that song."
Chiarelli, who has an amazing, three-octave vocal range (the average human voice has a range of about two octaves), first sang professionally at 15, with The Tempest, a Hamilton, Ontario, band that played high school dances and bars.
The Tempest's guitarist, Ralph Pugliese, persuaded her strict parents, her mother, Iris, and her late father, Salvatore, to let their young daughter join the band. "You'd think he was asking for my hand in marriage," Chiarelli says, laughing. "He came over to the house to say `I understand, I'm Italian as well, I have a sister, I know what you're feeling. We really want Rita to sing with us. You're welcome to come anytime to our rehearsals, to our gigs.' And I tell you, this man convinced my father - which was quite amazing - to let me sing. My parents did come to a lot of my gigs. In fact, they came to most of them until I was about 17."
Highlights of Chiarelli's early career include a tour of Canada and the United States with Battleaxe, a nine-piece band she formed after finishing high school, and a stint singing with Ronnie Hawkins' band. During the 1980s, she did studio work in Italy for five years. Her independent single, "Have You Seen My Shoes?", was included in the soundtrack of Bruce McDonald's 1989 film Roadkill, now a cult classic.
Chiarelli toured Europe - Germany, where she has a loyal following, as well as Switzerland, Austria and Belgium - at least once a year for most of the 1990s, sometimes twice. "They're really big blues and jazz fans over there, and they have a huge respect for the music and the artist," she says. "They come to the gigs and its totally quiet. At first, you have to get used to it. It's like doing a concert. And the reception was great; they loved the tunes."
She started writing her own songs - songs that are capable of powerfully tapping into her audiences' emotions and experiences - because she couldn't find enough original material that suited her. It was in Italy that her songwriting began to blossom. "I was alone for one thing, totally alone, with my guitar and myself," she recalls. "That's when I really started putting the songwriting craft together."
The maturing of Chiarelli's art can be heard on the vivid tracks of her latest CD, Breakfast At Midnight. This is the first CD she has done on which all the material is original; she financed it herself and recorded it independently, leasing it to NorthernBlues. "If I had done nothing else up until today, I would have had to have done this record," she says. "To me, it's a very special record."
Breakfast At Midnight will be in stores and available through the NorthernBlues Music Web site this month. www.northernblues.com
- Ruth Schweitzer