Video by: Jacob Mendel

This is Greil Marcus’ Brain on “Shuffle”

Excerpt from article:

MJ: What about something totally outside your genre?

GM: I like to think there’s no outside; that I can hear whatever has a claim to make, but if you’d asked me if I were interested in poetry set to music, I’d probably say no. When I heard Ellyn Maybe’s “City Streets” on KALX in Berkeley I had no idea what it was, just that I was transfixed. I called up the DJ, went to Amoeba Records, couldn’t find it, wrote away—and after listening to Maybe’s album Rodeo for the Sheepish (Hen House) half a dozen times, I had no idea who the people behind it were—a poet, and a musician/singer who sounds like many of himself, or for that matter her-himself. But there’s a pathos cut with self-lacerating humor that makes this the most surprising and painful music I’ve come across.

Last.FM Bio: Of Ellyn Maybe’s new poetry/music CD, Rodeo for the Sheepish, the legendary rock critic Greil Marcus wrote, “I heard half of the long, quietly mesmerizing “City Streets” on the radio—what was this? A woman with a poem, with music and a sung chorus not behind her but circling her, and the poem neither exactly recited nor sung, but spoken with such a lilt, in a voice so full of miserabilist pride—at forty, a woman is still getting high-school insults tossed at her (“Hey Mars girl,” a man shouts on the street, “get off the Earth”)—that it’s music in and of itself. There is no bottom to Maybe’s inventiveness, to her adoption of Nirvana’s Oh well whatever never mind as an artistic tool, to a confidence that allows her to toss off a bedrock statement on the American character (“There are people / who know the cuckoo is the state bird / of most states of mind”) in a throwaway voice so that its humor hits you not as a joke but as an echo. There is nothing like this album except for the real life it maps.”

Author of eight books of poetry but even better known for her engagaging personality and performances, Ellyn was convinced by fans from the music world to adapt her spoken-word prowress to a musical format. Their delight at the results can be seen from a few typical reactions:

• Jackson Browne – “I have started to write something about you…several times, and each time I am struck by my inability to describe what you do in terms beautiful enough, original enough to do you justice. … Who has ever been able to say in other words what a song says? Maybe it’s why I like your poems so much; they say what can only be said in exactly the way you say it. The best way of turning someone on to you is to play you for them.”
• Henry Rollins – “Ellyn Maybe is an irresistible force. To…listen to her poetry is to be gently and completely crushed while simultaneously inspired and charmed. The honesty with which she so exquisitely reveals her vulnerabilities, desires and pain is beautiful and rare. … Reading Ellyn’s poems from the page is one thing but hearing…them just the way she meant them to be heard is something else altogether. … The musical accompaniment on the album is not mere background filler but a true collaborative effort between Ellyn and the musicians that really works.

Growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Ellyn has spent her adult years in New York City, Prague (Czech Republic) and Los Angeles. She is often identified as “a Venice poet”, part of the historic arts movement that has seen Venice, California from being one birthplace of the Beat Movement to its present status as a 24/7, beachfront boardwalk circus of arts, commerce and tourism. She is affiliated with Venice’s famed Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, performing there monthly and inviting any attending poets to perform with her great backup musicians.

Ellyn has also appeared at such prominent venues as South by Southwest, Lollapalooza, the Poetry Project, Bumbershoot and the Los Angeles Times Book Fair, the Taos Poetry Circus, and the Albuquerque and Seattle Poetry Festivals. She has performed in Europe at the Bristol Poetry Festival, on the BBC, and in poetry slams and readings in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Prague. She opened the MTV Spoken Wurd Tour in Los Angeles and has read at USC, UCLA, NYC’s The New School and many other colleges.

Writer’s Digest named Ellyn one of “Ten Poets to Watch in the New Millennium”. She’s been anthologized in Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and American Poetry: The Next Generation, Another City: Writing From Los Angeles Poetry Slam and Poetry Nation, among others. She was on the 1998 and 1999 Venice Beach Slam teams…and earned her Screen Actors Guild card from a featured cameo in Michael Radford’s film “Dancing at the Blue Iguana”.

Rodeo for the Sheepish features such memorably musical talents as Geggy Tah’s Tommy C. Jordan, The Untouchables’ Danny Moynahan, and producer/composer Harlan Steinberger of Hen House Studios. Rabbits Running’s Robbie Fitzsimmons has recently joined the ensemble.

http://ellynmaybe.com/
Rodeo for the Sheepish home page
Hen House Studios home page

Video by: Nisey Jay and Riccardo Spinotti

“Fans of spoken word CDs and lovers of slam poetry with a nerd-girl edge should seek this CD out as soon as they finish reading this review, as should anyone curious to see the highs to which this blended art form can aspire. I cannot recommend Rodeo for the Sheepish enough.” – JoSelle Vanderhooft for Pedestal Magazine

///This video was a contribution to Ellyns online zine http://www.rodeowrite.com/ please visit and contribute your own work to the Rodeo!

Harlan Steinberger of Hen House Records wasn’t pursuing a reputation as one of the best poetry producers of the Los Angeles poetry and music scene, but today not only is he one of the best, he is also an innovator of a whole new budding genre in music.

Poetry’lectronica has been born – and the great news is, it’s pop music!

As the producer of Ellyn Maybe’s album of poetry and pop electronica, “RODEO FOR THE SHEEPISH”, Harlan Steinberger presents a clever and magical interpretation of a poet’s body of work. Steinberger has accomplished what not many others before him has ever done. He has produced a radio friendly showcase of poetry and pop- electronica in an album that, with most of it’s tracks might easily be played on pop radio.

The record is just about everything a pop record is. It’s got hooks, choruses and clever lyrics, it has a beat you really want to dance to. It has perfectly “out of the box” sound hooks that because of it’s sound – is catchy, just like a few pop hits in the past have had, such as the syncopated vocal musings that Michael Jackson innovated. It’s rhythmic and hip, easy to listen to, and once again, the best part is – it’s poetry! – and it’s pop!

Never before has anyone been able to conceptualize the spoken word so clearly and unaffectedly as Harlan. His compositions beneath the spoken word are produced with natural layers of sound symbiosis, occurring as easily as if it were simply a continuation of the initial creative process begun by the poet.

During Hen House Studios’ beginnings Harlan was involved in the recording of 150 bands in 5 years, due to Harlan’s desire to meet, work with, collaborate and shoot video with as many bands as he could. That way he could meet the stand out talent, and was able, as a producer and engineer, to choose which artists he might like to work with in the future.

The numerous different bands of Los Angeles, no doubt left sounds of many genres and music effects technologies with Harlan’s inner Pavlovian, which would later subconsciously or consciously, contribute to his now finely tuned 2nd nature of instincts that a good producer of music should have,

But beyond that, the early experience of producing and especially the engineering of one hundred and fifty LA bands in five years, became coupled through Harlan with a serendipitous entry into producing poetry and eventually laying it down with pop electronica,

Together, these two factors blended to create an even more unique flavor of music producing. And while it is said that Harlan Steinburger is a talented and very good music producer, beyond that, it can be safely said that Harlan Steinberger is one of the great producers of Poetry and Music, and perhaps the only producer of poetry’lectronica, a whole new brand of pop.

Still, just like his work, he comes off as natural and unaffected as his sound, yet still genuinely enthusiastic about a genre of music that has had minor hits but at most were presented as novelty pieces, such as Gil Scott Herron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.

Harlan is not in a premeditated pursuance of poetry and pop music, but instead he has come to be who is becoming, much like a sidewalk vendor who might have one day rolled up a piece of salty beef, put it in a long roll of bread and invented, The Hot Dog.

“I haven’t really given it that much thought, I’m just doing it. The only thing I can say is that when I close my eyes and listen to spoken word, I imagine it’s a lot like people who score movies for a living, they’re basically looking at a visual, and maybe listening to the dialogue, I don’t know…. and they hear something in their head.

Well ,with Ellyn (Maybe), she comes in and reads first to record the poetry, I tell her do a nice performance but this is not what’s going to end up on the record and then I sit there and listen to the poem over and over again and I get a sort of…. vision of a sound in my third eye.

I try to recreate those sounds by the sounds that are being inspired by the cadence, the timbre, the natural words…”

Today Hen House Records is a record label that has recorded, produced and distributed a variety of spoken word and music records. In the many serendipitous circumstances that have shaped Producer Harlan Steinbergers role in the LA Poetry & Music scene, many of the albums came by accident, but all of them have come nothing short of great.

Photo Credit: Joanne Qualey Baines