DeBlois Milledge Band: PRESS

It's only been a month since Miami-born musician Deblois Milledge moved to California where she's recording a CD with producer Danny Campbell, but already she's coming back for a few weeks. While here, she and Campbell, who is also the drummer for her band, will play several gigs as Beauty and the Beat. We interviewed Milledge by phone while she was on a break from recording at Proxy Studios, shortly before she headed to South Florida.

Your song “South of Okeechobee” is such a Florida tune. Can you tell me about that?
Sure, when my dad was about college age he and a bunch of buddies went in on a piece of land up in Central Florida and west of Lake Okeechobee called Fisheating Creek, They built a very rustic cabin and when I was 6 months old, my dad and my mom and their other kids went down to the banks. We had to get into the canoes to paddle to the cabin. It was a pretty hardcore camping trip with a 6-month old. So my father set up my crib in the johnboat and got me out of the way so they could load everything else before they towed me into the cabin. But my mother came back and saw me floating offshore without a chaperone and freaked out. That’s one of my family’s stories they tell about how I was set adrift in the johnboat. There’s something really special about where you’re from and the alligators and mosquitoes. … I was writing that song about being a Florida girl.

At what age did you start playing guitar?
Seven. I got a bug in my hat that I wanted a guitar and my parents got me one. I played the heck out of it for years and years and years. They made me take classical guitar lessons. I wanted to quit for ages because I wanted to play rock and roll but my parents made me take lessons until I could find the courage to fire my teacher, and that made me take them for 5 years. … I had to find the words to say, “If you’re not gonna teach me any Janis Joplin, I’m outta here.”

What’s your favorite thing to write songs about?
My favorite thing to write about is love … hello! … the most important subject on earth.

Tell us about the songs on your third CD, the one you’re recording.
There’s one called “Change,” a small tribute to the political campaign last year and also a call to the society around us that we could do things differently. The change is in our hands. Sometimes I write quasi – political songs like that, but my soapbox is pretty small. … There’s another song that has steel pan in the instrumentation, and it’s called “Fire in the City,” which is about the fires out here in Southern California … and five or six or eight love songs.

I understand you had a surf school in Costa Rica for five years.
Yeah, it wasn’t any big entrepreneurial thing. It was mostly a way to be able to surf and stay down there for a few years.

Is that when you worked a lot on your music?
Definitely. That was my little woodshed time.

How long have you been doing music full-time?
I moved home from Costa Rica in July 2005 … and in April 2006 I stopped doing whatever else I was doing to make ends meet and haven’t looked back since.

Beauty and the Beat will perform Saturday and Sunday with guitarist Buffalo Brown at Carnaval on the Mile in Coral Gables, Monday at Bougainvilleas Old Florida Tavern, and Wednesday, March 11 at Kitchen 305 in North Miami Beach. For details, visit Myspace.com/debloismusic.

In Currents: the Arts and Music insert of Star News in Wilmington NC:

From Costa to Carolina, Deblois plays to surf
It's a sweaty night in Nosara, Costa Rica, and Carolina surfers recount the days waves, using their hands to describe hard turns and billowing swells. In her own way the blond guitarist playing that night at the Harbor Reef is doing the same thing.
Surfing and music are intertwined for singer songwriter Deblois, who will playa series of shows in the area over the course of a week or so, starting Sat April 7th. Growing up in Miami, she discovered music early and knew it was for her.

With her mellow rythms and raspy alto, Deblois can capture a room. She's a magnificent story teller and posseses a warmth in her persona that's truly endearing.

Surfer-Girl Songwriter Deblois
Plays a Sunset Show at the News Lounge
She's packing up and taking her campfire groove to Tinseltown.

I prefer to let my music do most of the talking," announces Miami-based singer-songwriter Deblois Milledge as she appears at the door of this reporter's house armed with a guitar, a mandolin, several CDs, and a promotional DVD. She slips the latter into her laptop, and out flows a sampling of her earthy folk rock and lyrics, as heard on the song "Crazy." Then she starts to talk, and it's obvious her spoken words are as fluid as her creative musical process.

"It's the song that you write when you're looking back on that time you're literally sitting on your bathroom floor and it feels like your guts are kicked in. But I wrote it from a place 10 years ago to where it almost feels funny now," she says now about "Crazy." She stares up at the ceiling and chuckles at her own resilience, before uttering a few more lines about deciding that someone you once thought of as a meteor shower can later dim to a pile of rocks.

Deblois is a rock of sorts — a diamond that's coming out of the last of its rough stages. During the next two months she'll be polishing up the songs for her new album, and then heading to Los Angeles to follow that city's strong folk-rock vibe.

She's sad she can't take her favorite collaborating guitarist, Buffalo Brown, and bassist, Nathan Greenburg, with her, as they've been an integral part of her creative process. "I pick my artistic partners carefully," she says. "Buffalo — how easy can you get? He has that great musical sixth sense." And she says Greenburg is "very devoted to the projects he works on. He has a really understated vibe that's about supporting the art as a whole."

Still, she's confident the two Angelenos she's found are pretty intuitive themselves. Drummer and producer Danny Campbell has his own production studio in L.A., and guitarist Dave Curtis has an edgy sound that should jive with the West Coast surf crowd. They've already helped Deblois line up some gigs at the House of Blues, the Derby, and Hotel Café, venues that fit L.A.'s vibrant singer-songwriter scene.

"It's really down to earth. It's a roots music movement," she says. In fact, it's a bit like coming home.

"I was always really drawn to the campfire side of guitar. My parents are from the South, so there's also a lot of front porch time," says the Miamian, her husky voice unconsciously meandering into a Southern drawl.

Deblois has been performing for as long as she can remember, but her real break came after a five-year adventure in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2005. She ran the Sweetwater Surf School on the country's Pacific Coast by day, and hung in hammocks plucking out tunes on her guitar by night.

By the time she returned to the States, she had enough material for two albums: Leviathan (2006) and Velveteen (2007). Both run in the vein of Emmy Lou Harris, Lucinda Williams, James Taylor, Norah Jones, and her personal favorite, the Indigo Girls.

Coming up with dozens of likable songs was easy. Getting them recorded was the tricky part. "I had to paint houses and put up drywall and work construction before I could pay for my first album," she says. Then she leans back, relaxed and confident. "I haven't really looked back since. I've had some lean months but for the most part, I get by."

Deblois was pretty much raised on resilience. Take, for example, the time her dad nearly sent her straight into the mouths of murky Everglades monsters, as described on "South of Okeechobee" (Leviathan). Its lyrics recount how her dad loaded her into her crib and set her in a johnboat along a creek while he walked into the cabin they were renting to put some things away. Minutes later, Deblois's mother walked outside to find the boat had slipped out into the middle of the creek's alligator-infested waters. "My dad was in trouble for a long time; it about made my mama crazy," laughs Deblois.

She giggles when asked if that experience prompted her risk-taking behavior — moving to a foreign country, diving into some of the most treacherous waves on the Pacific, and willingly becoming a starving artist. It was actually in Costa Rica, she says, that she learned to become more disciplined as an artist, though she's not sure if it was the culture or just an inevitable growth process.

"Did college make you smarter or did you just get older?" she asks cheekily. "Costa Rica was just a huge chapter for me." It was the place where she learned to be a better businessperson and maybe even work through some of her past pain. When Deblois was 16, her mother suddenly died of cancer. Over the course of the next few years, a young Deblois would bumble about from one band to the next, trying to figure out her sound, herself, and how to manage a team of musicians.

"It's very difficult to be a band leader and a young woman and find your own voice as an artist," she says. Costa Rica allowed her to find her voice and run the show at the surf shop. Still, Miami is where she learned to let her emotions flow freely through her music, a feat she's convinced will be obvious by the time she hatches album number three in L.A. next spring.
"If you put your heart on your sleeve, everyone will say 'I know that heart,' not because it's yours but because it's theirs," reflects Deblois. "I'm a little more willing now to show the blood and guts, not just wipe the mascara."

Deblois's sweet style is irresistible.
Details:
Deblois: Sunday, December 14. The News Lounge, NE 55th Street and NE Fourth Court, Miami. Show starts at 5:30 p.m. Admission is free. 305-758-9932, www.55thstreetstation.com
Subject(s):
Deblois Milledge, The News Lounge, 55th Street Station
That's exactly what she does on new songs such as "Fire in the City," which is about getting stuck between the Southern California wildfires and the Pacific Ocean. "It's very percussive with extremely fast lyrics and a heavy delivery," she says. But once again, she shows her buoyancy on the new track "Make Me Like a Boat," which she describes as "swampy." "Calling for Change" is a tribute to the way President-elect Barack Obama rocked the boat of American politics and ideology. But she says it's really about all kinds of change — about learning to overcome anything that seemed nearly impossible.

"Sometimes you do want to just flip everything on its head — I guess I kind of meant to turn the ship around, but I was feeling melodramatic," Deblois says.

It's that ability to ride the waves and paddle back into them that will surely impress Angelenos as much as it has Miamians. That, and the way her voice catches its listeners with a few sweet notes, pulls them upward with deep-chested voluminous force, and then rides them down into a reflective whisper. "I just really believe in jumping in," she says. "That's how I like to roll."

"The huskiness of Sheryl Crow, the sultry poignancy of Beth Orton and the comforting rhythms of Jack Johnson."

Soul meets song when Deblois takes the stage. It's not bluegrass, it's not folk, and it's not jazz-it's just good music. Too often artists become pigeonholed in a genre, but this is one woman who refuses to conform to a style. Her down-to-earth songwriting tangos confortably around common melodies and with an angelic voice she creates music that is better experienced than simply heard. With a nine song album entitled "Leviathan" in her pocket and five years worth of Costa Rican memories following her tenure as a surf instructor there, Deblois brings her style and sounds to Savannah during her tour of the Southeast. This is music simply meant for enjoyment with no labels attached.

Review for Leviathan

“With a style that takes turns through jazz sounds and more of a folk vibe, this album has a thousand things to offer a thousand different people. “Sing Softly” showcases a more adult contemporary sound with a jazz flair, then you find yourself enjoying the Americana sounds of “Leviathan” and “Don’t Blink”. Great American stories and soulful vocals never stop. Whether they are soft and sweet or rockin it out it is always enjoyable. A complete set of great songs can be found on this one little disc. This is what music is all about.”

Deblois ~ Leviathan
Date: Saturday, April 08, 2006 @ 07:28:56 EST
Topic: Reviews


Artist: Deblois

CD: Leviathan

Home: Miami, Florida

Style: Jazz/Blues/Folk

Quote: "The variety here can sometimes be astounding."

Deblois is the singlular name vocalist Deblois Milledge goes under, and Leviathan is Deblois’s musically eclectic collection of personalized songs. The variety here can sometimes be astounding. This CD's title track is bluesy, but then “Sing Softly,” with its swinging rhythms and smoky vocals, is much closer to jazz. “Don’t Blink,” on the other hand, has a country feel to it. Many of these tracks are also spiced with Kellie Rucker’s soulful harmonica.

The best song on this nine-track release is one called “Peaches.” It features a lyric about someone that has left the South, but longs to return there soon. The taste of peaches, memories of mama’s cooking, and warm summer nights bring it all back home to this nostalgic one.

Milledge’s flexible voice is the aural element that stands out most here. She’s the kind of singer that immediately draws you into her world from the first note of each song, and never lets go. Leviathan is an excellent introduction to this talented woman’s work.

http://www.DebloisMusic.com

Last year I went to the Concert In Garden and the experience I had there was one that amazed me. My kids had a great time, the music was beautiful and I was enchanted by the setting. I know that this year's concert will be a memorable one!