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“If I had a dime for every time someone laughed at me, you know where I'd be?”
So goes “Bright Lights,” the new single from Stringer Belle. But if you've caught a show with the SF R&B-soul group, fronted by singer Emily McLean, you'd probably think she was broke. When the music plays, it's McLean's stage, her voice sliding up and down tough melodies lain over the solid musicianship of the band behind her. She's got the kind of grace that has the power to make audience members randomly shout “like THAT!”
People laugh at this woman?<!--break-->
But offstage, the diva is an awkward one, she assures me (it's part of her charm). McLean recently posted the Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl videos to her Facebook page with a multi-exclamation-marked assertion that “I'm black and awkward.” She wears well-made thrift store gear in subdued colors, and gets a little flustered when you compliment her or put her around small children. It's adorable.
You can see this hesitation for a moment at a recent show at La Peña Cultural Center when Stringer Belle's sound gets all fouled up – McLean looks out at the crowd and asks hesitantly if anyone knows any jokes. But once the band is tuned up her body language drops the hesitation and her voice takes control. Lyrics for the band's songs, all written by McLean, are about finding self, often through difficult times, learning from it. She loves early '90s R&B and counts SWV, TLC, and Brandy among her sound's influences. Which is not to say she's trying to copy the girl band esthetic. “Lyrically, not so much,” she says. “There'd be a lot more baby-baby-babies.”
But that swagger is there. “In that moment, the act of singing just feels really good.”
Stringer Belle is not a new project for McLean and brother Matt – at 16, she trekked from her home on the East Coast to visit him at Stanford, where he was learning to play instruments and majoring in mechanical engineering.
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Seriously, Stringer Belle
The two recorded a song on the trip, and after that “tracked back and forth” across the country to make music together. Emily finally moved to the Bay in 2009 to really get things started with Stringer Belle – for which Matt plays guitar – and Today Okay, Matt's group in which she mans the bass. She says they fight a lot, but clearly they've discovered that theirs is a sound worth sharing.
McLean is determined to make a name for herself and her band as San Francisco artists, which presents its own set of challenges. “The scene is really supportive, but it caters to folk and indie rock groups,” she tells me. “There's not much soul in San Francisco. Coming from New York, the lack of diversity here – it was surprising.”
But be the change, y'know. Since coming to the city, McLean has fallen in with a group of young Tenderloin artists, including photographer Sasha Kelley and hip-hop group Tokyo 24. “I wouldn't say there's a thread, genre-wise or aesthetically,” she says. “We're just friends.” But they do take turns collaborating and supporting each other. Recently, Kelley styled Mclean's fresh Garage Band Series mixtape – a free download, snag it – McLean says Kelley is a great connector of minority artists in the area. “I think it's important for San Francisco as a city to see artists of color doing things.”
And for the moment, Stringer Belle is content with playing on musically varied lineups. In fact: “I think a bill with a lot of different sounds is more interesting,” says McLean. Which is why tomorrow, Thursday April 21, you'll find the group strumming alongside Valerie Orth, a folk singer, and Audiafauna, an electro-acoustic outfit that counts among its influences “waves, clouds, corduroy, salamanders,” on its Facebook page.
And maybe SF's relative lack of traditional soul groups gives McLean a chance to develop something unique in the genre, or at least absorb the artistry of a city that's not given overmuch to baby-baby-babies. The free download links to Stringer Belle's new album will be sold at the show in a booklet featuring works by five SF visual artists, each inspired by Stringer Belle's songs. It's all about pulling together a multidisciplinary community, or as McLean puts it -- free now from any hint of awkward or shy -- “wanting to showcase the work of the city.”
Most of the group's downloads are free at this point -- at this point, McLean says, the group's on a mission to get heard, which given the powerful shows it puts on, seems like an eventuality. The hook of that song I quoted up there: "Bright lights don't seem to faze me and worries will never break me."
Stringer Belle
Feat. Valerie Orth and Audiofauna
Thurs/21 8:30 p.m., $10
Cafe Du Nord
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016