Dia

Dia at the Venice Walk Streets

DIA

At the Venice Walk Streets

Nowita Place, Marco Place, Amoroso Place and Crescent Place in Venice Beach

“Each one of these things – whether you’re talking about a ring, a song, a project – is like a little jewel. They’re all these little jewels,” begins Daniella Birrittella. “I love the idea of looking back at my life and seeing a trail of little jewels.”

It’s impossible not to smile along with the grinning Daniella, aka Dia, as she speaks about the things she is most passionate about: her music and all of the other art projects that she has going on in her life. Her “little jewels” metaphor is an apt one, since she is not only a singer-songwriter and composer, she also designs a line of fine jewelry.

We meet up on a sunny afternoon near her home in Venice Beach to discuss all of these little jewels (including her debut EP, Tiny Ocean, released by Manimal Records in May), as well as her unique upbringing and training in classical singing. While she does visit the more trendy spots in Venice from time to time, Dia prefers the more low-key treasures the entire city has to offer.

Venice Walk Streets

“There’s this spaciousness to L.A. that allows for expression and privacy. I hike a lot, and clearly, I have an obsession with the ocean,” she offers, in reference to her EP title. “Growing up in Boston, I definitely feel the weight of darkness. I internalize it; it doesn’t roll off of me. So I love the light here, it’s good for the spirit. There is a part of me that’s perpetually heartbroken and drawn to the darkness, the weightiness of being in older cities like Paris or Rome. They have a perfume, a heaviness, that feels so alluring. But as far as a sustainable way of living and being, L.A. is good for me.”

One definitely feels the light and lightness of Los Angeles when visiting one of the pockets Dia enjoys most in her neighborhood, the Venice Walk Streets. Built in the early 1900s, Abbot Kinney initially designed the walk streets as part of his vision for making Venice, Calif. mirror the city of Venice, Italy.

As you walk down Nowita Place, Marco Place or Amoroso Place between Lincoln Boulevard and Shell Avenue or Crescent Place between Palms Boulevard and Superba Avenue, you realize why they appeal to Dia. Cars aren’t allowed on any of these narrow pathways, and they’re lined with gorgeous homes adorned with ornate gates, small community library boxes, handmade art pieces, colorful flower and vegetable beds and trees decorated with chandeliers.

Each yard has its own special story, as does Dia. As she mentioned, she is from Boston, but she isn’t your typical Bostonian.

“My parents moved there to run an ashram, so my particular situation was this little bubble inside of Boston,” she says, before going into the music she was surrounded by as a child. “In the ashram, there would be chanting at particular times of the day, and that was lots of sitar, harmonium, tabla, mridangam. That was the core thing that I heard. My parents weren’t particularly music aficionados; most of what we listened to otherwise was ‘80s pop on the radio. Then, I always loved oldies from the ’50s and ‘60s, and I still do. So when I was really young, those were the biggest things: bad ‘80s pop, really good oldies and chanting.”

Enveloped by that mixture of sounds, she also took ballet, tap and jazz dance classes since age 3 and would always put on shows for family and friends. One thing seemed certain: Young Dia was destined to be a performer.

“I was so over the top. I thought I was Madonna for sure,” she admits. “I remember walking home with my friend, singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ for her. She made fun of me: ‘You sing it so seriously.’ ‘That’s because it’s how I feel it,’ I replied.”

As Dia moved into fifth grade, her inner diva became restrained when she began being intensely bullied at school.

“I so naturally wanted to express, share and create, but I got terrified and self conscious about doing that because of the experiences that I had,” she recalls. “I would go home and sing my heart out. I was taking voice lessons privately, but I never wanted to perform for anyone. I was terrified of putting myself out there. When I was in choir, I wanted to sing so badly, but I was hiding within that.”

The competition choir introduced Dia to what would become one of her great loves: classical music. Since there wasn’t much classical music being played in the Hindu ashram growing up, getting to sing “Messiah” and Mozart’s “Requiem” opened her mind to all the things she could really do with her voice.

After high school, Dia attended New York University as a journalism major. She decided to take a private voice lesson as an elective during her first semester, and this changed the course of her life.

“My teacher, John Kuhn, was an opera singer in Germany, and so were his parents. Our first lesson, he warmed me up and down the piano and said, ‘You could be an opera singer.’ That was a life-changing moment for me, a validation of something I already knew,” she tells. “I started going down this path at NYU of training to be an opera singer. A lot of my teachers, mentors and coaches were like, ‘You have it,’ which was a dream to hear, but I wasn’t grounded enough in myself. I didn’t have the security to fully do it.”

Dia continued to study opera as she obtained a double MFA (in classical voice and theater) at California Institute of the Arts and took part in several young artists programs. She knew she wanted to do something in music, but wasn’t quite sure exactly what. Then one Christmas around four years ago when she moved to Venice, her brother – who is a professional musician as well – asked her what she wanted, and she replied, “A ukulele.”

“I can be Type A or neurotic about this needing to happen or this needing to happen, but with the ukulele, I had no agenda. It was so natural,” she remembers. “I started by looking up charts to play Beatles or Turtles songs and was satisfied and stunned. I would play piano for learning the classical music – this Verdi or this Strauss thing. It was never to just chill and play. This whole little world I needed to create a song was right here, and that made me so happy.

She started playing in a ukulele duo, coming up with melodies that eventually morphed into song fragments. Once she had enough material to think about recording, she realized she needed some help.

“The person who ended up being the most instrumental for me is Tim Carr, who produced a lot of songs on the EP. When we got together to listen to what I had, he immediately sat at my piano, played along and harmonized with me or was on the guitar. I thought, ’He totally gets what this is,’” she exclaims. “We recorded an album’s worth of my songs but only released six on the EP. That year of working together, I learned so much about collaboration, arrangement and tones. I started to listen to music in a different way.”

When you listen to the EP’s title track, “Tiny Ocean,” you hear the many layers of Dia’s musical history. Classic folk and rock mixed with classical, and even some Hindu influences.

“We brought in a shruti box, which has a similar tone to a harmonium but doesn’t have a keyboard, for ‘Tiny Ocean.’ It has these little valves, and each valve is a different note, so you can create chords with it,” she explains. “The intro of the song almost sounds like a really distant ship or foghorn on the water in the morning. That was the shruti box.”

Dia continues to hone her songwriting skills, and recently rekindled her love of classical singing and music by collaborating with other composers to score 12 of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.

“I was really specific about which composers I asked to participate, those I knew his work would resonate with. He writes about love, transcendence, spirituality, nature, sexuality, death, and expresses them in a way that captures their gravity but with a perspective or awareness that doesn’t feel heavy. He’s writing about Orpheus and Eurydice, but it’s everything. His writing’s so complete,” she gushes. “I read Letters to a Young Poet in my early 20s, and the idea that you don’t choose to be an artist was so meaningful to me. I have a jewelry line too, and a friend once asked, ‘Don’t want to just focus on the jewelry?’ An old boyfriend introduced me to someone as ‘a jewelry designer.’ I didn’t say anything at the time, but inside, I was like, ‘Fuck you, that’s not what I am.’ It just illustrates the idea in Rilke’s book of you don’t get to choose. If you don’t have that feeling, you really can’t relate to it in that way, and that’s fine.”

As far as her jewelry line, which she has been creating pieces for since graduating from NYU, Dia is in the process of completely rebranding her site to relaunch soon.

“Jewelry is a different outlet for me, but I try and infuse what I feel through music and performing into the jewelry. I only do fine jewelry because it’s fascinating to me. This bangle [points to the bracelet on her wrist] I made years ago with my grandmother’s gold. I don’t take this off ever,” she says. “To make fine things that become a part of people’s bodies and stories that they pass down – that’s an honor.”

While jewelry is definitely a creative outlet that Dia keeps exploring, music is really at the forefront for her right now. After writing her first chamber piece for Sonnet to Orpheus, she started a chamber quintet. She is also collaborating with other artists on two contemporary performance projects.

“One is a male actor and singer, and it’s based on the Portuguese word saudade and fado music,” she shares. “The other artist I’m collaborating with is a dancer. We’re working on this project with music and dance about moms not really being able to be moms.”

In addition to these collaborative performance pieces, Dia is working on a covers EP to come out early next year and several original songs that she hopes to record in the spring.

“The covers are all early ‘60s and some ‘50s songs. It’s sexy and dark; they’re remnants of what you remember of an old song. Of course I know these songs really well, but when we were recording some of them, I didn’t want to reference their tempo or anything, just how the memory of each song felt to me,” she explains. “With the newer stuff I’m working on, I feel like I have a better understanding of how to write songs. They have a 1940s cowgirl feel but with chamber elements – still Dia. We’ll see how things come together. I’m excited about new things.”

Tiny Ocean is currently available. Dia performs Nov. 19 at Late Sunday Afternoon in Venice. For more information, visit diathemusic.com.

Josh Haden of Spain

Spain frontman Josh Haden at the Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown

JOSH HADEN of SPAIN 

At Gaylord Apartments
3355 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles (Koreatown)

When interviewing an artist about his latest album, it’s such a treat to get to visit the studio where the music was actually recorded. Such an experience is even greater when the location is as rich in history as the Gaylord Apartments.

“I think everyone who lives in Los Angeles knows about the Gaylord, even if they don’t know its specific history,” says Josh Haden, the founder, bassist and songwriter of pioneering slowcore band Spain. “It’s pretty old, and anyone who drives through here to Downtown has to pass this building – it’s pretty noticeable.” 

Spain’s sixth release, Carolina, was recorded in musician Kenny Lyon’s (the Lemonheads, Divinyls, NoFX) studio that is located in the building (Drummer Danny Frankel (John Cale, k.d. lang, Lou Reed) laid down his tracks at his home in Joshua Tree.). Kenny played acoustic and electric guitars, piano, keyboards, banjo and lap and pedal steel on Carolina, and he also served as the album’s producer, engineer and mixer. 

Kenny graciously opens his doors at the Gaylord to Josh and I the day after Spain’s first show of a three-week residency at the Love Song Bar. The trio premiered songs from the new album, which is set for release June 3, and they also play tonight, May 10, and May 17.

After Josh and Kenny show me the studio space, we sit down to discuss some of Josh’s musical history, Carolina being a bit of a departure from past Spain albums, the rekindling of his passion for storytelling and how he began to deal with the death of his father, groundbreaking jazz bassist Charlie Haden, while writing the new songs.

“My mom says that after my triplet sisters were born when I was 3 and a half, the house descended into chaos, and I would just go into my room. That’s when I taught myself to read as an escape. I’ve always been a reader, and I went to school for writing as an undergrad. So I’m kind of like a failed writer/novelist. It’s too difficult an art that I can’t even master, especially short stories. For this record, I decided I was going to write short stories but make them songs,” Josh explains. “It’s hard to write a song that’s a story. It takes a lot of concentration and time, and I was being a little lazy on my earlier records, writing not so story-like songs. With the new record, almost every song can be a story with a beginning, middle and end.” 

From “Battle of Saratoga,” which tells the tale of a heroin-addicted musician trapped in his New York hotel room by a snowstorm in the 1960s, and recounting the Farmington Mine Disaster of 1968 in “One Last Look” to the world of a 1875 homesteader in “Tennessee” and images from Josh's own childhood in Malibu in “Station 2,” Carolina is full of vivid portraits of a wide range of characters.

“My dad is from the Midwest, so I’m exploring that general territory. A lot of it was my dad passing away [in July 2014], dealing with those emotions. In the first song, ‘Tennessee,’ I’m leaving Tennessee to go to the Missouri line. Missouri is where my dad grew up, so that is more of it than picking the South as a symbol," Josh responds when I ask if he specifically concentrated on the region while writing Carolina. "At the same time, there is a lot of symbolism with the South, and I’m working with that as well. The worst of American history happened in the South, and that is a very powerful topic for songwriting; many songwriters have used that for themes. I’m just starting to, and I think the next record is going to go even deeper than that.”

With all this talk of stories from the past, both real and fictional, it’s hard not to take in the immense history of the building that we’re sitting in. The Gaylord – named for land developer, publisher and eponym of Wilshire Boulevard, Henry Gaylord Wilshire – was built in 1924 as one of Los Angeles’ first co-ops, but when the lavish apartments didn’t all sell, the co-op dissolved. From 1930 on, the units became long and short-term rentals for the likes of John Barrymore, Richard Nixon, Yo Gabba Gabba’s DJ Lance and Kevin Dillon of “Entourage.”

The bottom floor used to house a grand ballroom, which became a nightclub called the Gay Room in 1948. This space eventually became the nautically themed HMS Bounty bar in 1962.

In days past, the original Brown Derby restaurant sat just to the west, while the Ambassador Hotel – where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 and currently the site of a group of schools named in his honor – and its famed Coconut Grove nightclub was located across the street from the Gaylord. Although Koreatown is rapidly gentrifying, and change is happening all around the HMS Bounty and Gaylord, there is still an air of old-school elegance to the building’s lobby, patio and pool area. Josh informs me that jazz musicians would stay at the Gaylord when touring, and Kenny points to a pile of rubble across the street that used to be a jazz club. 

Charlie Haden first saw saxophonist Ornette Coleman – who eventually became his longtime associate – play at a club that was formerly around the corner from the Gaylord, so the area definitely has significance to Josh. He has vivid memories of being 12 and hopping on a bus from Malibu with a friend to attend the Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention at the Ambassador Hotel.

“My friend and I used to bother Bruce [Schwartz], the guy who puts on the shows, by following him around, trying to distract him from his duties at the convention. He would try to introduce special guests on stage, and my friend and I would catcall him from the audience. He would get so annoyed and frustrated with us. He would run away as soon as he saw us, but in a joking way. He was always so nice,” he recalls. “I stopped going for years, and then on a lark, I saw they were having another convention. Thirty-plus years later, he still puts out the same fliers in the same font. I went to it and found him at the convention. I introduced myself as one of the two kids who used to torture him 30 years earlier. He joked, ‘You’re the kid who was bothering me years ago. How dare you show your face here!’ Now we’re kind of friends, so when I go, he stops and talks to me. When I go to his conventions, I go into the 25-cent boxes, buy 30 or 40 comic books and bring them home. It takes me a few months to get through them, but it’s fun.”

Josh also has strong memories attached to a certain album he would stare at in his parents’ record collection as a child.

“I would put headphones on and stare at the album artwork on the Beatles’ Revolver,” he shares. “I would just stare at the great black-and-white psychedelic drawing on the front and listen to ‘Taxman’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ when I was between 5 and 7 years old.”

As he grew up, Josh and his buddies would listen to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen, but that all changed one day when another friend introduced them all to something else entirely.

“My friend brought his boombox to school, slammed it on the lunch table, said, ‘Josh, listen to this,’ and pressed play. It was ‘Jealous Again’ by Black Flag, and all those other bands went out the window. From then on it was Adolescents, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, Shattered Faith and Bad Religion. We loved The Decline of Western Civilization soundtrack,” he tells. “The first punk show I went to was Fear and the Minutemen at the Whisky when I had just turned 13 or 14.” 

It was around this time when Josh began playing his own music.

“My parents split up when I was pretty young, and my mom did not want me to be a musician, so she kept me isolated from musical instruments,” he says. “In her mind, maybe if she could keep me from being a musician I wouldn’t end up like my dad. My sisters got the piano, violin and cello lessons, but I didn’t really start playing an instrument until I was into punk rock. I tried playing guitar, but it didn’t click with me, and then I switched to bass. My dad bought me a bass when I was 14, I took some lessons for about a year and then I was in a punk rock band. I said, ‘I don’t really need lessons. I can do this; this is easy.”

Although he harbored dreams of being a writer, all Josh wanted to do at this time in his life was play music.

“When I was 16, we started a band called Treacherous Jaywalkers and literally rehearsed five days a week. We would get out of school, go to James’ [Fenton] house and play music until we had to go home,” he remembers. “We didn’t think of it as dedication, it was just fun. We didn’t have any other responsibilities, so that’s what we did.”

Josh shared all of the bands that were inspiring him with his dad and his three sisters – Tanya, Petra and Rachel. 

“Then when we got a little older, my sisters [Rachel on bass, Petra on violin/vocals] started a band called That Dog with their friend Anna [Waronker], and that actually influenced Spain a lot because their songs were mellow and quiet. I heard those songs, and they reinforced the direction I was going in. I thought, ‘If they can play songs like that and people are going to their shows and they’re getting attention, I could probably do it, too.”

He formed Spain in 1993, and their debut album, The Blue Moods of Spain, released two years later. The album featured the haunting song “Spiritual,” which has been covered by artists that run the gamut, from Johnny Cash to Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny. Spain went on to release two more albums, She Haunts My Dreams and I Believe, before taking a break then reforming in 2007.

The Soul of Spain debuted in 2012, featuring Petra, Rachel and Tanya – the Haden Triplets – to critical acclaim, and the band toured all over Europe. The following year, Sargent Place (named for the Echo Park studio it was recorded in), was released, featuring the final recorded performance of Charlie Haden on the track “You And I.” 

With Carolina, Josh makes a conscious effort to move away from Spain’s past material, and the album artwork is indicative of this. 

“[Nate Pottker] sent me this portrait that he drew out of the blue. The drawing itself is great, but what really struck me was the color that he used, that blue. It was this very unique and creative wash that he used, like a pen drawing, for a really interesting, spontaneous background. I thought, ‘If this was an album cover, people would notice it,’ so I contacted him,” he says. “It was happy circumstance because I really wanted to get away from what I was doing with Spain album covers in the past. I wanted to make a clean break from that, musically advance to another level and do the same with the art – break out of a rut I had found myself in after many years.”

When I ask if one of the new songs, “Starry Night,” was so named because he is an art lover, Josh replies with “Probably.”

“I got a love of visual art from my grandparents, my mom’s parents, who were always members of LACMA. My grandma would always say, ‘There are two things you always need to have: a membership to an art museum and a subscription to a newspaper,’ so I’ve tried to be a member of LACMA as much as I can,” he says. “I also like the Norton Simon. It’s smaller, nicer to hang out at, and they have really great art, too.”

While he admits to loving too many restaurants in his neighborhood of Silver Lake, Josh does have a few favorites.

“We go to a Brazilian chicken place on Hillhurst [Tropicalia Brazilian Grill?] a lot. They do one thing really well. Tomato Pie has the best pizza in our neighborhood,” he reveals. “On the west side there’s a French restaurant, Mélisse, which is so expensive I wouldn’t be able to eat there, but my dad loved that place and we would go there on special occasions. It is amazing. We do like Cafe Stella, it’s expensive but not as bad, so we go there a couple times a year.” 

As Spain gears up for a month-long European tour, Josh admits to really only missing two things when he’s away from home: his family and good Mexican food. He thinks Los Angeles is great, but if he had his way, he would live in New York City and make every Angeleno spend time someplace else.

“I think that every young person should at least live in New York City for a couple of years to experience it because it’s so different and inspiring in a way that L.A. isn’t, and L.A. is inspiring in ways that New York isn’t. If I was the president of L.A. Unified School District, I would put millions of dollars into a program to get every student to be a roadie for a band on tour in Europe just to experience the cosmopolitan nature of life and to meet people from all walks of life,” he concludes. “Most people don’t have the money to travel. If I wasn’t a musician, I probably wouldn’t be traveling either, but I think it’s important to force kids to have those experiences because that’s what opens their minds, lets them be peaceful, aware and thoughtful people.”

Carolina will be available June 3. Spain performs May 10 and 17 at the Love Song Bar. For more information, visit spaintheband.com.

Tom Everhart

Artist Tom Everhart at his studio with Surfing with Franz and Willem from Waves of Influence

TOM EVERHART

At Everhart Studio
Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice

“I’ve been here on Abbot Kinney for 18 years, and it’s been like sitting in a time machine, watching everything around you change,” says artist Tom Everhart. “Even in the past few months, it’s been on such a roll. It’s amazing.” 

As the only fine artist authorized to paint Peanuts comic strip characters, Tom is mostly known for his Charles Schulz-influenced paintings, which decorate the walls of his studio located on bustling Abbot Kinney Boulevard. He discusses Schulz, his upcoming exhibit at Mouche Gallery of Beverly Hills and the constant evolution of his Venice Beach neighborhood after taking me on a tour of his home base.

Tom incorporates media like acrylic paint and varnish on canvas and paper, but he also utilizes raw wood, medium-density fiber panels, plastic cups and polyester pom-pom balls to create the visually stunning Chop Chop Chop, Performance Art and Medal of Free Dumb pieces that line the main showroom of his studio space. While he’s widely known for these brightly colored works, it’s his black-and-white Schulz-influenced pieces from the past 13 years – as well as 15 exclusive new works – that are being featured in Raw: Black and White Works From 1998-2016 at Mouche Gallery from Feb. 27 through March 16.

“There are about 50 different reasons why it’s titled Raw,” he explains. “The moment when it’s black and white on that rack being drawn – that’s raw right there. In that raw state there’s a whole other beauty to it than there is with all the color that’s even sometimes more meaningful because the original approach doesn’t get lost.”

Chop Chop Chop hanging in Everhart Studio

Appreciating the black-and-white rawness of a drawing is something Tom has done since his childhood in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

“I always had coloring books, but sometimes I didn’t even color in them. I would just carry the black-and-white pages around because I thought they were strong enough without the crayons,” he shares. “That’s how the black-and-white work happens now. I start everything in black and white, and if I think it stands up strong by itself – which is rare, it happens a few times a year – then I keep it. It’s almost the same as with the coloring books where I felt there were certain things that just didn’t need color.”

In his downstairs workroom, where he normally works on small paper drawings and paintings, a beautiful black-and-white painting on raw wood and a massive plastic-cup sculpture that have been retrieved from other locations for the Mouche Gallery show fill the area. Tom instructs me to look at the sculpture from a certain angle to see how it resembles a piano, and I wonder how much time the artist has spent staring at work of his own as well as others over the course of his life.

“When I was a little kid, I spent a lot of time in art museums. I saw so much art, all these different movements, especially in Washington where my grandparents lived,” he recalls. “There was everything from the oldest of American art to the newest of contemporary art in those museums.”

Young Tom eventually studied art and architecture at Yale University, performance independent study under Earl Hofmann at St. Mary’s College and did post-graduate work at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. He began exploring artistic anatomy, doing muscle and skeleton paintings, and as he was finishing school in the early 1980s, the art world was taking a turn.

“At that point in time, most of the art world had declared painting dead for many reasons: conceptualism, minimalism, photography, the list goes on and on of why painting couldn’t go forward anymore because everything had been done. The group of people that I was playing, partying and painting with in East Village refused to believe it. We had conversations constantly about what we could do to save it before it was buried and came up with all these painting constructions that were slightly offensive and completely uncomfortable for most people in the art world. We thought that was the only way to get the art world to take painting back as a living thing was to make them uncomfortable with painting because it would make them stop and look at it,” he remembers. “Keith Haring was doing multiple paintings of penises everywhere, and I did some with him in the subways. There were paintings about racism – all sorts of subject matter. I was heading in the direction of doing a whole body of work of skeletons as religious people.” 

Then Tom met Charles M. Schulz.

The main showroom of Everhart Studio

“I was trying to draw his stuff for a project, and I couldn’t get it. I just didn’t understand the language, the cartooning to it. It was so abbreviated compared to the kind of drawings that I was used to doing that I couldn’t get past it – until I put his drawing in a projector, blew it up on a huge wall and saw the lines as paintbrush strokes. I went, ‘Oh my god, this looks just like the abstract paintings in black and white that I studied in school,’” he says. “I was expecting to meet a cartoonist, but because I got to know him as an artist, I got to know him in a completely different way. How does a cartoon strip get published every single day for 50 years and not have something else to it than just cartoon strip with cute characters? There’s got to be something much deeper in it, and that’s what I saw in his work when I was studying it. 

“From that first meeting on, he and I became friends and had lots of discussions over the next 20 years about pictorial problems simplified in black and white. Thats what we talked about for 20 years. As we got to know each other, he started telling me all these things: ‘I use this line to represent this,’ ‘If you draw three lines together they never look the same because each line is seen at a different time,’” Tom continues. “One of Schulz’s quotes hangs in his museum: ‘A cartoonist’s job is doing the same thing every day without repeating themselves.’ It’s got to be the familiar done in an unfamiliar angle for it to be art. To me, that wasn’t like a cartoonist at all. That’s a complete painter’s way of looking at the world. That caught me. It was so raw, and I was completely innocent, visually open and ready to be changed.”

After a couple of years, Tom could draw Schulz’ line just like him – not copying him but drawing an object the way he would draw it – and began creating authentic Schulz-style drawings for magazines such as Time and Good Housekeeping, in art for the White House and the majority of the MetLife campaign. Knowing Tom could draw his line exactly like he would draw it in these marketing pieces allowed Schulz to continue dedicating himself completely to the comic strip.

Simultaneously, Tom’s discussions with Schulz were influencing him so much that his skeleton paintings were becoming a bit boring to him, but after eight years of these talks he wasn’t ready to take the plunge and incorporate these techniques and theories into pieces of his own.

“I knew I could somehow work in his visual subject matter but didn’t know how without just doing Peanuts paintings because neither of us wanted that. It couldn’t be a painterly version of what he did, it had to be something that came from me, with a direction that came from me,” he says.

“In 1988 I got sick and was told I had two years to live. I was able to break through mentally and start working like he influenced me to do on paintings. This was my one chance to do it. I had to get back to the studio and do as much as I could as fast as I could. That’s what happened, and I just kept living.”

Psycho Cyclone

It took death staring him in the face as a cancer patient to give Tom the epiphany he needed to incorporate Schulz’s characters into his own work but never in a literal way. 

“It wasn’t like we ever sat down, and he said, ‘This is how you draw Snoopy.’ We would just be drawing, and he would say, ‘Look at this line. Doesn’t that express a sad feeling to you? Here’s why: It starts thin and then gets very heavy – almost like an opera would.’ He had this encyclopedic range of human emotions in his lines and that caught my eye intensely. It was never his storyline that caught my eye, it was his line,” Tom tells. “A lot of times people mistake my paintings as paintings about Peanuts when – this sounds very odd people have a hard time with it at first – they really have very little to do with the Peanuts comic strip. They have a whole lot to do with the line construction of Charles Schulz the way he breaks down line and express emotion with line. They have nothing to do with character development. I don’t follow any character relationships, I don’t pick the character because they’re the character. They always represent something else. It’s another way of seeing the world in the way he saw it but with using the influence of the visual subject matter that I learned from him.”

He made sure that the work upheld Schulz’s idea of the familiar done in an unfamiliar way, as well as infusing life into each piece as much as possible.

“It’s a line that’s gone from drawing to painting – fused it into one thing,” he describes. “The work is influenced by my relationship and the things that I’ve learned from Charles Schulz from that 20-year period, but what makes it happen, what pushes it to happen is being alive. That came from almost dying and realizing that the world only could be about being alive, and it’s been about that ever since. Every piece is about being alive and not taking it for granted.” 

This principle is certainly felt when viewing Tom’s latest group of paintings, entitled Waves of Influence, which he’s working on in the upstairs area of his studio. As I examine, the black-and-white piece for the Raw exhibition, Surfing with Franz and Willem – as in Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning – Tom explains that not only is the tiny Snoopy in the painting influenced by Schulz but so is the giant wave.

“The wave came from a Peanuts strip published on April 21, 1991 that I think Schulz did from when he was playing golf at Pebble Beach. I cut that wave out in ’91 and said, ‘One day I have to do something with it,’ and this is it,” he says. “The initial visual articulation of the wave came from that strip, but since then I’ve been spending the last two weeks at the Venice Pier just watching the breaks going out for a good hour each day, and of course in Tahiti I’m always watching. It is a combination of the rhythms in Tahiti and the rhythms of the waves here in Venice put together. That’s what I mean by being alive: I’m taking things from life that I’ve experienced, that have made differences in my life and putting them into these waves, so it still feels like it’s something alive.”

After having lived in D.C., San Francisco, Paris, New York, Baltimore and London, Tom and his wife, Jennifer, decided to make Venice their home. The couple also spends part of the year on the island of Taha’a, Tahiti. Tom says he fell in love with Venice Beach at first sight.

“The first time I ever saw Venice was in 1982 when I came with my neighbor and friend, Jean Basquiat, who was getting ready to have a show with Gagosian Gallery. He had a studio on Market Street, between Pacific and Speedway. There were one or two other studios and a hip restaurant [72 Market Street Oyster Bar and Grill]. The area was deadly with heroin addicts and gangs, but we loved that. We were from the East Village in New York and thought this was cool because you could see the violence here. In our neighborhood guys were hiding under and in between cars to hit you over the head, but out here you could see them coming for you,” Tom laughs. “I fell in love with it instantly and always had a part-time place here from that mid-‘80s period until 1997 when we moved here full time. I was just dying to move here for the weather, the not-New-York feeling. There was an art community, but it wasn’t like the one in New York where it was so amped up and on full time. Here you could just hide in your studio. Ed Ruscha had a studio right across the street up until a year or two ago, Sam Francis had a place around the corner. This felt like a sanctuary to me.”

“For every single reason possible to love L.A., I love it. I’ve always liked to be by the water. I love the rhythm out there on the bike path. I ride from here to the Palisades and back – that rhythm of the bike, the wind that goes with you, the blank peaceful water on one side and the thrusting cliffs on the other side when you’re on PCH in between those two forces,” he continues. “Even more than inspiration, it’s a key that opens a door because you’re no longer hung up on the things you get hung up on in daily life. It’s a blank canvas, and you’re in the middle of it. I do most of my effective thinking work out there.”

It’s obvious why Tom has kept Eberhart Studios in the same location for almost 20 years, even through all the ups and downs the area has experienced.

“I watched that bar across the way go from a serious biker bar where you could watch some fights at 2 a.m. to a cool hipster-like bar [The Brig]. There was a guy camped out in the middle of the parking lot, bathing himself as everyone was parking, dressed all nice going to Gjelina – we still have a balance. That’s why when people start yelling about regentrification, I say come over, spend some time at my place and watch,” he laughs. “I love it having all this new stuff grow like this, it makes the street feel alive. How can you ask an artist to be upset about growth and change because that’s what we’re supposed to do, we’re supposed to see things in a different way all the time, continuously growing and changin. That’s what Schulz and I talked about: The work had to keep feeling like it was growing. If it wasn’t growing, it wouldn’t feel alive.”

Raw: Black and White Works From 1998-2016 debuts with a premiere party from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Feb. 27 at Moche Gallery (340 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills 90210). The exhibit is open to the public from Feb. 28 through March 16. For more information, visit mouchegallery.com and everhartstudio.com. 

Go Betty Go

Michelle Rangel, Betty Cisneros, Aixa Vilar and Nicolette Vilar of Go Betty Go at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Glendale

GO BETTY GO 

At Forest Lawn Memorial Park
1712 S. Glendale Ave., Glendale (800) 204-3131

While most people typically don’t choose to spend their free time hanging out in a cemetery, Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale isn’t your average burial ground. With its picturesque stone chapels, rolling green hills and sweeping views of the city, Forest Lawn is a peaceful haven for those visiting a loved one’s grave, as well as any Angeleno looking for a moment away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The four founding members of Los Angeles-based punk band Go Betty Go couldn’t have picked a more fitting location to talk about the group’s renaissance and their new EP, Reboot, which is set for release on Jan. 27.

“We literally grew up down the street from here,” drummer Aixa Villar tells me before recounting some of Forest Lawn’s history. “Its main founder [Dr. Hubert Eaton] wanted it to be more of a park than cemetery, that’s why the grave markers are all embedded in the ground and not sticking up like most tombstones. He wanted people to focus on the trees and landscape instead.”

I’ve lived just a few miles away from the cemetery for years but never visited. I had no idea that the huge white building atop its highest hill had such an interesting history, one that Aixa is eager to share. Polish painter Jan Styka created a panorama (measuring 45 feet tall and 195 feet long) detailing the moments before Jesus’ crucifixion and brought the piece to America for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. However, The Crucifixion was seized by airport officials since Styka lacked the proper customs documents, and the artist was forced to return home. He never saw the painting again, and it languished in the basement of the Chicago Civic Opera Company until Eaton found and acquired it in 1944. He began the construction of Forest Lawn’s Hall of the Crucifixion to house the enormous work, and it remains there today where the public can view it every hour, along with a light show and film documenting its history.

“Whenever people from out of town visit, I like to bring them here as a tourist spot because of the art [in the Hall of the Crucifixion], as well as the museum next door where the exhibits are always changing,” Aixa says. “I can also show them the building where Michael Jackson rests and Walt Disney’s secret tomb. We grew up hearing that Walt Disney was frozen with cryogenics, but it’s not true. His family keeps his plot area quite secret. There are trees and a little garden in front of a plaque on the wall with his name on it. A lot of other classic Hollywood actors are here, too.” 

Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow are just a few of the famous names many would recognize. Yet, the most special resident of Forest Lawn for the Go Betty Go foursome isn’t a celebrity at all.

“This place is symbolic for me in particular because when I left the band years had gone by, and the only time after that when I saw everybody again was when Betty’s dad died,” shares the band’s lead vocalist, Nicolette Vilar, who is also Aixa’s younger sister. “His funeral, which happened right over there, brought us all back together.”

“It was like a reunion,” adds guitarist Betty Cisneros. “I come here a lot to visit him. It’s so pretty and chill. I bring a guitar and just sit.”

“It’s not a scary cemetery at all,” agrees bassist Michelle Rangel.

“It’s so peaceful, and since it’s on top of the hill, the views are beautiful,” says Aixa.

The museum that Aixa mentions has showcased art from Matisse, Rembrandt and Goya, in addition to a contemporary exhibit of pieces made entirely of Legos and one highlighting the art of motorcycles. There are also several gorgeous stained-glass masterpieces and full-size reproductions of Michelangelo’s David and Moses sculptures. 

The cemetery really does inspire you to savor all life has to offer in nature, art and culture, and these are also the things that Go Betty Go loves most about the city they call home.

“The weather is the best,” says Nicolette. “It’s like your mother’s womb – so warm, cozy and familiar. I also love to see the way that people dress, the different fashions all together”

“I like the nature aspect of it, the beautiful parks, mountains and the ocean. You can be outdoors and enjoy it all,” offers Aixa. “I love how the city is so eclectic, its many cultures. We’ve been to places where it’s like the town from Children of the Corn, where there’s no cultural diversity, but Los Angeles is a melting pot of everything you could want.”

Michelle continues, “If you feel like having Thai food, Indian food, Ethiopian food—”

“I want a coconut water right now, and ta da,” exclaims Nicolette.

“You can have a fresh coconut,” Michelle finishes.

When hunger does strike the group, they head to places like Golden Road or any place that has good Thai food or tacos. They also enjoy checking out new music and bands at local venues.

“I go to the Echo a lot because it’s in the middle of where there’s a lot of musical things happening. It seems like I’m always surprised by groups that I’ve never seen before there,” admits Nicolette. ”It’s very welcoming because it’s easy to park, I know the neighborhood, half the time it’s free and you know you’re supporting a band that’s working really hard.”

“I judge places by their parking, so if I can’t find parking I just take off,” laughs Betty. ”One place that I do like to go is the Troubadour; I always find good parking there. Their sound is really good so I’m able to enjoy the bands, and when we play there it’s great.”

Although Nicolette and Aixa grew up just two blocks away from Betty in Glendale, they never knew her until after graduating high school.

“We went to the same elementary, junior high and high school. We knew of her, but didn’t know her,” explains Nicolette.

“I still remember how they dressed; their styles were totally different from mine,” Betty giggles. “Nicolette was very ’50s, and Aixa was more grungy.”

While the Vilar sisters’ dad had filled their home with music, the girls began discovering their own musical tastes and capabilities together around that time. 

“Our age gap is only a year and a half. We were both super into music, and picking it up came naturally,” says Aixa.

“Aixa started getting into the drums really early. The first show that I ever went to was her playing in a punk band in a basement underneath a church,” Nicolette remembers.

Meanwhile, Betty’s first encounter with a guitar was actually not of her choosing.

“It was eighth grade, and I had to pick an elective. I wanted home economics because I thought I wanted to be a chef, but I had to take music instead. I wanted to play drums, but there was a boy already on it. They had acoustic guitar open, so I bought a guitar and then was kicked out two weeks into the class because I was tardy,” she recalls, and everyone busts out laughing. “But, I still had the guitar, so I learned a couple of chords and would play along to commercials.”

Like the Vilars, Michelle was immersed in music from a young age, growing up in South Los Angeles. 

“I went to a performing arts magnet so I was always around music,” she says. “I played the flute from elementary to high school. In ninth grade I learned to play some guitar, then I picked up the upright bass and played it in orchestra. I eventually ended up playing electric and met the girls.”

“And history was made,” chimes in Nicolette.

They formed Go Betty Go in 2001, taking the name from the chant they would use to get Betty to begin a song. Their fiery energy caught the attention of SideOneDummy, and the label released their debut EP, Worst Enemy, in 2004 and album, Nothing Is More, the following year – both produced by Flogging Molly’s original guitarist Ted Hutt (the Gaslight Anthem, Mighty Mighty Bosstones). The quartet toured across the nation on Vans Warped Tour, just like their musical heroes, No Doubt.

“I watched the VHS tape of No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom Tour from 1997 until it broke,” confesses Betty. “It was so good, and they were so cool. I wanted to be up there!”

“When Tragic Kingdom came out it was a big influence on me. Then when I saw them live I thought, ‘Wow, what a great show. I would love to do that,” Aixa remembers. “As a female artist it was very influential seeing a punk rock chick like Gwen be so cool.”

In the subsequent couple of years after the debut of their two releases, Nicolette and then Michelle parted ways with the band, and Emily Wynne-Hughes and Phil Beckman filled in the gaps. Even though several years had passed, when the original members of Go Betty Go reunited on stage in 2012 that fire was still as combustible as ever.

“The show was already booked. It was just a matter of Aixa talking to Nicolette, and Nicolette talking to Michelle,” begins Betty.

“You must have been surprised when I called you,” Nicolette says to Michelle. “I had visited you just to say hi a little before that, though.”

“I think it was a year before that, when the whole ‘American Idol’ thing [Wynne-Hughes was briefly a contestant on the show.] was going on because I remember talking about it, as well as about things that had bugged us when we were in the band,” replies Michelle.

“Well, I told Aixa things, too” jokes Betty, and everyone laughs.

“Then Nicolette called one day and asked me to play a song with them. I had been so out of touch with the band, but I decided I should just do it for fun,” Michelle continues. “I was playing with another band at the time—”

“But we were slowly sneaking her back in with us,” laughs Aixa.

“They went on to do their own thing, composing for a film and I was able to do more things with Go Betty Go, so it all worked out.”

“It’s not like they got butt hurt or anything,” laughs Nicolette.

“It was the same thing with us and Phil. It’s funny because bands are so much like relationships. We said, ‘Hey, Phil, you know we’re talking to Michelle again’ – in a very nice way we told him we would rather have Michelle back, and he was so great about it.”

“He said that if we hadn’t told him that he would have told us that we needed to get Michelle back anyway,” adds Betty.

So Go Betty Go’s original lineup was back together again, working on new material, and when it came time to record they turned to their fans to help make Reboot a reality.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do this on our own. Nothing is free. It’s awesome that people would listen and want to help,” Aixa says. “If it weren’t for people having that attitude there’s no way we could make this work again.”

“We have really great fans,” adds Nicolette. “They know that it’s up to them, and they really step it up to make it happen.”

And when it came time for them to head into the studio, they naturally reteamed with Hutt.

“When I was in college I had gone through a breakup, and Ted had gone through a divorce. We caught up one day and became good friends because we were both going through similar things. We hung out a lot and rekindled that relationship, so that all these years later when we were ready to record, it was easy for me to call him up and say, ‘Let’s do this,’” offers Nicolette. “He was super excited and said he would have been offended if we didn’t ask him. That’s the kind of reaction you want.”

“[Betty], me and Ted had a conversation after we played the Roxy with Big D and the Kids Table and Voodoo Glow Skulls on our last tour a long time ago. We said to him, ‘If we do another album, you have to promise to help us.’ We even made him shake our hands!” Michelle remembers. “And now it has happened, and we’re playing the Roxy for [Rebirth’s] release show on Jan. 25.”

“And now he’s a Grammy-nominated producer! He had said, ‘The only thing I would love is to get a Grammy,’ and he’s one step closer,” Aixa gushes about the Best Folk Album nomination Hutt’s work has garnered on Old Crow Medicine Show’s latest, Remedy.

“He’s a real pro, and he worked his ass off for us. We’re so proud of him,” Nicolette continues.

While the original band members and producer have all returned, they have a new focus in mind when it comes to the present and future of Go Betty Go.

“When we first started the band and put out our first two records, it was very much just about the band. Our lives revolved around the band. Now, the band revolves around our lives,” says Aixa. “We knew that if we were going to do this again we would have to do it that way because if not, it wouldn’t work again. Now we take everything with maturity and with the lessons we’ve learned from our past.”

Reboot will be available Jan. 27. Go Betty Go perform Jan. 25 at the Roxy. For more information, visit gobettygo.com.

Mia Doi Todd

Mia Doi Todd at the Trails Café in Griffith Park

MIA DOI TODD 

At Griffith Park 

Having first heard of Mia Doi Todd upon the release of her fifth album (Manzanita) in 2005, the singer-songwriter has been on my radar for almost 10 years. She has continued to create beautiful songs that showcase her uniquely soft yet powerful voice on four additional full lengths, making appearances on numerous compilations and soundtracks for films like Mood Indigo, the latest from Michel Gondry, who directed Mia’s colorful video for “Open Your Heart” in 2010.

I’ve always felt a little kinship with the L.A. native since she is also half-Japanese and has a keen fondness for nature, so it wasn’t that surprising when she happened to pick one of the places that I love most in the city as her own favorite, Griffith Park. We meet just south of Griffith Observatory at the Trails Café on Fern Dell Drive, order a biscuit with honey for her and her 2-year-old daughter Ynez and a strawberry lemonade for me and begin to talk about growing up in Los Angeles and Mia’s upcoming album, Floresta, which releases next week and was inspired by Brazilian music and culture.

“I grew up in Silver Lake, so I’ve been coming to Griffith Park since I was little,” Mia shares. “[Riding the train and carousel], that’s what we would do for my birthday.” 

At this, Ynez reminds her mom that she would like to ride on the ponies later on their way home to Glendale. It’s quite heartwarming to see the two ladies interact, and I’m sure that Mia feels quite fortunate to be able to share the places where many of her own childhood memories occurred with her daughter. She also considers herself fortunate to have been able to expose Ynez to the person she looked up to most in life, her grandmother.

“Luckily my grandmother was alive when Ynez was born, so she was able to meet her bachan, her great-grandmother before she passed away. My grandmother was my idol; she was such a hardworking, gentle lady,” Mia reflects. “She was a seamstress for a living, so she taught me to sew when I was 4 or 5. She worked at a lingerie factory with silk and lace – the hardest materials – so she could sew anything, doing very detailed and beautiful work. My mother and aunt had the most beautiful prom dresses when they were in high school because of my grandmother.

Mia continues to sew a lot of her own clothes and even some dolls for Ynez. One of the fabric stores she often frequents is in Downtown’s Garment District, Michael Levine, Inc. http://www.lowpricefabric.com As a result of her father being a sculptor and painter, both Mia and Ynez love to draw and paint.

“[Growing up,] I was always drawing, sewing and doing crafty things in my room. I wasn’t very athletic, but I was really into school,” she says. “There was a lot of music in my grammar school, which was awesome. My teacher played guitar and sang. We would go around the room and get to choose our favorite song from a songbook to sing. That was really my first experience with singing.” 

At around 8 or 9, Mia’s mother – who is an Associate Justice for the state of California (She was the first female Asian-American judge in the country.) – took her to her first concert, Michael Jackson at Dodger Stadium.

“It was raining that night, and the show was so scary because it was the Thriller tour. I was totally freaked out,” she laughs. “I don’t know if I had ever been in such a big crowd. After that, the first concert I chose to go to that I got my mom to take me and some friends to was the Cure in 1989, also at Dodger Stadium.”

Mia’s own voice training began around this time. The family’s next-door neighbor was an opera singer and gave her private vocal lessons in his living room throughout her teenage years.

“That’s where the tone of my voice comes from,” she offers. “I started dancing in high school, too. We could take dance instead of P.E., so I did that.”

Although she didn’t start dancing until adolescence, her interest in dance and theater was sparked by her immersion in Japanese culture from a young age.

“My mother was on the board of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC), so we went to a lot of performances and art shows there. We went to see kabuki and Noh there,” she recalls. “My interest in Japanese culture definitely stemmed from all of that.” 

Mia was so taken with the culture that she went on to major in Asian Studies (with a focus on Japan) at Yale University, becoming immersed in the country’s history, religion and art. She was especially drawn to Butoh, Japanese dance theater and eventually received a grant from Yale to study the art form in Japan.

“When I was back east, I saw Kazuo Ohno perform at Amherst College. I had already been into Butoh, but seeing him live really heightened my interest in it. He was already 92 or 93 when I was studying under him in Tokyo; he was there, but his son, Yoshito, was leading a lot of the workshops,” she remembers. “I also studied with Min Tanaka, whom I consider a great teacher, during my year in Japan.”

Going away to college and then traveling to Japan were the first experiences Mia had away from Los Angeles, and this definitely had an impact on her. 

“I wrote my first song at the end of high school, and by the time I was in college, I was writing a lot of songs. There’s the whole first generation of songs that I only have on a tape, and they’re really funny,” she laughs. “Then there’s the second generation of songs that were recorded in 1996 and released on my first record, The Ewe & the Eye. Those were written around when I was 20 years old.”

“Going to the East Coast I could definitely see myself as a Californian more because it’s not until you go away that you see where you’re coming from, what’s behind you. I found out I was definitely a California girl, I didn’t know until,” she continues with a smile. “There are other places I would like to live but I have such a strong community here, roots, family and friends. It’s so hard to leave. We have such beautiful parks in Malibu, here at Griffith Park and we live really close to Angeles Crest at the top of Glendale. I find great comfort in nature and am always trying to find it.” 

Nature has always figured greatly in Mia’s work, and she feels that it relates to the fact that growing up in the city, she was constantly surrounded by asphalt. A longing to be in nature is always inside of her, it manifests itself even in the title of her albums. Her latest effort is called Floresta, which is Portuguese for ‘forest.’

“Flore is flower, so in Portuguese floresta mentions the flowers of the forest not just the trees. The rainforest in Brazil is so rich, abundant and teeming with life, so Floresta captures that feeling,” she tells. “We made a video for ‘Cais,’ the last track on the album, in France, and it’s about nature being our path to salvation. That characterizes the whole message of the album. I’ve found so much solace in nature.” 

Mia has also found much comfort in Brazilian music. She was originally introduced to the genre via a compilation put together by David Byrne, Beleza Tropical.

“Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, a lot of huge Brailian stars are represented on that compilation; hearing that for the first time was like discovering the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. I listened to that CD for years and gradually became more familiar with all the different artists on it,” she says. “Over time, Brazilian music became more popular in the states, and a lot of my DJ friends collect the original vinyl, so I got to hear the albums that the singles came from – so much amazing music. My love of Brazilian music has just continued to grow.” 

As her fascination with Brazilian music and culture flourished, she decided to travel to the country to play some shows and became acquainted with drummer and percussionist Mauricio Takara.

“I got to play at Circo Voador, this amazing venue in Rio opening for Marcelo Camelo who is like the Beck of Brazil just by chance. Immediately, I was so accepted by all the people I met in Mauricio’s community. They would be surprised that I wasn’t from São Paulo, while here in Los Angeles, it’s the opposite. People are always asking me where I’m from,” she laughs. “I felt so accepted in Brazil, and it started to be less of the ‘other.’ I spent six weeks there, went back later that year and made lifelong friends.”

Upon returning from that first trip to Brazil in 2009, Mia began working on material inspired by the culture with guitarist and arranger Fabiano do Nascimento. After going back to Brazil last November to work on a track, “Jardim do Amor,” with Takara for the Red Hot + Bach compilation that released this summer, Mia finally found the perfect place to record the songs she and do Nascimento had been putting together for the past four years.

“Mauricio’s family had moved their studio into an amazing new location that was built in the ‘80s by an Argentinian architect. It’s the most beautiful studio that I’ve ever been in with lots of Brazilian hardwoods, paneling all over, modern architecture,” she gushes. “I had been wanting to make this record, Fabiano and I had been working on this material for four years, and it was getting to the point here we need to record it, capture it or else just move on. Once I found that studio, I said, ‘OK, we’re going to do it!’” 

Floresta is comprised of compositions by some of the Brazilian masters who first inspired her, Nascimento and Veloso, as well as Joyce, Tom Zé, Cadeia, Tom Jobim, Dorival Caymmi and Dércio Marques. There was just one hurdle that Mia had yet to overcome: All of these songs have lyrics composed n Portuguese, and she doesn’t speak the language at all.

“In order to learn the songs I had to know what I was singing, so I do understand all the lyrics. The way I chose the songs had a lot to do with the lyrical content, so I just have to convey the emotion of the songs, the feeling of them, through the music for the listeners in the states,” she admits. “A lot of the interpretations of Brazilian music that get to us in the U.S. are more club oriented, lounge music or jazz with a lot of production, that are more slick. I approached the songs like folk songs. I was aiming for a more roots-y album; that’s what I could bring to it. There are way better singers who could perform these songs in a super fabulous way, but I wanted to go to the core of them because they’re just beautiful songs.”

While several of the songs deal with sad subjects, Mia says that transforming that sadness into something sublime is “the joy that pierces through the cloud.” Beauty can be found in even the saddest of places. Music gives many people solace, a diversion from their troubles. Throughout the recording of Floresta, Mia had her own doubts about being worthy of recording songs by such legendary musicians, but the power of the music itself was undeniable.

“As a songwriter I just love Milton Nascimento and Caetano Veloso, so I grappled for a long time, 'why should I be doing this,' 'can I do them justice?' Even while we were recording, I was still wondering, ’why am I doing this,'” she says. “But I learned so much, it was so fun. I love these songs, and to be able to play them, sing them is just a dream. I hope that joy is contagious in the songs. And for me, on my path of growing as a musician and songwriter, digesting this material fuels my own songwriting.”

I can’t wait to see what’s going to come next from Mia Doi Todd.

Floresta will be available Sept. 16. Mia Doi Todd performs at Floresta’s release party Sept. 15 at the Blue Whale in Little Tokyo. For more information, visit miadoitodd.com.