REVIEWS

Billboard Magazine - Dave Luhrssen The Village Voice - Melanie Bush The Shepherd Express (full review) - Dave Luhrssen, Nov. 1997 The Onion - Stephen Thompson The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal - Tina Maples Madison Magazine - Jon Kovalic The Isthmus - Tom Laskin

If interested in obtaining a promo packet of all Schaefer reviews for whatever purpose, write "Wrecked Moviehouse Records" 126 E. Wilson Box C, Madison, Wisconsin 53703 and enclose two dollars for mailing fee.

by Dave Luhrssen

Quirky-voiced Elizabeth Schaefer insists that her singing is just her passionate nuture rising to the surface. "I was the younger sister in my family. Singing became a big emotional outlet," she says.... Schaefer's singing is effective on reflective, acoustic numbers like "Blue Theater" which could rest comfortably alongside a Rickie Lee Jones song, and on the rockier "Raining Magritte," whose rich lyrical imagery is attacked with a weird relentless glee.... She performs regularly in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago; fans out to such Midwest cities as Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minn., Indianapolis, and Bloomington, Ind.: has played conferences in New Orleans and St. Louis; and even gigged at New York's Sidewalk Cafe (for which she received a Village Voice critic's choice pick.) She has also opened for Ani DiFranco and received airplay on Madison's WORT, Milwaukee's WLUM, Radio Netherlands (a Dutch shortwave broadcaster) and numerous college stations in the Midwest....

by Melanie Bush

This unusual songstress from Wisconsin may well have come through Yma Sumac country... or off a Lene Lovich single spinning underwater at 78rpm. Hitting pitches that only bats can hear, Schaefer employs her high, high, ghostly voice to alchemize ordinary subjects like hard-ons and futons into surreal and intimate stream-of-consciousness poetry.

in an interview with Stephen Thompson

Thompson: Do you think your album will save lives?

Schaefer: Save lives. That I would never claim to say it would do. Humorously or not, I don't think I could claim that it would saves lives. (Laughs) Hopefully, it will enhance them.

by Tina Maples

After drawing some titters for her unusual sound, Madison's Elizabeth Schaefer won over the crowd with voice.... Wisconsin Area Music Industry recognizes big names, local favorites: Here are the 1997 winners: Female vocalist-Elizabeth Schaefer Alternative Group/Artist- Elizabeth Schaefer Band

by Jon Kovalic

Elizabeth Schaefer may not be Madison's answer to Liz Phair (Lene Lovich seems a closer comparison at times), but the singer/songwriter's works are as edgy as anything Phair's released and every bit as whip-smart. When performing solo acoustic, Schaefer's even gutsier than those times when she's backed by the Elizabeth Schaefer Band. But either is worth catching for a folk-rock fusion.

by Tom Laskin

Her latest CD kicks off with an anrgy attack on a romantic rival which high-steps into "Thinkin' About It, " a whirrling demon of a tune that pairs her stern, declarative verses about the nature of illusion with trumpet, processed guitar and bowed acoustic bass. The latter cut is easily the most refined performance of her career, and it's no fluke. There are a half dozen songs on At the Heart of What's Obvious that play with musical textures and vocal colors in ways one would have expected from the old Schaefer, and tunes like the atmospheric "Thunderstorm of London" and the light blues-rocker "Brother in the Smokehouse" are the equal of anything that was offered at the Lillith Fair this year.

"At The Heart Of What's Obvious" Elizabeth Schaefer's Latest Masterpiece by Dave Luhrssen

When Elizabeth Schaefer was a girl, her parents bundled her up for late-night rides to Chicago, where she watched her mom sing cabaret. At home in Grayslake, Illinois, her dad, an English professor, entertained himself by blaring musicals on the stereo.

Those were the formative experiences." I went through a punk rock phase but it didn't last long. I was trying to find myself and I didn't find me there." Schaefer says, remembering being 15. It was the year this unique, one in a million singer, now living in Madison, started taking voice lessons. It was also the year someone gave her an acoustic guitar for her birthday. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that during this gateway year to the rest of her life, Schaefer started listening to Kate Bush and Lene Lovich, the two singers most recalled by her quirky vocals, "They are my heros! My favorites!" Schaefer exclaims. "I listened to them before I started singing. It was probably a combination of them and all the musicals I listened to through my life."

"It" is her voice, an octave-scrambling, tuneful warble; resilient, morphing, spiky but conveying warmth and vulnerability. It deserves its place in that respectable tradition at the margin of rock history: the eccentically-voiced, self-possessed woman. Schaefer doesn't proffer the shrill secular glossalolia of Yoko Ono or the annoying idiosyncrasies of Victoria Williams. She's really closest to her heroines. Schaefer is Lene Lovich without the Balkan intrigue, Kate Bush without the green hills of England. Schaefer doesn't mimic her prototypes but sounds instead like what she is: the product of a culturally aware Midwestern home.

"Once I learned some guitar chords, I hibernated in my room and wrote. I don't remember any songs from those days," says Schaefer who began performing in public at age 17 at Waukegan's Cafe Kismet. She played Wednesday open mikes before being bumped up to Thursday headliner spots and then a weekend residency.

"It was a great way to get started," she says of her three years at Cafe Kismet. "A great confidence-builder, although performing seemed so natural in my family that I was never nervous."

One of her relatively early songs, "Brother In The Smokehouse" resurfaces on Schaefer's new CD, her third self-released disc, At the Heart of What's Obvious. It fits tightly into the album's other songs, snug as a pearl on a strand. "Most of my early songs weren't well-constructed, "she admits. "They were disorganized. Some people might have called it stream of consciousness but I think it was bad writing."

There isn't a bad song on At the Heart of What's Obvious. "What Women Do" is bracketed by Dean Welch's trebly surf guitar, which continues, muted amid Brian Bentley's martial drumming, the munchkin-like cacophony of overdubbed Schaefer harmonies and her half-indignant lead vocals. An abbreviated solo trumpet fanfare helps push the conga-powered "Thinkin' About It, " a song that builds subtle drama as it climbs over the choruses. An Eastern dimension opens up in the languid electric guitar leads of "Thunderstorm of London," laying back like the Doors' Robbie Krueger against the pressure of a rhythm section trying to inject some Western rock fervor into the proceedings.

It mirrors Schaefer's emotional confusion ("I'm wring my hands under the ceiling fans"), a woman suffering the disorientation of jetlag and the crossing of cultural zones. The travelogue takes her to crowded New York City in "A Whole Lot of Lines, " a jittery newwave tune built on a "Peter Gunn" riff, that conjures the approving shades of Lene Lovich more than any other track.

Like many of the disc's songs, "A Whole Lot of Lines" is lovelorn ("I'm empty and buzzing and missing bad my baby"). "I usually sing about men-how I'm heartbroken and can't live without them, " she says, laughing. "I'll exaggerate things sometimes in the lyrics, "she adds, referring to the core of autobiography in many of her songs. "I've been trying to write them more as stories now. I'm trying to play characters in the songs. I want the scenery to be there. Not just the heartbreak or the frustration, but the setting, the specific conversations."

At the Heart of What's Obvious is a return to the form of her lucid 1995 debut disc, This Theater was Razed, which featured a cover photo of an old-time Milwaukee bijou called the Butterfly. Her second album, last year's The Spirit of Spotty, was a considerably spottier effort. The songs weren't as strong as on its predecessor and successor, and Schaefer's singing verged sometimes on goofy. "I was experimenting," she says, sighing a little. "There was a theatrical sound imbedded in my brain at the time-I just had the wrong idea and the album suffered for it."

Schaefer has performed in such widely separated places as a college in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and an Irish pub in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her discs have garnered sporadic college airplay and national reviews. Madison has been her solid support base. "Sometimes it's so small but I'm comfortable there." Schaefer says.

Her fourth CD is already in the planning, a disc she describes as "loungier" than the others. A disc that echos, her recent stint as a cabaret singer in a Madison hotel lounge, a gig that turned her singing around, maybe even rescued her from The Spirit of Spotty. "I don't know any covers. The only ones I've ever done were cabaret songs, "she says. "I think I've finally found my voice singing real songs that have to be sung the right way. You don't want to sing Cole Porter or George Gershwin in an eccentric, rock' n' roll voice. It was finding a part of me I didn't know was there. I've noticed I'm beginning to sing more like my mother, and that might be from cabaret singing, too. It was frightening to me at first: I'm turning into my mother! But it means a lot to me now."

Elizabeth's CDs can be ordered on-line through the
Uvulittle Records Secure Store.

Back to Elizabeth's Main Page

Contact Elizabeth via e-mail or reach her at 262-248-7729.