Outrageous Older Woman

Liz Zelvin

All my life I’ve been what a friend calls a “Renaissance soul” (nonsexist language for what used to be “Renaissance man”): interested in a lot of different subjects and activities and moving them around on the metaphoric stove from back to front burner and front to back as life has provided and removed opportunities.

I’ve played a lot of different roles. At the moment, I’m a mystery writer, therapist, and singer-songwriter with a new book and a CD out. I’ve worn the writer hat from the age of seven, but the music hat is almost as venerable, and the release of my album, Outrageous Older Woman, the realization of a lifelong dream.

As the bio on my music website tells my story (very different from my story as a writer and my mental health professional c.v.), I spent my childhood singing along on songs as diverse as morbid traditional murder ballads, old union and Spanish Civil War songs, and the gloriously sentimental harmonies of Girl Scout campfire songs. After a few uninspired years of piano lessons and a short career as a cellist in junior high and high school, I learned to play guitar at the age of thirteen and carried one with me everywhere for the next couple of decades.

I wrote a song or two in college during the Sixties and several more as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. I wrote and performed more songs while publishing two books of poetry and launching a midlife career as a psychotherapist and addiction treatment professional. For a while, I put music on the back burner, but then I encountered a trio of musical mentors whose influence and support helped extend my reach as both songwriter and vocalist. Through them, I had the pleasure of jamming with quite a few accomplished musicians and singers. While honing my skills as a songwriter, I realized that in terms of performance, happiness was having great backup.

Now, there’s a difference between mystery writing and making music. It takes a village to turn a manuscript into a book and send it out into the world. But the creation and perfecting of a mystery is a lonely process compared with a song’s journey. I wrote just about all of my more recent songs with the stimulus of a musical community. One of the mentors I mentioned was contemporary folk legend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, whose songwriting workshops I attended for several years at Omega, a New Age intentional community (or “dude ranch for space cadets,” as one of my characters calls its fictional incarnation in a so-far-unpublished novella).

Jimmie believes that the collaborative process mimics the creative process. Or as he put it, when you write alone, the voices saying, “That’s brilliant!” “No, that’s stupid!” are inside your head; when you write with others, your collaborators say the same things. The group songwriting sparked individual songwriting, with music as well as lyrics springing up from that same mysterious inner place as the characters that talk in the fiction writer’s head. And musicians, whether or not they are also writers, spend a lot of time making music. (I wish I could say that writers spend their time together telling stories. But they don’t—unless it’s stories about their struggles with agents, editors, and the literary marketplace.)

When I wanted the album to take my songs beyond the limitations of my singing voice and skill on the guitar, I was able to add the gifts of amazingly accomplished instrumentalists and harmony vocalists track by track: three more guitars in a wide range of styles; bass; keyboards, through the magic of digital technology, sounding at times like a concert grand, a honky tonk piano, accordion, organ, concertina, harp, tuba, and sitar; fiddle, cello, and banjo; clarinet, flute, and penny whistle; and drums and percussion. You’ll hear a klezmer band, a gospel choir, and a crowd of 100,000 at a demonstration, even though my co-producer and I never had more than one other person in the recording studio with us. (The sole exception is the klezmer song, for which our keyboard player brought along his exceptionally talented 16-year-old son to provide a mellow and witty clarinet track.)

I can’t tell you what a kick I got out of it when, late in the process of editing what we’d recorded, my co-producer and recording engineer started referring to the existing tracks as “the band.” (“Do you want to solo your vocal track or play it with the band?”) It would be heavenly to perform live with all ten of them together, instrumentalists and singers. It won’t happen, but I will have two of them along when I perform live in New York City on May 19 (You’re invited, details on my music website at lizzelvin.com. Two musicians: guitar, banjo, flute, fiddle, piano, and vocal harmonies.) But you can hear them all yourself. Listen to previews of all the songs. Better yet, buy the CD or download the album in mp3 format. Happy listening!

Cover Shot

Elizabeth Zelvin

Back when my first mystery was about to come out, a lot of people heard the story of the head shot that not only appeared on the book jacket, but became my “brand” image: on my website, all my bookmarks, eventually my Blogger profile, my Facebook page, and everywhere else a photo was needed to depict Elizabeth Zelvin, author.

It was the shot I loved among a hundred snapped by a fellow writer/off-duty professional photographer, and I got a lot of comic mileage out of how the backlit halo effect turned into what looked like a row of cotton balls sitting on my head in the high-res version. I finally succeeded in getting the hair touched up, and the final product was so effective that I swore I would never replace that smiling face that hasn’t aged a day since 2006 with any other picture.

Since then, my life in the mystery world has generated a lot of candid shots at conventions and book launches, not all of them looking so terrible. Photography technology has progressed to the point where I was able to take my own passport photo recently, holding my little digital camera away from my face to snap it. Now, that was a terrible picture. But no one expects better on a passport, and as long as I don’t leave the country, no one will see it.

I’ve been working for the past year or so on a recording of original songs I’ve been writing and performing for the past fifty years, and the time has come to think about packaging a CD for Liz Zelvin, Outrageous Older Woman. I know this Liz is different from Elizabeth Zelvin, author.

I needed new photos, and since I unfortunately don’t have a portrait in a closet somewhere like Dorian Gray to take the signs of aging time has deposited on my face, I needed a professional photographer who could make me look good. I went a-googling (“Upper West Side portrait photographers”) and found a kindred spirit: Nancy Pindrus, photographer.

Nancy lives and works in a wonderful old apartment near Central Park with two parrots (the elder, age 37, is a music lover whose repertoire includes both “Cancan” and “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring”) and a cat whose dander had me croaking when I tried to sing during my first visit to give her an idea of what would lie behind the album cover.

(Before the five-hour shoot, she ran an air purifier for twenty-four hours, and it worked better than any antihistamine I’ve ever taken for my cat allergy.) I had no problem assembling props: my guitar, of course; a big red hat; drop-dead earrings, a flamboyant outfit, a red feather boa. The problem came when she said, “Of course, you’ll need makeup.”

Makeup has never been my friend. I could probably use that passport and take a trip around the world with the money I’ve saved over a lifetime (not to mention the time) not using cosmetics. My line has always been, “My father never used makeup, and he had skin like a baby till the day he died at 91.” But for this photo shoot, it was not optional.

“I’ll tell you exactly what to buy,” she said. “You know what foundation is, right? Concealer?” Not really. I’ve walked right past all that stuff in CVS thousands of times. I finally convinced her that we’d be better off if she made me up in situ. (And I wasn’t kidding when I said I needed Cosmetics for Dummies. I volunteered to buy a couple of lipsticks and came back with lip gloss instead.) “But I don’t do eyelashes,” she said. “You need them, the more over-the-top the better, and you’ll have to put them on yourself.”

“You don’t understand,” I whined. My last encounter with false eyelashes was in 2002, when for my son’s wedding I tried valiantly to create a dramatic look that would come across well in the photos and ended up throwing the damn lashes across the room. But I did want to cooperate, really. And my own eyelashes could not possibly be called outrageous.

So I went out and bought two pairs of these weird little fringes. One claimed to be self-adhesive, the other came with its own little tube of glue. On the day of the shoot, I got up early, took a few calming breaths, and tried. I really, really tried.

The result—well, Nancy took one look at me and started laughing. In the end, she pasted the second pair (forget about “self-adhesive” and “reusable”) on my lids in the right place. She stroked and patted makeup of various kinds all over my face. Like any other artist, she kept stepping back to see her work and muttering, “Damn, I’m good!” In the end, I looked fabulous. If I had a handmaiden to put my face on, I could look glamorous every day. Since I don’t, I’m thrilled to have these fantastic photos.

When Music Is A Lot Like Writing

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been working for about a year on a project that’s been a dream of mine for a very long time: making an album of songs I’ve written over the past thirty years. The album title is Outrageous Older Woman, and when it’s finished, it will be available in CD and download form. Recording and co-producing the album in my co-producer and sound engineer’s studio has challenged me to learn and apply quite a number of new skills. I’ve also been able to draw on everything I’ve learned in my years of writing and getting my work published.

1. It takes time and patience. I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of 7, and my first novel came out when I was 64. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 13, writing songs that were “keepers” since I was 20, and if things go well, the album may come out before I turn 68.

2. It takes talent, persistence, and luck. I’m certainly not a pro as a musician, the way I am as a writer, but I’m proud of my songs, and they’re sounding better and better as I add the talents of backup musicians and vocalists to my own vocal and guitar tracks—just as my writing gets better and better as I allow critique partners and editors to enhance it with their own skills. Persistence? See time and patience, above. Since I’m self-producing, as many acoustic singer/songwriters do, I don’t need a record deal and may or may not try to interest radio DJs in my songs. But one huge stroke of luck I’ve had is my co-producer’s generosity in giving me studio time at far less than the going rate, without which I couldn’t possibly afford the many, many hours it’s taking. And even bigger luck, this friend of thirty years has turned out to be a dream collaborator. I’ve always been impressed by writing duos who can work together successfully and have never achieved such a collaboration myself. In the complex and demanding process or putting an album of recorded music together, we’ve been working together seamlessly and having a helluva lotta fun.

3. You need computer skills. I started out as a confirmed computerphobe, and I couldn’t have done all I have as a writer without overcoming my fears and developing skills to which I’m still adding today. Today’s recording is all about the computer. We’re using a program capable of digitizing the live performances, in this case, of four singers, three guitars (four if you count the bass, which provides those thumps that you hear when you’re trying to sleep and the neighbors are throwing a party), keyboard (programmed to sound at different times like a Steinway concert grand, honky tonk piano, harp, accordion, organ, concertina, fife, tuba, and sitar), flute, penny whistle, banjo, cello, fiddle (playing three different parts on one song), clarinet, drums, and assorted percussion. It then fine-tunes every track and mixes them so they’re balanced just right to sound as good as they possibly can. The human ear and mind makes all the decisions about how every note and breath should sound, separately and together—that’s a big part of producing. But it’s also some awesome technology. As sound engineer, my friend knows what every light and button on the gigantic sound board is for and what every menu item in the program does (more than I know about MS Word after using it for ten years). That’s all beyond me, but I’ve learned how to read the screen—for example, to look at a blob and say, “Let’s lower the volume on that note two decibels,” or at a tiny speck and say, “That dot is a breath—let’s delete it.” Yep, in a digital music program you cut, copy, paste, and delete, just the way you do in Word.

4. You have to kill your darlings. I heard that crucial piece of wisdom as soon as I joined Sisters in Crime and connected with other writers. But it took me years to steel myself to apply it to my work. It’s just the same with music as it is with words. Say, I finally hit the high note on the second verse of my hardest song. We did two takes, and I did it twice. Both takes are gorgeous—but I’ve got to throw one out, because that note appears in only one place in the song. Sometimes the darlings aren’t even my darlings, but those of my backup dream team, who play so much better than I do. For example, I’m crazy about what the fiddle, the banjo, the lead guitar, and the honky tonk piano all did on the solo (the instrumental passage that breaks up the flow of words) on my most fully orchestrated song. But only one instrument at a time can take the lead. If I use them all, even as background, the solo will sound cluttered, even muddy. It would be like leaving in all the adjectives—or more than a bare sprinkling of adverbs.

If you’d like to be notified when Outrageous Older Woman comes out, you can send me your email address at lizatlizzelvin.com. (Use the symbol, not the word “at.”)