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Doria Roberts is one busy artist. With an intense work ethic that would put even a Midwesterner to shame, the New Jersey born/Atlanta-based singer-songwriter-organizer in just a few years has managed to amass a hard-core loyal following around the country through a heavy touring schedule of audience-pleasing performances.
Her critically acclaimed music is soulful blend of folk, rock, blue R&B infused with inflections of hip-hop and spoken word. Add to that an unapologetic political edge, beautiful lyricism and badass acoustic guitar playing and you've got a musician that can put on one hell of a show. For her the personal is political from being an out musician who isn't afraid to skewer the shadiness of the mainstream record industry to writing piercing lyrics about violence against women.
Raised in Trenton, NJ, she attended college in Philadephia at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania. She didn't pick up a guitar until late in college. Soon after graduating she became the main organizer of Queerstock http://queerstock.org, the long-running musical showcase for out artists. While on a visit to Atlanta, she entered the Acoustic Open Mic Shootout contest at Eddie's Attic in Decatur (the place where the Indigo Girls made a name for themselves) and took first place. So she moved to Atlanta and began playing venues in the city, earning a name for herself on the live music scene. In 1999, she won the Lilith Fair Talent Search, played for two nights and was invited both nights to join Sarah McLachlan and the Indigo Girls on the main stage. The following Monday after Lilith Fair, she quit her day job and has been a full-time indie artist ever since. A self-proclaimed Ladyfest junkie, she's played several of them and consequently became the key organizer for Ladyfest South. Earlier this year, she released her fourth album, a live recording, "Alive and Well."
Doria will be playing at Subterranean in Wicker Park (2011 W. North Ave.) on Friday, October 25. Doors open at 9:30pm. The cover is: $6. Her CDs are available for sale on her Web site: www.doriaroberts.com, at Women and Children First bookstore here in Chicago and major online record outlets.
A few days after Ladyfest South, in the midst or recovering from the weekend (i.e catching up on sleep), Doria Roberts did a phone interview for dykediva.com.
Cheryl: Overall how do you feel about the weekend? Did the organizers accomplish their goals?
Doria: Artistically and logistically I think we definitely did a good job. Our main goals were diversity, equity and charity. With diversity, we did a really good job. I've been to a lot of other Ladyfests and didn't think that they were very diverse as far as color, class and all that kind of stuff. So I'm really proud of that--seeing it come to life and seeing the different types of people that showed up and the different bands that came and the different artists that displayed their work. We definitely succeeded.
I was a little worried about it [diversity] because it is the South and we had some struggles with the press about portraying it as a lesbian music festival, trying to get across that it was more diverse than that and the lineup was more diverse and trying not to delineate that necessarily but trying not to focus on that either. All the organizers were lesbian and that wasn't anything we were trying to hide but we really wanted everybody in the Atlanta community to come out and support it and not feel like they weren't going to be welcome. So I was really happy with the turnout.
Cheryl: Let's talk a little bit about your music. You released your fourth album this year, "Alive and Well." Tell me a little bit about that and why you decided to do a live recording.
Doria: I had started doing it, I guess in the middle of last summer. I had started the process of doing a live album and new release because I didn't want to go into the studio with a small budget and I either had the choice of making a very expensive live album or a very inexpensive studio album. So I chose to make a good decent-sized budget live album, which is, you pay somebody to come in and record the show. And it's a lot less expensive. You're not doing take after take after take. So I decided to do it that way and then September 11 happened and it was even more important for me to get it out. I had always planned to put my in-between songs banter on the CD and I just felt like it was important to laugh and it was important to give that laughter to people.
Doria was on the highway heading out of D.C. on the morning of September 11. She saw the plane that flew into the Defense Department stronghold before it crashed.
Doria: It was such a heavy time and I was having a hard time dealing with the whole September 11 thing and a lot of my fans did not want me to cancel any of my shows. I had cancelled some shows in New York and cancelled some shows in Toronto across the border because I really didn't know what was going on in the world and didn't know where we were going to be a month from then. They [the fans] were like "no, please come" and playing music just seemed very important.
Right when it happened I felt like I should've gone to medical school or something. Seeing these stories on TV of people risking their lives to save other lives and working around the clock and all of this other stuff. Being a musician just didn't seem very important immediately following and then I started getting a lot of email from people. So it became more important to me for the CD to be something people could take home with them and have a happy moment with. I didn't really change anything about it except I made it a little lighter than I had planned and I did go into the studio to record a couple of songs that changed lyrics right after the attacks.
Cheryl: Even though you said you wanted it to be a little lighter it still has a political edge but not as much as "Radio Doria." How does having that political edge effect how you are portrayed in the press?
Doria: I really don't have a problem with it. When the reviews came out for "Radio Doria," they came out three months after the CD was released and a lot of them were like "why is Doria Roberts so angry?" because the previous CD "Restoration" was mostly about life and love. It was a very personal CD. What I didn't have a chance to say on my side of that was that "Radio Doria" was just personal and that my political "rantings" are totally based in fact and they're based on everyday experiences not something that is contrived. It's not a situation where I'm unreasonably angry. I mean there's blatant racism, sexism and homophobia everyday. I travel a lot to all over the country to different cities and all of those things are very present in my daily existence. So you know people were saying that I went from having a sort of internal influence on "Restoration" where I was talking about changes in my life and went to a very external almost esoteric topical kind of stuff but I was saying "no"-- actually all of those things come a very specific incident which is why I put the stories of the songs in the CD so that people could see them in context. Reviewers and critics, they need to pigeonhole. They need to make it palatable for people. They need to pander to a wide audience and so I think putting a stamp on it saying, "this is political" and "she's really harsh" and "she's just really angry for no reason" -- that makes it easy for them to do their job. I was very pleased with the reviews that I got when people actually took the time to listen to it and read the liner notes and could understand my demographic as an artist and as a human being and not separating it from who I am and from what I do.
Cheryl: Regardless you've received accolades for your work. You've been courted by the mainstream record industry. Why have you chosen to stay as an indie artist instead of relentlessly pursuing that so-called dream record deal?
Doria: Well because it's just not a dream record deal. It's not good business when you break it down and you really start looking at the numbers. I was a potential business major in college, that's where I was heading and so I've got a keen business sense. When I started dealing with those record companies I just realized that there is no direct formula for making money and for being a financially viable employee of the record company. It's kind of like someone asking you to come to work and saying you might get paid in two weeks for the work that you've done. And people don't do that. You don't go to your desk job and hope that you get a check after you've done work and that's just kind of what they want from you. "Well you might get paid, you might not" but we're going to take all of the ownership of your intellectual property and we're gonna do this and we're gonna basically put you in debt to the point where if you don't pay us back you won't get paid and not only that we'll own your intellectual property. That's sort of the position you're put in as a new artist and it's just not a chance that I was willing to take for a number of reasons. One, my sexuality kept coming up. I'm totally out and I wasn't going back in the closet and that was a point of contention. And other things like "we can't really sell a black woman with a guitar playing folk music so maybe we can make it a little more of this and a little more of that." "Make it a little more soulful" and you know its' like that'd be great if that's what I did naturally but it only comes out every once in a while where I'll write something that's naturally like that. I'm not going to sit here and make up a whole new Doria Roberts just to sell records because the result might not be very good. So by the time I was dealing with all this I had a pretty clear sense of who I was as a person and I wasn't going to compromise to fit. That didn't seem necessary so I just stayed independent.
Cheryl: Well you have a really diehard core audience out there. I've seen you perform a couple of times in Chicago and down at Ladyfest South. You definitely have some audience favorites: "Perfect" and "Restoration." How does it feel not only when you're at home but when you're on the road far away, 1,000 or 2,000 miles away from Atlanta and the audience knows all the words and they sing along to your songs?
Doria: It's great because I'm alone a lot. I'm alone most of the time. You know I get home and I have a lot of work to do so the only time when I'm around a lot of people is at my shows. It does make me feel less alone in the world. It's not an ego trip. It definitely feels like "wow there are other people in the world that I'm with right now that understand." And you know even if it's just for 45 minutes, it's just really sustains me way beyond the 45 minutes of being onstage.
Cheryl: Do you get a lot of queries and question from young indie artists wanting to know how get their musical careers off the ground?
Doria: Yeah, I just tell them if they're in school, finish school and then just do it. Don't plan it too much. Because I think the problem with a lot of people that want to do this full-time is they're like "oh I'll wait 'til I get enough money in the bank" or "I'll wait to this" but those moments sometimes don't come and the longer you wait the harder it is going to be. Right after I played Lilith Fair I jumped. I quit my job the following Monday. Monday morning I was dressed for work and I was sitting there at 7:30am and I just called in said "you know I'm not coming in today" and that was it. And I made a decision to do it full-time. I figured if I could work somewhere 50 hours a week for somebody else's American dream than I could work 50 hours a week on mine. And so I just transferred all the time that I was spending there into my own work schedule and I worked from 9am to 9pm full-time every day until I booked some shows and tours and figured out how to pay my bills. And then got on to bigger things like how to pay for a CD. Just going from there was very hard. I felt defeated on many occasion but learned a lot. But then there's the good of it. When I come home from a show and when I wake up in the morning I do exactly what I want to do every single day of my life and that outweighs anything that could possibly be wrong with what I do.
Cheryl: So Lilith Fair was like the catalyst for you to do your own thing full-time?
Doria: Definitely.
Cheryl: Who are your musical influences? Artists who you look to for inspirations etc and who've inspired your musical career?
Doria: I don't really look for it. They kind of bumped into me. I didn't know that any of the people I listened to growing up were going to be musical influences just because I didn't start playing guitar until I was 21 or 22. I wasn't a musician necessarily but I could tell that a lot of the rap music that I listened to like De La Soul and KRS-One who were using real vocabulary and actually saying things. And then people with social commentary like Public Enemy and all them. I realize now that they were a bigger influence than any folk musician that I would end up listening to later. I don't have the normal influences like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and all those people because I didn't know who they were. I grew up in Trenton, NJ so Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were not staples. I listened to Bananarama and shit. I wasn't listening to anything anyone would consider a real influence. Right before college, and this was by accident, the one time that "Closer to Fine" was on MTV, I actually I heard it. And the guitar, the organic sounding guitar was amazing. A lot of synthesized music was out at the time; it was just a wasteland of synthesized music. Then hearing this organic sounding instrument definitely peaked my interest and just coming into my own and about my sexuality and leaving for college and all that kind of stuff--it was the perfect soundtrack for somebody like me. I knew they were lesbian even though I couldn't find any evidence of it. I guess that became an influence once I started playing guitar. I danced for 12 years so I've got natural rhythm and I tend to write stuff that is rhythmically driven because of that. I found Alternate Tunings by accident. I'm self-taught on the guitar completely so I don't have a background in theory so anything that I came upon was by accident. I guess I listen to a lot of people now. I'm listening to Rufus Wainwright , Cassandra Wilson and Nina Simone. Also Patti Smith. The way they emote is more of an influence than their style. The fact that Patti Smith doesn't edit herself is a huge influence. So it's more of the intangible influences that I have with these folks.
Cheryl: What about vocal training?
Doria: No. Oh, no. I went to a choir academy for three years because I went to a Catholic school where we were required to be in a chorus from 6th to 8th grade. But I did a lot of theater so I've got a really big mouth and I know how to project and breath and all of that kind of stuff. I think that's where it comes from but I've never had any vocal training either.
Cheryl:You've done so much organizing. You've been involved in so many activities from Queerstock up until Ladyfest right now. How do you balance promoting and organizing events for other artists with concentrating on your own work. Where do you get the time?
Doria:I spend every waking moment doing this. I mean literally I wake up and I'm on the computer at seven-thirty, eight in the morning and I don't stop working until almost nine o'clock at night. When I'm tour, I usually take a month or two off in between each tour and that gives me some down time where I'm not playing. Then my tours are usually six or seven weeks long which is longer than most people stay out but I kind of go back and forth between touring for six weeks, and then I come home for a month and then tour for another six weeks and come home for a month. It's in the breaks where I do most of the legwork for my own stuff. I do a lot of work on the road as well. The first thing I look for in a city is where I'm sleeping, where the club is, Kinko's and the post office. I'm working in the car if I have somebody driving with me. I'm constantly on the phone as my cell phone bill will attest to and I just make the time because like I said if I could have a job working fifty hours a week, I can certainly put in that much time doing this other stuff. That's just the choice that I've made. Once I've made a commitment to something it's kind of like no matter how badly I don't want to do it, I follow it through even if I get tired or I'm like "Oh god I can't do it it's too much." I really keep my commitments so I just do it. I don't even know how to explain it beyond that.
Cheryl: What does the future hold for you in the next year or so as far as recording new material?
Doria: I haven't made solid, solid plans on the studio thing. It's gonna be definitely a production that I'm ready to stand behind. Definitely going to be a step up from what I've been putting out. I'm going to take my time and be spontaneous to get it done. I've heard some really great albums that were done in twenty days and I've heard some that took a year. I'm just going to kind of see what kind of album I'm going to have and let what's happening naturally dictate the album. I've always been kind of under these deadlines and sort of well I wouldn't say desperation necessarily but needing to stay viable as an artist and I'm getting to a point where I'm comfortable enough to let the project dictate where it's going to be. So I'm anticipating going into the studio over the next few months but I don't know exactly where that's going to end up I don't know if its going to be done in a few months but I'm definitely going to be in there.
Cheryl Coward http://cherylcoward.com is a Chicago-based freelance writer and novelist. Her work has been published in such publications as the Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, Essence and Black Enterprise.
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