Stephanie Nilles

Artist Information

Biography

"Stephanie Nilles, hailing from New Orleans, is possibly the most compelling jazz piano/lounge punk singer since Tom Waits started chain smoking and singing about sailors. With a voice that manically switches from sultry soul to wild yelping, not to mention mad piano skills and a wild performance energy, Nilles has the talent to shuffle past the mediocre label props grinding their teeth on Top 40 radio today. Her sound is refreshing and irreverent, and those willing to give her a chance will find that they can easily latch on to her style without being forced to leave their boxed-in tastes; no matter what you prefer to listen to, you can at least appreciate the sweetly unusual nature of her music. Rolling Stone literally said that she's like 'Ella Fitzgerald on speed beating the shit out of Regina Spektor.' Put that on a poster, you bet I'll buy your record." -AudioSuede

Chicago-born jazz/punk/barrelhouse musician Stephanie Nilles has been doin' Kesey proud one bar at a time since 2008, hustling around the United States, Europe, and Canada (except from 2009-2010 for legal reasons), averaging 150 gigs a year, and captivating unsuspecting listeners with a voice that would make Jelly Roll Morton look orthodox and Ma Rainey look sober.

Having studied piano and cello since the age of six, she was a finalist at the Young Concert Artists' International Competition, a gold medalist at the Fischoff Competition, and had performed on NPR on three separate occasions by the age of seventeen. At twenty-two, she had graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music with a degree in classical piano performance and temporarily relocated to New York City, where she began writing songs and performed regularly on the east village anti-folk scene.

She has since sung with Bobby McFerrin in Carnegie Hall, directed the musical program of a Brooklyn burlesque series, covered Busta Rhymes's "Break Ya Neck" in the skeletal remains of a bombed-out cathedral in Nuremberg, been invited to perform official showcases at SXSW and International Folk Alliance, and self-released 3 full-length albums, the most recent of which was picked up by German roots/blues label Tradition und Moderne (Taj Mahal, John Fahey).

When Stephanie's not sleeping in her car, she lives in New Orleans, which might not be the best idea.

Instrumentation

Matt Wigton - Upright Bass
Zach Brock - violin + FX
Frederick Kennedy - drums + pitched percussion
Stephanie Nilles - piano + fender rhodes + B3 + vox + electric & acoustic guitars

Discography

reDemo (2008) (Sudden Infant Death Hut Records)
Live from Asheville with the Ryans (2009)
The Off-White Album and Waltzes in the Key of Gypsy McGee (2009) (Attention Spaniel Records)
Fuck Off, Grizzly Bear (2011) (US- Attention Spaniel Records) (Europe- Tradition & Moderne)

Links

• Last.fm
• MySpace
• Twitter
• Zach Brock & The Magic Number

Audio

• For A High Life Commercial
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• 2. Transistor
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• Fuck Off, Grizzly Bear
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• Canadians are from Canada
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• A Great Notion
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Lyrics

• For A High Life Commercial

Video

Photo Gallery

Press

• Interview and Video Performance at Burg Wilemstein [+ Show ]
  

  "Stephanie Nilles is a Bad Ass ... Her songs are full of political satire and bold, shocking ideas y..."Stephanie Nilles is a Bad Ass ... Her songs are full of political satire and bold, shocking ideas you've subconsciously formed but never figured out how to articulate. And she only uses maybe 7 or 8 chords..." -Christian Howes
  
  http://www.jazz-online.com/vsc_1289_220_1_vid_90476/Interview-Stephanie-Nilles.html

• NPR From the Top Profile [+ Show ]
  

  Video and Audio of performance: http://www.fromthetop.org/content/stephanie-nilles When From the ...Video and Audio of performance: http://www.fromthetop.org/content/stephanie-nilles
  
  When From the Top met Stephanie Nilles, she was just 16 years old and already an award-winning, classical pianist. She performed with two different piano ensembles during our first and second seasons on the air and then went on to the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she graduated with a Bachelor's of Music in classical piano performance. Upon graduating, however, Stephanie began to question her career direction.
  
  "I was performing in international competitions and unofficially preparing for the Van Cliburn Competition, which was a few years down the road," she recalls. "I was practicing in a room by myself for seven or eight hours a day, and it started to occur to me that I was unhappy."
  
  Stephanie knew she loved music and she knew she loved performing, but she was growing increasingly frustrated with the process of sitting alone for so many hours at a time playing classical music. The 2004 election also had a profound effect on what she was experiencing at the time. "I started to feel like the music I was playing didn't relate to the world around me."
  
  Stephanie decided to quit music altogether. She packed her things, moved to New York City, and took various odd jobs, doing everything but playing music. She soaked up city life, frequenting anti-folk clubs in the East Village and eventually befriending some jazz musicians who encouraged her to try her hand at jazz improv.
  
  "At the time, I was also going to a lot of open mike nights, and I started thinking to myself, 'I could do that.' So I started writing songs."
  
  Now at the age of 25, Stephanie has emerged as a singer/songwriter with a unique jazz/folk sound. Described by fans as "Ella Fitzgerald on speed beating the [bleep!] out of Regina Spektor," Stephanie writes poignant and ironic lyrics for her politically-charged songs, and draws on her classical training to explore new genres of music.
  
  Stephanie spends most of her time on the road, traveling from town to town, performing at coffee houses and bars all over the country. She plays 20-25 gigs per month and loves the direction her life has taken, despite the hardships that come with the territory.
  
  "There are times I've had to depend on the kindness of strangers to take me in and feed me, but it should be hard," she says. I'm making a living playing my own music and that should be incredibly challenging."
  
  Stephanie is an amazing example of the thousands of multi-talented and creative From the Top alumni who follow diverse and interesting life paths. "I love the process of what I'm doing," says Stephanie. "My whole life is a big adventure at this point!"
  

• Artists That May or May Not Be the Next Big Thing [+ Show ]
  

  Stephanie Nilles, hailing from New Orleans, is possibly the most compelling jazz piano/lounge punk s...Stephanie Nilles, hailing from New Orleans, is possibly the most compelling jazz piano/lounge punk singer since Tom Waits started chain smoking and singing about sailors. With a voice that manically switches from sultry soul to wild yelping, not to mention mad piano skills and a wild performance energy, Nilles has the talent to shuffle past the mediocre label props grinding their teeth on Top 40 radio today. Her sound is refreshing and irreverent, and those willing to give her a chance will find that they can easily latch on to her style without being forced to leave their boxed-in tastes; no matter what you prefer to listen to, you can at least appreciate the sweetly unusual nature of her music. Plus, she’s already amassed some of the best press quotes about any musician ever. Rolling Stone literally said that she’s like “Ella Fitzgerald on speed beating the shit out of Regina Spektor.” Put that on a poster, you bet I’ll buy your record.

• SXSW 2010 [+ Show ]
  

  Jazz poet Stephanie Nilles, who recently released her third album, 'The Off-White Album and Waltzes ...Jazz poet Stephanie Nilles, who recently released her third album, 'The Off-White Album and Waltzes in the Key of Gypsy McGee,' will be making her first SXSW appearance this year. Nilles, an ex-classical pianist turned jazz and blues belter, tours year-round singing personally and passionately with a voice reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald, if Ella was a little tweaked and really adamant about sticking it to the man.

• One part Ella, One dash Waits, Seven Cups of Awesome [+ Show ]
  

  On paper, she's an acclaimed classically trained pianist. At first glance, she's an adorable little ...On paper, she's an acclaimed classically trained pianist. At first glance, she's an adorable little twentysomething. In sound, she's been compared to Ella Fitzgerald ... if Ella was tweaked out on something and punching Regina Spektor in the face. I suspect it's this unexpected sound that has earned Stephanie so much ink lately, and in music pubs of the highest regard (Pitchfork, Spinner, etc.). Her music is no-nonsense, lo-fi, piano-driven, blues-jazz. Or at least that's how I'd say it. Others hear her whiskey-drinkin' lounge style and think early Tom Waits. Others still point to her maniacal changes from sultry soul to wild yelping, her shocking political lyrics, or her beatnik whispers and howls, thinking of Jack Kerouac or Rickie Lee Jones. She's currently on the road promoting her third album, F*** Off, Grizzly Bear, with a stamped seal on the cover saying ""Hipster Quality Guaranteed" to either poke fun of a dying species (unlikely) or the indie band and its followers (quite possible). Regardless, Stephanie is the kind of hidden gem performer who would blow the roof off a blues/jazz club around here (if we had one). Instead she'll blow the roof off The Mousetrap. And that's just fine. They have whiskey, too.

• Stephanie Nilles is riding the indie underground railroad [+ Show ]
  

  Singer and songwriter Stephanie Nilles makes something fresh out of things lost. A graduate of Cl...Singer and songwriter Stephanie Nilles makes something fresh out of things lost.
  
  A graduate of Cleveland Institute of Music, she is a serious classical pianist gone bard. When you think Nilles, think of a quirky mix of subversive vagabond and sultry artist, a burlesque cocktail of wit and substance.
  
  "Her music growls like Eartha Kitt and bites like Tom Waits," said Hannah Gregory, a junior at Tulane University in New Orleans.
  
  While at CIM, Nilles lived near the Hough community in East Cleveland, Ohio, a neighborhood notorious for racial tension and impoverish conditions.
  
  “During college I really got to know the city from a sociological viewpoint,” said Nilles. “It's the quintessential city for finding something good in an unexpected place. It's an amazing area. It led me to realize I can find little treasures everywhere I go.”
  
  Feeling a little more enlightened and increasingly unsatisfied with the sociopolitical differences separating her from classical composers, Nilles temporarily gave up on music and headed to New York City.
  
  Instead of stumbling across some tangible fortune, the treasure Nilles found was more substantial: a serendipitous aptitude for jazz music and a ticket aboard what she likes to call “an underground railroad of folk tradition.”
  
  The enigmatic railroad Nilles describes is paved with small venues, open mic nights, tip jars and strangers' couches. It's fueled by a friendly network of musicians, artists and venue owners. This organic approach to music is reminiscent of a forgotten American dream, one in which a person controls his or her destiny instead of feeling trapped by obligation.
  
  Though Nilles empathizes with the truth that many seem locked into roles as either students or workers, dismissing urges to pursue dreams as lunacy, she exemplifies the reality that chasing a passion is utterly feasible.
  
  “A lot of people are doing this. Artists by way of car or train hop off wherever and find a gig.”
  -Stephanie Nilles, singer/songwriter
  
  She admits that leading a life without knowing what to expect can be intimidating if too much time is spent in contemplation, but she adds that it's been a fairly enjoyable task to make a living, even on nights when she had no expectations of profit.
  
  “If I had a night off, I would roll into a town and walk around, asking where the music was,” she said. “I would do open mic nights, or I'd ask bar owners if they'd mind if I opened for someone or played for tips. Usually they'd just say, ‘Knock yourself out.'”
  
  After two years of living on the road, Nilles has reconciled her love for touring and the need to call a place home by moving to New Orleans, where she continues to pursue her music.
  
  With a unique outlook on life, music that's as intellectual as it is entertaining and a voice capable of transcending the tracks of the indie railroad, Nilles is just the kind of treasure that music aficionados love to discover.
  
  “The main industry in New Orleans is tourism,” she said. “Local artists kind of get in a rut trying to build an audience because the crowd is always rotating, but I like it. For me, it's like being on the road without driving.”
  

• CIM Graduate Returns to Cleveland with jazz, cabaret aspirations [+ Show ]
  

  Posted: 11/20/09 Young singer-songwriter Stephanie Nilles isn't particularly fond of comparison...
  Posted: 11/20/09
  
  Young singer-songwriter Stephanie Nilles isn't particularly fond of comparisons, even when names like Tom Waits and Ella Fitzgerald are tossed around.
  
  "When people hear anything, their immediate reaction is to compare it to something they're familiar with," said Nilles, "and I'll be described as the 'female version of so-and-so,' which is unfortunate. But that's fair, I'll take whatever comparisons I can get."
  
  Considering the direction that her music takes, combining resigned, smoky jazz with dark, Brechtian cabaret, the comparisons are not entirely unmerited. Even so, the manner in which she effortlessly fuses these two distinct moods results in a specific atmosphere, captured in her most recent album, 2009's The Off-White Album and Waltzes in the Key of Gypsy McGee.
  
  Nilles didn't always picture herself a singer-songwriter, though. Having grown up in Chicago and taken piano lessons since the age of six, she eventually found herself studying piano performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music. While she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in piano performance, the experience left her wanting more out of life.
  
  "I was just unhappy playing piano in this classical setting that revolved around merely recreating works from a specific community of old, dead, rich people," said Nilles, "and being in a socially and politically active place like Cleveland gave me a real need to be a part of the current world. I felt a great discomfort as a citizen."
  
  Even as a CIM student, there were still few signs that pointed Nilles toward songwriting as a viable career option.
  
  "I taught myself guitar at 18, just a few Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Ani Difranco songs," said Nilles. "Every now and then, a few of us would spend a weekend night in a practice room, playing songs on the piano. It was really a great release and time off from serious practicing."
  
  Upon graduating, Nilles' continuous dissatisfaction with classical piano caused her to briefly quit music altogether and relocate to New York City. "I didn't want to go home," said Nilles, "and I had some friends in New York. It's a convenient place, and I was distracted from the fact that I didn't want to play music…it became a big adventure."
  
  While working at various odd jobs over the next couple of years, she grew increasingly involved in New York's jazz scene, eventually meeting with jazz violinist Christian Howes. Howes worked with Nilles and gave her tips on improvising and in connecting with this music scene, disparate from her conservatory studies. Nilles gained a new interest in creating music.
  
  Nilles' brooding jazz work, she notes, is merely a reflection of what she has been exposed to lately.
  
  "I'm just borrowing from what I listen to, from Mozart rondos to jazz," she said. "I'm just quoting and flipping things around, turning them into my own tunes."
  
  After releasing reDemo, a sparse collection of studio takes in 2008, Nilles set out to create final versions of songs in her back catalogue in addition to newer ones. The Off-White Album and Waltzes in the Key of Gypsy McGee was the final result of the initiative. Featuring loose, yet melancholy barroom piano odes like "A Great Notion" and "Boston" alongside the minor-key oompahs of "Rat Pack" and "Overeasy Eggs," The Off-White Album proves to be an engaging listen. The album's centerpiece, the nine-minute lament to the Bush Administration, "Oh, George and his Funeral Procession," concludes with a New Orleans-styled jazz march.
  
  While her efforts haven't completely paid off yet, Stephanie Nilles is far happier in her current environment than she has been in prior years.
  
  "This is a much better fit for me," she said. "The classical setting lends itself to a very sterile performance in a very polite atmosphere, while here I need to make people be quiet and listen. It's a lot more challenging, but I love it more."
  
  Nilles' love for her craft will be on display at the Barking Spider this Sunday Nov. 22 at 8 p.m. While she may be on the receiving end of comparisons now, her performance will leave few surprised if others might someday be compared to her.
  © Copyright 2009 The Observer

• Stephanie Nilles: The UnGoddess [+ Show ]
  

  On one of the colder nights in recent memory, I took a brief refuge from the wind in a divey (but in...On one of the colder nights in recent memory, I took a brief refuge from the wind in a divey (but in a posh sort of way) club in Harlem around midnight. Inside, down the stairs, underneath the low-drop ceilings seemingly covered in asbestos, flanked by two half-naked burlesque performers and armed with a shot glass of whiskey, Stephanie Nilles sings Ella. But she doesn’t just sing it- she whispers and howls out the words in a Rickie Lee Jones-every sentence is a super cool beatnik epiphany- sort of way. But Stephanie transcends cool. She’s post cool, if you will.
  
  The first time I heard Stephanie play was at Sidewalk café (of course). Stephanie, who looks slightly like Jane after a few years with Tarzan, which is to say she has a striking stage presence, was putting every other pianist in the club to shame. She is a poet without being pretentious about it; she is bluesy, jazzy, soulful (in her way), and lets her music pour out in such an organic way. Her songs can be analyzed word for word, or they can be taken impressionistically, fixating instead on the overall mood. Whenever she plays, the room falls dead silent. Whether everyone will be able to absorb all of the complexity and nuances of her music is unimportant. What is important is that everyone will try.
  
  I’m calling Stephanie the Un-Goddess, because while anyone who has heard her music will vouch for her brilliance (and I, in the course of this interview, may inadvertently put her on a pedestal), she’s too down to earth to wear someone else’s crown.
  
  I shot Stephanie a few questions via myspace, and she responded resplendently:
  
  
  
  1. Do you relate at all to any music you hear out there right now being made by either your peers/other? If so, who, why? What do you wish there was more of in the musical world right now? Where would you like to see your music go?
  
  I do relate to other musicians, especially people in my position—-you know, poor; we can compare stories about living on rice and beans while trying to find a better day job—-but it's less that I relate to particular musicians and more that I hear moments they make that I sort of fall in love with. For example, there's a Lumberjack Isto song with a killer line in the middle about how everything we need we can find in Mother Nature. More globally, there’s a monolithic Ani Difranco song called Serpentine about making the political personal and vice-versa, which is literally two chords. While I don’t agree with her in every political ideology she discards, there is a moment there in which she says “Why don’t you just give me my Judy Garland drugs and let me get back to work, because the Empire State Building is the tallest building in New York and I always got the feeling you just liked to hear it fall… off your tongue.” So much of that song I adore, in terms of the poetry—the dichotomy of the word “you”--and the space she uses. I do wish there was more of that—more moments that make people stop and listen. I also love Radu Lupu, a Czech pianist I first heard when I lived in Cleveland. He isn’t that big a person (so I can relate there), but he has such a warm, huge sound, and this incredible use of space. A teacher of mine once explained, “He plays a phrase and you think, ‘That’s it. That’s the way it was meant to be played. That is the truth.’” Some human beings just have a particular quality, a talent maybe, that makes everyone around them listen. I want to hear more of that, and I want to be more like that. For me, that’s really the only place I want my music to go; I love the moments when you’re playing, and you’re having a great time with your collaborators, and you’re in a bar full of drunk people who couldn’t care less about who you are or what you have to say. And all of a sudden, even if for a second, they all stop to listen to you, not because they feel obligated, but because you have created a moment that makes them listen.
  
  
  
  2. How do you see your own music evolving? Where is it headed?
  
  I want to be more light-hearted. My mom dragged me to see The Color Purple with her before the strike. I had read the book and was not at all looking forward to a night of all of that. I guess when I think of Broadway, which generally I don’t, I think of Spamalot. I just couldn’t imagine a musical about rape and racial conflict. But it really is a beautiful production. I actually cried. On Broadway! What struck me most about it, though, was the fact that—to quote Eddie Izzard—that music is consistently so happy in spite of everything that has happened. Sometimes I feel my music getting more and more angry, which is strange, because I'm really a good-natured person; the challenge is to make "happy" interesting.
  
  
  
  3. Can you give a little mini bio of your background in music- how your passion started, and all the dark alleys it's taken you to?
  
  I started playing on an old upright my mother had in our living room in Chicago when I was 5. I would run around making up songs and singing, and I would make my brothers sing in harmony with me. When I was 6, I tried to teach myself The Nutcracker by ear after we saw the play, so my mom took me to my first piano lesson. I also started playing the cello when I was 10 and was subsequently introduced to chamber music. Ever since then, playing with other people in any context has been one of my favorite things.
  
  I also remember being very young and listening to the soundtrack from Flashdance on a record player in our basement. I think most young girls would try to re-choreograph the dance, but I would listen to the record and play along on air guitar, which is hilarious because I don't even think there's a guitar in that song...
  
  When I was 17, I played in the Young Concert Artists' International Competition in New York, where I met some professors from The Juilliard School. That was probably the first time it occurred to me that this was a business more so than an art form. This is also when it was made very clear to me that, if I wanted to play and be taken seriously, I had to try to do it immediately. I went to The Cleveland Institute of Music for college and got a degree in piano performance. I hated it at the time, mostly because Cleveland is sort of a bummer of a city when you're young and a ball of energy. I remember that I was just so bitter and angry all the time, and then I went to visit a friend of mine in New York around Christmas of my junior year. I flew back to Cleveland and was riding the train across town in a snowstorm, and nobody else was in the train, and I laid my head on the seat in front of me and just sort of watched the city go by sideways. I fell in love with it then. I also know now, having gotten to know the playing of a number of musicians from different conservatories around the country, especially in New York, that I was in Cleveland at the end of a golden age of classical music-making. It was incredible. I miss it a little bit, and I'm sad that I only truly appreciated it posthumously, but that's how that goes.
  
  I graduated from college and at this time was living in a Ward 8 building on Cleveland's east side. I have never been a very disciplined person naturally, so it was difficult for me to adopt the pianist's lifestyle. I finally figured out that I had to make myself get up at 7, drink some coffee, and practice until about 2 in the afternoon. Then I'd have rehearsals or concerts or I'd teach little kids, and then I'd go out and drink at one of the three bars in the city. I had four friends. I learned to be content in almost complete solitude, and I was distracted because I was playing so much music all the time. Then I went to the Aspen Music Festival for my third time. I was living in a beautiful place with very good friends, and I was practicing all day and studying with a very famous teacher. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not a very happy kid, but I had no reason not to be. I came home, packed up, and moved to New York in a van. I had no gigs, no job. Very dramatic. I think I just had no idea what I wanted to be doing, so I figured I'd move into the place where I could do everything all the time. It was awful when I think about it now--I lived on St. Nicholas Avenue in this shitty apartment with florescent lights and white white white everywhere, and we had mold problems and bed bugs and my ceiling was falling down. If I came home after midnight, I had to watch it because there were these men there who freebased cocaine in the lobby of my building. I worked at a cafe downtown and I didn't play any kind of music for about 6 months, mostly because I couldn't find a piano to play on. Honestly though, I had never been happier. It's funny- some people would ask me if I felt a great void having completely dropped something I took seriously for almost 20 years. But any ex-classical musician will tell you (at least the ones I know), we don't miss it really. I've begun to take great stock in new things, and as a result, I feel very free.
  
  Right now, I'm just in this amorphous kind of limbo. I'm doing research at a Center for Ethics, which feeds my "maybe I'll go to law school" impulse; I read a lot (about particle physics lately, which is weird) and go to many more concerts than I did when I was younger, which feeds me, good or bad; I write my own music, which is new to me. I think it's as if I'm making up for the time spent having a self-disciplined childhood. I've been writing in tiny spurts forever, but I never finished a full song or piece of poetry really until I moved here. I wouldn't say the level of music making is better in the city, but I'm surrounded by opportunities to perform all the time, so that pushes me to get off my ass.
  
  
  
  4. I feel like your music and music are both so complex and demand a lot from the listener. For people like me, who get what you're doing, it's brilliant. But, a lot of people out there say the emphasis has to be on one or the other? Do you agree or disagree? Which would you say you're more concerned with- the music, or the lyrical content of your songs. What message are you trying to put across in your writing?
  
  My background is in classical music, and I got into writing my own tunes by way of improvisational jazz (which I still can’t do and am convinced I will never be able to), so in a way, it’s not my fault (haha). Actually, this is something that is very important to me. In part, I stopped playing classical music because I felt guilty; the most I could ever do was to provide a very specific demographic with about 2 hours worth of transcendence via entertainment—at least that was the ultimate goal. But no matter what I did, no matter how hard I worked, a. it was not my music and b. it in no sociopolitical manner related to the world around me. So I started writing, mostly about political problems I had with my surroundings. My writing is usually then more lyrically-based, and the music becomes almost a word-painting-esque byproduct. I wouldn't say it's so complex that it demands too much from the listener, but it's as if there are many kinds of songs in which you can find joy in the way there are many kinds of conversations in which you can enjoy yourself. There are the poppy love ballads that stick with you when you're walking somewhere and end up connecting themselves to memories of that moment. That's maybe comparable to being in a bar with a bunch of drunk and rambunctious people and getting kicked out of it--not a lot of substance, but you'll always remember it fondly. Then there are the long songs that you can't necessarily sing in the shower but that have maybe one or two lines in them which make you go, "hmm." Those are more like sitting around all night drinking boxed wine with three people you grew up with and talking, or something. My writing tends to be more like the latter, partially because I'm not good at writing catchy hooks, and partially because there are many important and incidentally complex goings-on in the world, apart from romantic heartache, that I believe need a voice.
  
  Actually, the last song I wrote is about a Jewish parable that boys commonly read before Bar Mitzvah. It’s in part a joke about how rabbis argue incessantly because Jewish people like to argue. In the end, God emerges to tell one of the rabbis that He is siding with the other. The stubborn lonely rabbi says to God, “The Torah is not in heaven. We pay no attention to voices.” Man, not mysticism, has the last word, which otherwise never occurs in theology. This is to say that it is so important that we use our brains, that any kind of conviction or ideology is meaningless if we don’t think and argue through it. So I guess I write complicated stuff because I want people to get into it, talk about it, think about it, worry about it, write about it, and find joy in it. And I refuse to believe that anything a person can write is empirically too much for any other person to understand. I have more faith in people than that.
  
  
  
  5. Forgive me for being trite, but who is your music goddess?
  
  Nina Simone.
  
  
  
  6. How'd you get to be so cool?
  
  I have an amazing family and friends and a fairly steady supply of whisky within my grasp at all times.

• TVD Live: Stephanie Nilles at the Zender Agenda House, 10/2/2011 [+ Show ]
  

  "To be frank, this girl’s got a pair and she’s not quiet about it! Don’t believe me? Just look so fa..."To be frank, this girl’s got a pair and she’s not quiet about it! Don’t believe me? Just look so far as her album, “Fuck Off, Grizzly Bear”." Her sultry voice slyly works the room; it leaves you haunted as it dissipates like a night fog."

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