Annie Moscow

Do people over 40 listen to the radio? Dominated by teens and twentysomethings, pop music subjects its older - if hardly gray - audiences to the continual angst of young love. if you're looking for a more mature take on life's relationships, consider local singer and songwriter Annie Moscow. While her influences range from Bartok to Billy Joel, from musical theater to punk, it is the Sturm and Drang of midlife that gives Moscow's music it's power. She performs in Scottsdale this Friday night, backed by her husband, musician Steve Gold

Trained as a classical pianist, Moscow partnered with her husband to write songs for performers such as Sister Sledge and Sarah Vaughn. But about six years ago, she started to write more personal songs. "I gave myself permission to write what I really wanted to say," Moscow explains.

Performing for close friends, Moscow discovered that her songs struck a deep chord with the women in her circle. "My friends would say, "you are writing about my life," she recalls. "The stuff that I was writing about was going on in the lives of so many people, my peers. It just wasn't being said."

"It's All Dissipating," one of the songs on her first CD, Wolves at My Door, describes how family relationships can break down at midlife. "To the Himalayas" explores disillusionment in the search for a spiritual path. And "Buy The Bitch aq Cadillac" is a theatrical, midlife tantrum put to music. - PHOENIX NEW TIMES

Annie Moscow plays the piano beautifully and has a great talent for songwriting. Her music is thoughtful, emotionally complex and mature. She has a sound based on show tunes, jazz and pop. The range on this album is dazzling. From the boisterous "Buy the Bitch a Cadillac" to the reflective "To the Himalayas" and back again. "Cinderella Suite" dissects the myth and shows the grim reality lurking behind it.

The more I listen to this music the more I discover. This is a keeper. - Collected Sounds Women in Music

Perhaps inevitably, considering she's created a one-woman show and written songs performed by Sarah Vaughn, Sister Sledge and (ahem) Mickey Mouse, a pop theatricality permeates Moscow's material. While her dramatic delivery overwhelms the delicate poignance of ballads like "House of Cards", Moscow's lyrics skillfully empathize with lost characters (the title track) and capture the intimate losses of time ("my grandma moved across the world when she was still quite young/She found a life of freedom but she lost her mother tongue"). Should appeal to Roches fans. At Coffee Gallery Backstage Saturday.
TRAX by Bliss - Pasadena Weekly (Mar 12, 2009) - by Bliss - Pasadena Weekly

Poet/pianist Annie Moscow’s entertaining one-woman theater revue is fitting for these money-tight times.
We live in an era of homes in suburbia lost to foreclosures, imminent job layoffs at all socio-economic levels, and cherished career dreams dashed by harsh economic realities.
For just over an hour the audience at Moscow’s one-act musical interspersed with her poignant philosophical musings were able to forget their own financial problems – or as least laugh at them while listening to this seasoned musician’s songs and stage banter about life’s bittersweet lessons.
The name of Annie’s stage show that opened this past weekend is “Philosophical Musings (of a Suburban Dwelling Free Spirit Ex Hippie Wannabe with Longings for Connections and Security).” Whew! Try saying that in one breath.
The title pretty much sums up Annie’s hard-edged but vulnerable personality and her personal, poignant outlook on life. www.anniemoscow.com
The show continues this upcoming weekend at Theatre Artists Studio, 4848 E. Cactus Road, # 406, in Scottsdale, Friday through Sunday, Sept. 11-13. The Friday and Saturday shows start at 7:30 p.m., the Sunday show is a matinee and starts at 2 p.m. Call the box office at (602) 765-0120 for tickets, or visit www.theatreartistsstudio.org.
Tickets are $18, $10 for students. And what do you get for your hard-earned cash? You get a mix of Annie Moscow-penned songs and imaginative lyrics from her two CDs and live shows. You get insightful story-telling and get to meet Annie’s life experiences and perspectives in the form of friends who would make quirky characters for an outlandish, surrealistic novel. Except that these folks are so weird they must be real.
Characters like Drew, the high schoolmate who looked so hot but turned out to be gay. Like her woman friend who calls herself the “Orange Juice Fairy.” And Stan, her oh-so-lucky friend who lives only 11 blocks from the beach in Santa Monica, while Annie’s stuck in East Valley subdivision.
Or listen to whimsical lyrics welcoming you to suburbia, “Where the beds are warm, and the floors are clean, and the dogs are fat, and the lawns are green, and we have the best stores that you’ve ever seen.”??The conversations about Annie’s experiences with these people are set to the soundtracks of Annie’s musical compositions: “To the Himalayas,” about her yen for adventure, “Artificial Cheer,” where suburban parties are set-ups for selling you the products of home-based businesses, and “Jazz Cat,” about her romantic relationship with a musician who wanted to be a jazz sideman but wound up playing at Bar Mitzvahs.
Those familiar with Annie Moscow’s performances know the songs from her two CDs, “Wolves at My Door” and “Visible.” Or they may have seen the show in a rudimentary form when she previously performed some of these pieces at the Lunchtime Theater program at the Herberger Theater Center.
So when the Theatre Artists Studio folks asked her to grow the skits into a one-woman show, she first went to watch one of Carrie Fisher’s one-woman shows about alcoholism. Annie says she figured if Fisher could bare her soul in front of an audience, so could she.
The result was “Philosophical Musings,” a delightful, thought-provoking mix of story-telling, songs, and audience interaction from an ex hippie.
Go visit Annie’s world, where mid-life crises bite down hard, lost opportunities complete with dreams gone wrong, and we ponder the personal prices we pay for four walls – and are able to laugh all the while. - PHOENIX CULTURAL EVENTS EXAMINER/Ruben Hernandez

Whatever else she is, Annie Moscow may be the most important Arizona musician you’ve never heard of.

She calls herself a poet and storyteller. And she is that, though the description leaves out tunesmith, singer, pianist, and theater artist.

She says her songs are nearly genre-less, which is true, though it’s also true they at various times fit multiple genres including pop, rock, folk, jazz and even art song.

- ARIZONA LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE/Ken LaFave

Storytelling comes naturally to Annie Moscow, both in the songs she writes and in the chatter that comes between them in concert.
“People are always coming up to me and saying, “Where’s the musical?” she says.
So it didn’t seem like that much of a stretch when she agreed to develop a one-woman show for the Lunch Time Theater program at the Herberger Theater Center. But then she started to get nervous.
“I’d never seen a one-person show, and yet I was going to do one,” she recalls. “So a friend and I went to see one of Carrie Fisher’s one-woman shows - it was one of the ones about alcohol. After the show, we just looked at each other. I thought, ‘If she can do that... ‘
“I suddenly had a boost of confidence.”
A mix of songs, storytelling and audience interaction, her show came off so well that Theatre Artists Studio invited her to develop an expanded version, which she performs this month. it has a self-explanatory title: “Philosophical Musings of a Suburban Dwelling Free Spirit Ex-Hippie Wannabe With Longings for Connection and Security.”
“I always wanted to write one of those books with a title too long for the cover,” she says.
Moscow had an artsy upbringing on the East Coast. Her father gave her her first piano lessons, and she was also into art, poetry, theater and dance. She figured she was on course to be a concert pianist, although that wasn’t necessarily her dream.
“I was one of maybe three best pianist in my high school. And you think you’re pretty hot stuff,” she says. But when she went to college, she was surrounded by musicians with as much or more talent.
“I realized that it’s a big world, and even if you can’t be the cream-of-the-crop concert pianist, there are a bazillion things you can do,” she says.
She worked in the theater as a musical director and ended up moving out West with her no-former husband, a musician who continues to be a songwriting partner. She has lived in the Valley for nearly two decades, balancing motherhood with her singer-songwriter career.
The former role plays a part in her one-woman show, along with observations on suburban existence in postmodern America. One bit she call “a life in parties,” comparing the kind of shindigs folks throw when they’re 21 with the very different gatherings that occur in middle age.
“They’re just snapshots of life,” she says. “If there’s any central core, it’s that there are no easy answers and life is full of choices. And we may think we make those choices with eyes open, but then when we get there it’s something different.” - THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC/Kerry Lengel

Whatever else she is, Annie Moscow may be the most important Arizona musician you’ve never heard of.

She calls herself a poet and storyteller. And she is that, though the description leaves out tunesmith, singer, pianist, and theater artist.

She says her songs are nearly genre-less, which is true, though it’s also true they at various times fit multiple genres including pop, rock, folk, jazz and even art song.

- Arizona Lifestyle Magazine

We're creating all types of new art, especially performance art. New artists, like poet/pianist Annie Moscow, are quietly connecting with their audience by sharing a vulnerability that often startles us with its familiarity to our own thoughts, fears and frustrations. It's as if our everyday lives are being given a new perspective when we see and hear our "own" stories woven into rhythm, color and rhyme.

Annie Moscow is one of those new artists whos songs have come out of an unlikely experience; the suburban housewife who feels neglected and invisible. But think about it; neglect and invisibility are universal themes. Annie Moscow is a singer/storyteller like the troubadours of old, influencing audiences by weaving our everyday stories into poignant poetry, with music that is thoughtful, emotionally complex and mature. She has a sound that's based on show tunes, jazz and pop. She is creating modern day mythology by telling stories from a women's perspective. - DRAMA BEAT cover story/Lou Hunt

Not just another 'girl with guitar'

East Valley musician Annie Moscow's fusion of folk and rock has drawn comparisons to Fiona Apple and Tori Amos. And while the 40-something pianist, singer and songwriter says such comparisons are flattering, she admist they're also immensely frustration.

"If you have 10 incredibly talented female acts, the media will say, 'Oh, its just another whiny girl, it's just another girl with guitar.' But then you have all these boy bands who all look the same and all sound the same, but they're seen as completely different entities. When you're a female musician and you share the littlest thing in common with another female musician, people tend to lump you in a category a lot faster."

A veteran songwriter of more than 20 years, Moscow has penned songs for artists from Sister Sledge to Sarah Vaughn to Mickey Mouse. When she and her husband, keyboardist Steve Gold, moved from Los Angeles nearly a decade ago, the couple began writing and performing children's music. A nationwide tour followed, but soon Moscow found herself writing music for an older, "more experienced" audience.

The music, the songs, just started coming and I tried not to go with it because a lot of them were darker than I thought I wanted to be," Moscow explains. "But the album was the easiest thing in the world to write because that's what wanted to come out."

The result was "Wolves," which features a diverse line-up of songs, from the delicate, impressionistic "Dried Up and Dying", to the rollicking, in-your-face "Buy The Bitch a Cadillac."

Lori Anne Daley of Scottsdale was one of the many in attendance at Moscow's February show at the Kerr Cultural Center.

"She's just an incredible performer. She's got a great voice and her music is so mature. I hope we see a lot more of her." Daley pauses for a moment. "It won't be right if she doesn't make it." - Get Out/The Tribune

With a 20-year resume that includes creative contributions to artists ranging from Sister Sledge to Sarah Vaughn to Mickey Mouse (yes, he's listed in her press package), Annie Moscow is a seasoned songwriter, even though "Wolves At My Door" is her deubt disc. That professionalism is evident in this effort, as Moscow offers ongoing observations about life, longing and middle age regrets. Hers is a singular voice, both in its soaring resonance and in its poignant perspective, a rarity in a musical environment that champions teen queens a bitter babes.

Moscow immediately joins a mature middle-age echelon populated by artists such as Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Janis Ian, Christine Lavin' and others who freely express both triumph and tragedy. Bearing a siilar style, Moscow's music is a mix of sad soliloquies and quirky compositions, of insights and idiosyncrasies. Songs such as "To the Himalayas," "It's All Dissipating" and "Blue Eyes" are typical of her tender tearjerkers, beautiful ballads built on sweeping sophisticated arrangements and touching on truths common to everyday existence. But she can also convey an unexpected edge; "But The Bitch A Cadillac," for example, features a cranky attitude, a chaotic chorus and singing that sounds like a blustery Kate Bush.

On the other hand, that bold approach doesn't always wear well. Mostcow's mischievous mannerisms can come across as more irritating than endearing. "Cinderella Suite" is one such case in point, when her irreverent attitude causes her to adapt some operatic affectations. Fortunately, those few failings are only minor distrations. It's fair to say "Wolves At My Door" is a howling success. - Goldmine

“She’s smart and funny and tells it like it is.”
“Her poetry hits hard. She says what most of us are feeling, but don’t every say.”
“Inspiring.”
“Love that lyrics are intelligent and take you somewhere.”
“A ‘performer’s performer’ ”
“I adore her work. When I see her perform I am seeing absolutely all of a woman. it makes me feel open and raw because she’s tapped something way inside - the music, the feeling... this is a woman who has been through life - the good and the bad.”
“Wow! What marvelous energy!”
- direct quotes from Annie Moscow fans through the years

Arizona musician, Annie Moscow's genre is hard to pin down. She has lived in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles and her career slate includes classical pianist and songwriter for film, television and other recording artists, such as Sarah Vaughn, Kathy Sledge and Mickey Mouse.
“Because I didn’t come to the table with my own music until I was in my 40s, I had so many influences that I just put them all together and it is what it is,” Moscow said. “I don’t know how I would classify though, jsut calling myself a singer-songwriter seems to be able to work.”
Her solo albums, “Visible” and “Wolves at My Door” (both on Melonball Records), cross the boundaries o folk, pop, rock and theater. Moscow is often joined by keyboardist Stevie Gold for live performances, such as her show Saturday at the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena.
Moscow began playing piano at age 4, focusing on a career as a concert pianist throughout high school and college.
“I was super serious and thought that that was where I was going to go, but I didn’t,” she said. “It was like I would be doing Chopin and looking over my shoulder at people playing the Beatles and wished I could have been one of them, but it just wasn’t in the cards for my upbringing.”
After attending Indiana University, Moscow became involved with musical theater and worked as the musical director for a dinner theater outside of Philadelphia. But she still wasn’t satisfied with her life.
“I felt straitjacketed with all that training and I stopped playing completely for 10 years,” she said. “Then I bought myself a little electric piano with headphones and I promised my piano that it would never see a piece of music paper on it. I said I’m just going to use this to relax and to learn how to play by ear and just write on. To this day, “I’ve kept my promise to that piano.”
Moscow married an R&B and rock keyboardist/composer and they began collaborating. her husband would write music and then give the pieces to Moscow so she could ink the lyrics. Among their hits were Kathy Sledge’s (Sister Sledge) 1992 solo tune, “All of My Love” and Disney’s top-selling audio Halloween card, “They Don’t Scare Me,” sung by Mickey Mouse.
Moscow found herself single again and, although she still collaborates with her former husband, she began writing on her own as a way to copy with all that was going on in her life.
“I just started writing all this stuff and then I would sit down at the piano, meditative almost, and think of my poetry and songs would start coming out of it,” she said. “It’s very much stream-of-consciousness.”
Her lyrics, though penned as poetry, are simple and straightforward rather than flower and over-thought.
“It’s my version of plain-speak,” Moscow said. “It’s just coming from what I’m feeling at the moment.”
Moscow capitalizes on her versatility. She can be found performing in folk venues, as well as doubling up on keyboards with Stevie Gold for what she calls “almost techno/rock/pop/storytelling.” She has also starred on stage in one-woman shows that feature a play built around her songs.
Moscow said her Coffee Gallery Backstage concert will be theatrical.
“There’s always drama, she said. “I’m not going to put on a mask or dance or anything, the drama is in the arrangements and the work that we do with the arrangements of the songs. One of the words that I use to describe my songs that seems to work is my songs are like little mini-movies.”
She adds that although the two keyboardists will be playing synthesizer, no sequencing will be used. Every note will be live.
Moscow is currently working on the arrangements for her third CD, which will be recorded live and should be released in May or June. - SAN GABRIEL VALLEY NEWS/Michelle J. Mills

Arizona musician, Annie Moscow's genre is hard to pin down. She has lived in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles and her career slate includes classical pianist and songwriter for film, television and other recording artists, such as Sarah Vaughn, Kathy Sledge and Mickey Mouse.
“Because I didn’t come to the table with my own music until I was in my 40s, I had so many influences that I just put them all together and it is what it is,” Moscow said. “I don’t know how I would classify though, jsut calling myself a singer-songwriter seems to be able to work.”
Her solo albums, “Visible” and “Wolves at My Door” (both on Melonball Records), cross the boundaries o folk, pop, rock and theater. Moscow is often joined by keyboardist Stevie Gold for live performances, such as her show Saturday at the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena.
Moscow began playing piano at age 4, focusing on a career as a concert pianist throughout high school and college.
“I was super serious and thought that that was where I was going to go, but I didn’t,” she said. “It was like I would be doing Chopin and looking over my shoulder at people playing the Beatles and wished I could have been one of them, but it just wasn’t in the cards for my upbringing.”
After attending Indiana University, Moscow became involved with musical theater and worked as the musical director for a dinner theater outside of Philadelphia. But she still wasn’t satisfied with her life.
“I felt straitjacketed with all that training and I stopped playing completely for 10 years,” she said. “Then I bought myself a little electric piano with headphones and I promised my piano that it would never see a piece of music paper on it. I said I’m just going to use this to relax and to learn how to play by ear and just write on. To this day, “I’ve kept my promise to that piano.”
Moscow married an R&B and rock keyboardist/composer and they began collaborating. her husband would write music and then give the pieces to Moscow so she could ink the lyrics. Among their hits were Kathy Sledge’s (Sister Sledge) 1992 solo tune, “All of My Love” and Disney’s top-selling audio Halloween card, “They Don’t Scare Me,” sung by Mickey Mouse.
Moscow found herself single again and, although she still collaborates with her former husband, she began writing on her own as a way to copy with all that was going on in her life.
“I just started writing all this stuff and then I would sit down at the piano, meditative almost, and think of my poetry and songs would start coming out of it,” she said. “It’s very much stream-of-consciousness.”
Her lyrics, though penned as poetry, are simple and straightforward rather than flower and over-thought.
“It’s my version of plain-speak,” Moscow said. “It’s just coming from what I’m feeling at the moment.”
Moscow capitalizes on her versatility. She can be found performing in folk venues, as well as doubling up on keyboards with Stevie Gold for what she calls “almost techno/rock/pop/storytelling.” She has also starred on stage in one-woman shows that feature a play built around her songs.
Moscow said her Coffee Gallery Backstage concert will be theatrical.
“There’s always drama, she said. “I’m not going to put on a mask or dance or anything, the drama is in the arrangements and the work that we do with the arrangements of the songs. One of the words that I use to describe my songs that seems to work is my songs are like little mini-movies.”
She adds that although the two keyboardists will be playing synthesizer, no sequencing will be used. Every note will be live.
Moscow is currently working on the arrangements for her third CD, which will be recorded live and should be released in May or June. - SAN GABRIEL VALLEY NEWS/Michelle J. Mills