Delicate Cutters

The music from Birmingham's Delicate Cutters is described as a despairing, (yet hopeful), heart-string tugging, haunting effort. The group is fronted by Janet Simpson, whose song crafting is a strange mix of appalachian folk, country, and pop.

Kevin Nicholson's Irish tinged folk stylings on fiddle soar above Pete Szelenbaum's crunchy, warbling guitars. Chance Shirley alternates between static and percussive style of drumming and filling in on bass guitar while Brian Moon leaves his usual position as the melodic root of the band to play pinefully folky accordian and pump organ. Simpson rounds it all out with her song sketches on acoustic guitar, pianos and organs.

Delicate Cutters have appeared on stages throughout the Southeast. Their latest CD is "We Are Not Lovers".

http://www.wbhm.org/Tapestry/bands/DelicateCutters.html - http://www.wbhm.org/Tapestry/bands/DelicateCutters.html

I've had the pleasure of seeing Delicate Cutters perform several times and even after the tenth time I'm still amazed at how powerful this band is. Hailing from little Birmingham, Alabama the band includes lead singer, pianist, guitar player and song writer Janet Simpson, bass, accordian and keyboard player Brian Moon, drummer Chance Shirley and mad fiddelist Kevin Nicholson.

I won't lie. The band has a unique, whole sound but I'm always mesmerized by front lady Janet. Her voice is resonant and angelic and she is so passionate that she nearly demands you stop your nonsense chatter, set down your PBR and...just listen.

Listen to The Delicate Cutters' album We Are Not Lovers. And read an interview with Janet below.

How long have you been playing music?
I started playing music just as soon as I could. There are pictures of me, pictures that I actually remember being taken, as young as 2 in playing a little air organ wearing headphones and holding a microphone. I recorded songs for my parents on the family stereo.

What was the first instrument you learned to play? A neighbor kid who was nine years older than me had a piano, and she took piano lessons. Whenever she practiced in the afternoon, I would go over and watch her and listen. When she got up from the piano, I would sit down and mimic what I had heard, on a very rudimentary level, of course. After a few years of my begging, my parents put a lien on their car and bought a piano and signed me up for piano lessons. I was seven years old.

How old were you when you first starting writing music? The first song that I really sat down, wrote, composed and recorded on my boom-box was called “What would the children say?”, which was a sort of environmental protest song. I wrote it with my friend Liz Durrett (Warm Records) at Marine Biology Camp on Skidaway Island when we were in 6th grade. I also wrote a very Bangles-inspired song called “Black Sheep”, that year. I had just discovered poetry at this age, as well as The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, R.E.M., Violent Femmes, and The Cure. I was trying to work out some very dark feelings through my poems (whose maudlin titles included “Clouds”, “Alone”, and “Suicide”), so it seemed pretty natural to start putting it all to music.

Who were other musicians/bands and people in your life that inspired you? Very early in my life, my parents’ music influenced me: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick, The Mamas and The Papas, 5th Dimension, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, Carole King, Linda Rondstadt, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Burt Bacharach, and Simon & Garfunkel. Later on, I would say my biggest influences could be attributed to Kristin Hersh/Throwing Muses, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Pixies, The Jayhawks, Vic Chesnutt, Suzanne Vega, The Velvet Underground, Low, Yo La Tengo, Rickie Lee Jones, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, The Band, Lucinda Williams, Pere Ubu, The Talking Heads, David Bowie, and lots and lots of art music and jazz music.

You have a classical music background. Can you talk about that training?
From age 12 to age 17, I studied piano with a lady named Mary Ann Knight. She’s a fabulous woman, a New Yorker displaced to the south to teach at Shorter College. Both she and her husband are very widely respected pianists and pedagogues, so it was wonderful to be under their tutelage. Mrs. Knight taught me the poetry behind music. It’s a shame that more people don’t get exposed to art music and find it to be stuffy or something purely for the upper class. The people who were writing the music were a lot more like you or me. They were poor, starving artists with controversial lifestyles and beliefs. She would tell me about Chopin as though she were dishing the most dishy of all gossip. But it made Chopin, Debussy and Mozart human, and therefore their poetry came alive to me.

In college, I studied composition, form and analysis, theory and history all with one amazing professor, Dr. Edwin Robertson. Just full of wisdom. He opened up the mysteries of music as art, math and science. Now, when I am composing a piece or I hear an interesting piece of music, I find myself decoding it; it’s like trying to distinguish the shape of a snowflake.
Most recently, my work in the art music realm has involved singing ancient sacred organum and medieval chant with a friend of mine who is a musicologist. She is studying music from a specific region in France from the 11th and 12th centuries.
Also Brian Moon composed a suite of pieces for me consisting of voice, piano and flute. The suite is based on little notes found on scraps of paper including a partial poem, a note to a loved one and a grocery list. I perform the voice part, written for soprano.

What was the first album you ever owned? My most exciting and memorable early music purchase was joining Columbia House in 9th grade (what a scam!) and getting 12 tapes for a penny. On a friend’s recommendation, I ordered a Throwing Muses album. I’d never heard them before, so it was life changing. I also ordered about 3 Smiths albums, 3 Cure albums, Concrete Blonde, The Pixies, Minor Threat and Patti Smith or something. I felt so cool getting to put all those tapes of my very own into my little tape organizer suitcase.

What are you listening these days? These days, I find myself revisiting Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks a whole lot. I loved that album, and recently found it on vinyl on a major vinyl-shopping binge. I also bought a couple of Phoebe Snow records that I am keeping on heavy rotation, an early Ray Charles/Solomon Burke record that I found at a junk store, and my husband just picked up a replacement copy Sugar’s Copper Blue, which is a great fall record.

Delicate Cutters have been around for about four or five years now, how did you guys come together? Chance Shirley (the drummer) and I used to get into drunken debates at Barnstormer’s, (a great, now-defunct pizza joint in Montevallo, AL) about which Replacements album was the all-time greatest. Finally, we decided that he should start playing with me (I had already been playing solo for many years by this point) and Brian just happened to be standing nearby. Brian’s a great musician, also classically trained. Both Brian and Chance can play a wide range of instruments, so things just fell into place from there. How we happened to snag Kevin is a miracle. He really wanted to play guitar, and he’s a badass guitarist to be sure, but he’s also this really fantastic Irish fiddler, so how could I not convince him to play fiddle? So it stuck.

What is the best thing you can imagine happening to your music career? In other words, what is your music life dream? Of course, everybody would love to make a living doing what she loves to do. I guess that as long as people will tolerate me making music, I will make it, whether it pays the bills or not. The joy really comes in the process.

What is your favorite song you've written? I’ve never really had a favorite color, and I’m the same way with songs. It’s probably like choosing a favorite child. Or maybe I’m just too moody. There are times when one of my songs will really resonate to me when I perform it, and I relive it or find new meaning in it. Lately, its been a couple of the newer songs which are in the process of being recorded for the next album – one being the title track, “Some Creatures” and the other being a song called “Me and the Birds.”

Delicate Cutters can be seen on Myspace and in and around Birmingham, Alabama. Janet also plays with another local Birmingham band called Teen Getaway.

http://www.sprymag.com/artists/janet_simpson.php - Spry Magazine

Featuring members of both Teen Getaway and The Maisleys, the Delicate Cutters could be called a Birmingham supergroup. Unlike most supergroups, though, the sound got smaller and gentler rather than larger and louder. With smooth violin work and beautiful vocals, the Delicate Cutters play soft, thoughtful folk-tinged songs. A Warm Day in April is a great showcase of Janet Simpson’s gorgeous voice and their willingness to let a song speak for itself.

http://theyellowstereo.com/2007/07/spotlight-on-alabama/ - theyellowstereo.com