News Press - Santa Barbara, CA

Everything In Its Right Place

IN A TOWN KNOWN FOR PRODUCING ROCKIN' FOUR-PIECE BANDS, PETRACOVICH IS AN ANOMALY

By Ted Mills - NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

"Petracovich music is Santa Barbara music," says Jessica Peters, whose one-woman show returns to Santa Barbara tonight.

To her, Santa Barbara is where the magic first happened in her music career, and she is as yet loathe to change the formula. Even though she has since moved to San Rafael, work on the second album continues here in town at Tad Wagner's Buonapasta Studios. "I spend four days out of every month down here creating music," she says.

If that sounds like a drawn-out recording session, consider that the first Petracovich album, 2002's "Blue Cotton Skin," took a whole year to record. Since then, Peters has toured the country promoting the album with a series of intimate live performances, accompanied by her manager and husband Ryan Malmberg.

etracovich, named after her great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant, may have earned the title of best Santa Barbara pop group that doesn't actually live in Santa Barbara.

She may also be one of the most underrated. In a town known for producing rockin' four-piece bands and guitar-bearing singer-songwriters, Petracovich is an anomaly - a classically trained pianist with an ethereal voice backed by trip-hop electronics and laced with sensible pop hooks. The sound is a bit like Aimee Mann fronting Portishead, with a dash of Bjork's iciness and Radiohead's digital landscapes. And then again it's a bit like none-of-the-above.

"I often get compared to those artists," she says, "but the latter two are more of a down sound, a bit gloomy, a bit distant. Vocally, I'm attracted to artists like Richard Buckner and Lucinda Williams. They sing the way they sound in real life."

Call her a lapsed folkie, then.

Having been into music all her life, she flowered when attending Westmont College back in the 1990s. With a major in music, she studied piano, and sang in Vespers and with the college's worship band. Outside class, she teamed up with a fellow member of the worship band and played Santa Barbara's small circuit of coffee houses as a folk duo.

When graduation came, she began a day job and bought herself a piano. "I had a fear that I would stop playing," she says. She also dissolved the duo and began what would be a musical hibernation.

A cousin lent Peters his Nord synthesizer and in the privacy of her room she began to experiment. "I had an effects unit and knobs to turn," she says. Most importantly, she had the synth's manual, and tutored herself in the machine's idiosyncrasies. Having come to a creative cul-de-sac with the usual folk styles, she suddenly found an entire world of new sounds opened up in front of her. Her job was flexible enough to take one day off a week and she devoted those hours instead to making demos.

She contacted Tad Wagner, bass player for the band Buellton and also a Westmont alum (he had been part of the folk duo Wagner and Hughes, "Westmont's musical gods," as Peters describes them). At first, he wasn't interested. Peters continued undaunted, until her demo tape was bursting with 15 songs. A year later, she again contacted Wagner and invited him over for dinner, where he finally heard the entire tape. "I was so nervous," she recalls, "I sat there with my eyes closed."

Wagner agreed to take on the project and the two settled into the studio for the long birthing process of "Blue Cotton Skin." Years of listening to Radiohead and Sparklehorse had not just influenced Peters' songwriting, but now came to bear on the production. Peters layered on synth and keyboards; Wagner added guitars and effects. More importantly, he helped shape often unwieldy songs down into gems. "I tend to write long, like five or six minutes," she says. "Tad taught me how to cut things down to the essence, to keep things flowing." He also gave her tasks.

"Tad gave me one night to write a track. I got home and went to work." That track was the ambient instrumental "Rosebud." "I was happy right then to be a musician. I learned that it was legit to write without a vocal."

Neither does Peters write lyrics in the "diary set to music" style of confessional songwriting. On tracks like "Bird's in Flight," "Footsteps" and KCRW favorite "Nighttime," with its creepy music-box vocals and winding staircase of a melody, feelings and moods are expressed like blurry snapshots. There's just enough information to suggest reality, but the connections are there for the listener to make.

"All the songs are about my life, yes," Peters agrees, "but they're expressed in a poetic way. It's not just the feeling itself, but trying to figure out where that feeling comes from."

"Bird's in Flight," she says, comes from a late-night visit to a national supermarket chain and feeling stuck in a capitalistic culture, surrounded by artificial foods and additives. "I wanted to wash my hands of the whole thing," she says. But the song itself is all Beatlesesque backing vocals, backbeat handclaps and a circuitous melody. When she sings "I've got what you need/ It's making you bleed," and wrings out those last syllables, you want to join up for whatever she's selling. "It's insidiousness in a nice package," she offers.

The last year has been a series of tours promoting the album and visits back to Buonapasta to work on the follow-up to "Blue Cotton Skin."

In San Rafael, Peters and her husband have turned a room above her father's photography studio into a base of operations, having decided to make this solo act a full-time career. There they learned how to book clubs and run the press for each city they play in.

Peters also learned the personal side of performing in cities where nobody knows your name. "New York City has so many bands playing every night. We played the Mercury Lounge and about 10 people turned up," she recalls. "Then they left.

"I've learned not to take it personally," she says. Malmberg has also been helpful. "He told me, 'You have to let go of the audience.' "

After a similar show in Milwaukee, Peters said she really tuned out matters of who or who didn't turn up. The next night in Minneapolis, they were rewarded with a full house and a club owner who had spent the previous week promoting Petracovich himself, unasked.

The new album will be released this winter. Meanwhile, more and more new songs are being debuted on tour. "The new songs are more mature. I've been exposed to more music. I'm making songs that completely fit me," Peters says.