Stevens: inspired by collaboration.
A few years back, Becca Stevens was a little like a student in a college English Comp class — all she really needed was a good theme to inspire her.
The jazz-pop-folk chanteuse, who’s set to play an intimate Valentine’s Day gig at Memorial Union’s Fredric March Play Circle, found inspiration in the stories of queens. The 13 songs on her 2017 release Regina weave that monarchical theme through character portraits and the lenses of history (both personal and world), poetry and folklore. It’s thought-provoking, uplifting and heartbreaking — sometimes in the same song.
But Regina did more than just raise Stevens’ profile nationally. It also revealed some important truths about the North Carolina native’s evolving approach to her craft.
For one, it helped her realize how much she’s inspired by collaboration. The album features work by the legendary David Crosby, along with Stevens’ longtime musical pal, the London-based jazz fusionist Jacob Collier. It also gave her a deep sense of renewed ownership of her music.
“Calling Regina a Becca Stevens album rather than a Becca Stevens Band project pushed me beyond that,” she says. “It brought this totally refreshing perspective to the process. It kept me going.”
The second revelation’s a lot more obvious: Working with a focused theme gives Stevens the vocal inspiration to get through the aspects of songwriting that don’t always come naturally to her.
“In picking a theme, in creating these characters, I strengthened my songwriting voice,” she explains. “And I’ll tell you one thing — it has made interviews a lot more fun. I’m talking about things that inspire me.”
As she’s toured over the last year, she’s become more comfortable sharing that inspiration with her audiences, as the songs have evolved in new directions. “Venus,” the album’s leadoff track, was written at a difficult point in Stevens’ life. Now her perspective on it is very different.
“I feel stronger now when I play it,” she says. “I’ll often put it toward the beginning of my sets.”
Stevens calls the title cut “the anthem of the album.” And even though it’s informed by her upbringing in North Carolina —“family, history and roots” — it also has a undeniable universality.
“It speaks to a lot of people about human struggles we’ve all had,” Stevens says. “Right now, women have lost a sense of their self-worth, and the song has become for me about getting some of that back.”
Stevens isn’t quite ready to articulate the particulars of the next theme to inspire her, but we may already have a clue: Her collaboration with Collier yielded more than a few songs on Regina; it also yielded “Bathtub,” the bustling, percussive single the two released earlier this year.
“It now feels like the beginning of something,” she says. “This is where I was three years ago with Regina.”
