Folk singer Susan Levine of Newburyport has a new album out called "Atlas."
(Globe Staff Photo / Essdras M. Suarez)
Susan Levine says the title of her new CD, "Atlas," can be taken as a literal and emotional travelogue or as a reference to the mythical hero bearing the weight of the world. The project maps the singer-songwriter's journey from dark days to better times - right onto folk-friendly radio stations around the country and a release party on Sunday at Club Passim in Cambridge.
"The oldest song on the record is '1,000 Open Doors,' which was written the day after Sept. 11," Levine said recently. "I had gotten married in 1999, to a person at that point I was with for eight years, and we had been married for three years, and it started to go south, and then Sept. 11 happened, and it all kind of crystallized in that song the day after the event."
The first verse:
Ain't life like a hole in your pocket
you don't know where everything goes
keep throwing in nickels and quarters
and minutes and hours
when all you can feel is the cold through the holes.
Levine was divorced in 2003, and the songs since then "are more about coming out of kind of a dark place and coming into more of a sense of home and a sense of belonging. Somewhere in there, Tom and I got together, and we kind of started seeing each other, and he listened to my body of work, and we started thinking about a record, and these songs sort of fit together."
Tom is her husband, Thomas Eaton, of Thomas Eaton Recording in Newburyport. According to the liner notes, he "produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered" the CD (on their own Riverwide Records), as well as playing "Hammond organ, piano, lap steel guitar, percussion, accordion, vibes, electric guitars, and keyboards."
The day of the interview was actually the couple's third anniversary, "and I'm doing press!" Levine said with a laugh.
So Levine is in a happy place, with husband, baby, dog, half-house in Newburyport, and a new CD. But just how much do the songs really reflect her experiences? Like "Letter Home," for instance, about a teenage girl who follows an older man south and finds her life going sadly wrong. Is that written from experience? She laughs again.
"Not exactly. I think the way I write everything is not strictly autobiographical. I start with an emotional truth and perhaps a situation that might be somewhat truthful, and then I'm more of a story writer," although "things happened," she admitted.
"Actually," she remembers, "that song, I had just read the book 'The Lovely Bones,' about a young girl who gets raped and watches everything from the afterlife, and I think I had been thinking about that book, and the story just evolved from there.
"Inspiration strikes, and for me the songs that take the least time and are the least labored are the best. Songs that kind of feel like they write themselves. 'Home' was like that. 'Home' I wrote in 10 minutes and played it for Tom and played it to my friend Rob Laurens, and they're like, 'Oh, wow, it's a great song.' That tends to be a song people really respond to."
The arrangements on "Atlas" are rich with guitars, mandolin, and other instruments that give it an Americana feel. But what you take away from the first bars is Levine's mezzo-soprano voice, which has some of the wistful knowledge of Dolly Parton at her best, along with a girlish tone that calls to mind Victoria Williams.
"Her voice is unique. It stands out," said program director Brian Quinn at WUMB-FM (91.9), which is playing the album, especially the song "Wings." "I'm not sure how to describe it, but it just grabs you. . . . The images that she creates with her writing - it's written from emotion, it's written from the heart, it's written from her experience. You can tell that she's not just cranking out songs to be cranking out songs."
"Working with your wife is just a whole other level of intimacy that allows you to maybe even be more candid," Eaton said in a separate interview. "It's far easier for me to say, 'I know you can do that better,' or 'That was great.' And to have a sense of confidence both about her life and where she's coming from with the work and what it needs to say . . . and obviously I know what she's capable of, having heard her more than anybody."
No domestic strife over missed notes? "No. . . . There are definitely moments where we get into that, but the way you resolve it becoming an issue is acknowledging everybody has their eyes on the same prize," Eaton said.
Levine grew up in Medford, in a house of musical split personality. Her father was "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn" who nonetheless grew up loving country and folk and Irish music. "We'd take Sunday drives and he'd listen to "The Irish Hour" on the radio, and we used to make fun of him," she said. "But it's funny, all those things you mock come to influence you."
Meanwhile, their mother was taking Laura and her two brothers to Broadway musicals, "and that's where my heart lay for a long time," Levine said.
She trained as a musical theater performer and got some work in New York, but she was touring Europe as Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol" when revelation struck. Someone popped a copy of Shawn Colvin's album "Steady On" in the stereo of their touring van.
"I thought, 'Wow, this is a singing voice I really respond to and a type of music I really responded to,' " she said. "There was also a sort of honesty in her lyrics, and a poetry, too."
Levine had journals full of poetry and stories, "and the seeds sort of started sowing in my mind about then, that this is something I could try."
Back in New York, she said: "I wrote my first couple of really bad songs, but there was something about it. Even though they were bad and I didn't know what I was doing, they felt really honest to me, more honest than theater had ever been."
She ended up in Santa Fe, playing open mikes while earning the rent singing Broadway show tunes and serving enchiladas (same job!) in a local tourist trap. But as a self-described type A personality, it didn't feel like enough. She went back to school to become a music therapist.
"What I realized about my songwriting is that it was very therapeutic for me, so if it works this way for me, writing songs and playing music - could I help facilitate that kind of process for other people," Levine said.
She works for Thom Pentucket Area Early Intervention, a public/private partnership that sends her into the homes of special-needs children up to 3 years old - with developmental delays, autism, and the like - to work with the children and parents through music.
Starting that career meant coming back to New England to attend Lesley College and be near her family as well as join the folk scene. And she kept writing and singing.
Flip through the atlas faster now - marriage, first record, divorce. Somewhere along the way, she sang on sessions at Eaton's studio and eventually they began seeing each other. Then: new marriage, son Henry - now 2 and known to all as Huck and the "Atlas" CD.
" 'I'm on maternity leave! I'll be able to finish my CD,' " Levine said with a laugh. "That's why it took three years to complete."
Tickets for Susan Levine's CD release event are available at http://www.clubpassim.org.
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