In her recently-released seventh album “Here and Now,” St. Louis vocalist Erin Bode decided to try to something a little different.
“We’ve been getting requests for a few years now to do another record of standards, which goes back to the first album that I made,” she explained to St. Louis on the Air contributor Steve Potter.
For “Here and Now,” Bode’s group recorded songs originally written by artists such as Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin.
While some of them could be classified as love songs, Bode said she wanted to go deeper with this album by singing about more than just romance.
“They talk about the other parts of life,” she said. “Like just wishing you had more time to be with the ones you love and thinking about some of your regrets and the things that you wish you’d done differently.”
While she enjoys singing about these deeper issues, Bode is not one to look back regretfully on earlier days.
“I’ve always been kind of grateful for getting a little bit older,” she said. “I’m not one of those people that wishes I was still young.”
In her latest album, which she describes as a mixture between jazz and folk music, Bode highlights the instruments used by her team in production. Each instrument, along with the year it was made, is listed on the back cover of the CD.
“It just kind of became this sort of collection of these beautiful instruments that we used for this recording, so we thought it would be nice to tell people a little bit about the instruments they were listening to,” she said.
One of the songs on the album – “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” – holds a special place in Bode’s heart.
“When I was about eight years old, one of my mom’s sisters came for a visit, and she brought with her a whole bag full of 45s for my sister and me to listen to, and we just poured through them and loved them,” she said. “One of them was ‘Chuck E’s in Love’ by Rickie Lee Jones, and the B-side of it was ‘Saturday Afternoons in 1963.’ I would listen to it over-and-over – it’s just kind of a mesmerizing song.”
"We live in the here and now, despite the fact that we oftentimes think about the past quite a bit or we may worry about the future."
This song, along with the others, follows a theme that inspired Bode to give the album its name.
“We live in the here and now, despite the fact that we oftentimes think about the past quite a bit or we may worry about the future,” she explained. “Really the here and now is the only thing we can control.”
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