Good morning, Lullaby

Songstress Angelina Iapaulo transforms herself into The Lullaby Baxter Trio and rises up as Montreal's latest major-label breakthrough

by CHRIS YURKIW

I should really be calling her Lullaby, but I just can't do it. I imagine that in a few month's time I'll be reading articles about Angelina Iapaulo by other people, and they'll go, "'My sisters and I memorized jazz standards when we were growing up,' says Baxter," or "'Lots of people knew me as never playing guitar, never doing music whatsoever,' says Lullaby."

But I know her as Angelina, the girl who got signed to Atlantic Records just 18 months after picking up the acoustic. Angelina, the girl with the killer Cassandra voice. Angelina, the girl who lives up my street in Mile-End and shows up on my doorstep from time to time in an army jacket and blue lipstick, to drop off a flyer and chat. Angelina, with whom I've struck up just an acquaintanceship since I interviewed her a year ago, when she inked her record deal, which doesn't stop her from recognizing my aging white-boy angst and recommending self-help books.

As Roberto Benigni would say, "She has jumped into my ocean!" And now, with the imminent release of the debut album by her fictitious Lullaby Baxter Trio, Angelina Iapaulo is rooting around in the ocean, ever closer to grasping that oyster that is the world.

Mega metamorphosis
"Do I seem different from a year ago?" asks, um, Lullaby, ever aware of her metamorphoses.

Maybe her hair, but really, this is the same determined, confident, voracious young woman who was telling me a year ago about her recent climb up a steep learning curve--from jumping onstage at Jello Bar, when the guys from Swing Dynamique asked her to sing a few jazz standards, to learning "Leaving on a Jet Plane," in a first guitar lesson from funky-ass folkster Lisa Gamble, to crafting her own tunes with life-and suddenly songwriting-partner Chris Tzotzos. But this time the talk isn't about how Mom & Pop Sounds studio owner Howard Bilerman offered to record Angelina's demo for free after hearing her at Isart, or how her more proper jazz-singing sister, Anna-Lisa, slipped the CD-R to Atlantic staff producer Yves Beauvais in New York.

The past year has been about writing more songs (about horses that don't snore and roosters in love), learning the studio while recording in San Francisco with hot-shot backing band the Oranj Symphonette, and essaying strategies on how to get past the secretaries of potential managers, booking agents and those record company heads.

"It's like an adventure everyday in the record biz for me," says, er, Baxter. "I don't really know how any of it works yet! I'm learning as I go. My sister was saying the other day, 'It's so great that you don't know what it is you're doing, because you just do all these things.' I don't even know what I'm up against. But I know that it wouldn't be my own thing if I just copied other people's methods."

Call girl's calling
The mythologized and monolithic world of the music industry seems a long way from the 29-year-old Iapaulo's earlier days in Montreal, when she was a struggling artiste struggling even harder just to find a form, to hear her calling. She dabbled in the visual arts, published an idiosyncratic zine called What Are You Dealing With?, and specialized in elaborate launches and vernissages. It might be a little too easy to look back now and say that those seem like parties with nothing to celebrate, but they were victories--small but important victories in the trenches of Bohemia. And Iapaulo is too wise to forsake all that she learned there, or her friends. But does she feel like she's found her calling in music?

"I realize now that I always had it," says Iapaulo, who sang for her family while growing up in Toronto and Calgary but always resisted the lure of the stage. "This just seems like a perfect avenue for me to express those same ideas that I wanted to express when I was making physical art and doing all those other things. I will continue to do those things and I totally want to use what I do in music to keep furthering all those ideas, in order to support other artists, or maybe start a record label. I can't wait until I get to choose all the people opening for me, and just showcase all these great [visual] artists and bring that art on the road with me and sell it. You know, instead of Lullaby Baxter keychains.

"Everybody I know is into a lot of the same ideas. We've gone from being slackers to artists, but we've never gone into legitimacy... We've had this whole idea: 'Oh, I don't want to dirty myself in big business.' And it stopped me: even after I was in it, I was holding myself back. But then I thought, 'No, if I learn about this I can do it my way. But if I don't learn about it I can never know how to work it my way. And I'm realizing how much I can do that."

You'd better be prepared if you're going to talk to Angelina Iapaulo about the notion of "sell-out." Before she found her calling she worked as a call girl--and a dancer in strip clubs--what some people might consider the ultimate act of a sell out. Not surprisingly, Iapaulo doesn't see it that way (her B.A. in Women's Studies from Concordia notwithstanding) and speaks of her experiences within the same frame of references as she does art.

"I explored a lot. I learned about myself. I became very comfortable with my body, my sexuality. I realized that people can't take things from you if you don't give them. And that it's not about the physical act, it's about how you view it in your mind that things become dirty or bad or this or that. And I was determined not to feel that way."

"I'm reticent to talk about it because people have very fixed ideas about what that means to them or how they will then look at you, which is too bad. But I think it's really made me strong and tough--and quite a sexy woman, quite a confident woman, quite a performer."

Hatching the Egg
The title of the debut album by the Lullaby Baxter Trio is Capable Egg (Atlantic) and it's set for release in Canada on February 22. It was recorded in San Francisco last spring with Oranj Symphonette--known for collective stuff like their album The Oranj Symphonette Plays Mancini and the efforts of the individuals as session and touring players with everyone from PJ Harvey to Tom Waits--as backing band.

Two other recording stints were planned with NYC Downtown guitarist Marc Ribot (John Zorn, Elvis Costello) and Peter Gabriel protege Joe Arthur, but were scrapped when the Symphonette sessions went so well. The minimalist arrangements with maximum instrumentation (including pump organ, cello, samba whistles, mandolin) complement well Baxter's deep 'n' smoky, jazz-informed voice.

"The Oranj Symphonette is a kooky outfit," says Lullaby, "so what a perfect thing. And they play so many styles, which is what this music requires. Some songs evoke jazz, some evoke pop, some country, some blues. So to have people that can play that stuff but who also don't take it so seriously, is just so phenomenal, such a great idea," that of producer Yves Beauvais (Madeleine Peyroux, James Carter) who signed Iapaulo in late '98.

"Children's songs for adults" was Beauvais' initial reaction to Baxter's very straight rendering of partner Tzotzos' playful words, but the themes are certainly serious.

"All the songs are basically [about] all the things I was going through trying to get into music, and everybody going 'You can't do that!' and 'Who do you think you are?' and 'You better learn to play better.' And my whole aim for music was like 'Don't people do it because they love it and want to communicate?'"

The songs are inhabited by titular characters like the "Knucklehead," the "Rooster in Love," "Spacegirl" and "Mr. Powder-Blue Breadbox," and between this metaphoric fantasyland and an album-ful of sticky melodies, you wouldn't guess that this is the work of folks who hadn't ever written a song just over two years ago. Then again, that's probably one of the reasons why it all comes off as so original.

But this is the music industry--and the local music scene!--where people will kill their mothers for a big-label contract. Hasn't some veteran of the alt-rock wars tried to scare off Iapaulo with tales of record-company reamings, airbrushed tour busses and crappy backstage deli trays?

"I've talked to lots of people who say those kinds of things. But the fact that this happened to me so quickly and almost effortlessly means that there's a reason, there's a purpose. I'm the most unlikely candidate for this to happen to, but the fact that all these factors swirled together for this to happen to me--there's gotta be a reason for it. Like, some thing, some force somewhere is saying, 'You should go here. You didn't even try, everybody else has been trying, and you got there. So you're supposed to be there.'" :



Capable Egg is scheduled for release on February 22