Second wind

Kay Hanley's post-Cleo career

by Matt Ashare

It's a little before 8 p.m. on a school night in May at Q Division studio in Boston, and Kay Hanley is diligently working her way through one of the trickier vocals for her debut solo album, which has been tentatively titled Cherry Marmalade and is due for release in the fall. "Chadie Saves the Day" is an almost jazzy number she's been playing out since the beginning of the year, and it calls for the kind of subtle inflections and sophisticated shadings that would have been lost in the brash bubblegrunge crunch of her long-time band Letters to Cleo. Her husband, ex-LTC guitarist Michael Eisenstein, patiently pages through a rock mag in the studio's control room while producer Mike Denneen, who's also been working with Hanley since the Cleo days, listens intently to her voice, offering words of encouragement and advice between takes as he tries to coax a keeper out of her. Not that she's making him work all that hard: in the era of Pro-Tools digital recording, an engineer can correct for flaws in pitch, rhythm, and even phrasing, but Hanley's nailing the track so consistently that he's pretty much letting her fine-tune the performance herself.

A few minutes later, having secured a couple cans of 50-cent beers from the Q Division soda machine, Hanley's ready to give her singing voice a break and do a little talking. She has a lot to talk about these days. For starters, there's the unexpected success of the Babyface-produced soundtrack to the flopped kid flick Josie & the Pussycats. Although you have to read the fine print to find out that Hanley (not actress Rachel Leigh Cook) does, in fact, sing all the Josie parts, and that she helped pen a couple of the tracks, the 100,000 units the disc moved in its first three weeks would seem to suggest that there's still a market out there for a voice like hers. And on the family front, Hanley and Eisenstein, who are in the process of raising their first kid (Zoey), have just become first-time homeowners in the fine city of Quincy, Massachusetts. In other words, Josie couldn't have come at a better time for the unsigned Hanley and Eisenstein, especially since they're planning on launching her solo career themselves.

"The plan has been to just put the album out ourselves and do a Web-heavy push for it," she explains. "With what we're doing, if we sell 10,000 records, then we'll easily recoup what we've invested. From that standpoint it doesn't make any sense at all to sign with a label, because unless something drastic happens, then I'm not getting on the radio. Our publishing company is helping to foot the bill for the album . . . and they're a lot more behind it now that the Josie record is doing so well. So I'm feeling comfortable writing this completely schizophrenic record."

If you caught any of the handful of gigs Hanley did around town the first half of this year, then you know what she means by "schizophrenic." (Her future bookings include a full-band gig on June 25 in Newport with Dar Williams.) A few months back, at a stripped-down performance at the Kendall Café in Cambridge (with her steady band of Eisenstein, Gravel Pit bassist Ed Valauskas, and Orbit drummer Paul Buckley), she leaned heavily on acoustic-guitar-based country-inflected material that suited her voice surprisingly well. Then in March, when she played a NEMO-sponsored showcase at Karma, it was back to the kind of hook-laden guitar pop that was Cleo's bread and butter, with a couple of country tunes and ballads mixed in for variety. The tracks on the Josie disc are also in line with the kind of melodic alterna-rock Cleo specialized in.

"My joking plan for the solo album is to do it in three acts like a play," Hanley says. "I'll have the Americana section -- the countryish stuff -- be act one. Act two is the space-rock, proggy, weird-time-signature kind of stuff. And act three is '93 revisited, which are the songs that would have gone on a Cleo record eventually. I haven't completely gotten that stuff out of my system. Doing Cleo was something that formed my entire life -- it was my life since I was a teenager. And it's hard to walk away from something that's so much a part of you. At the same time, it became oppressive, feeling the pressure to rock, having certain things expected of you. There was just no way I was going to be able to change in Letters to Cleo, and I had to change."

Even as Letters to Cleo were winding down after a run that had included one modest modern-rock hit ("Here and Now") and a pair of solid major-label-funded albums, Hanley was discovering new sources of inspiration. "I started buying Hank Williams tapes at truck stops and listening to jazz for the first time in my life. I mean, I stopped listening to contemporary rock a long time ago. So all the stuff that I've been writing the past couple of years has been all over the place. And of course, when Michael writes a song with me, he's kind of purging too -- he's got all this stuff that he needs to get out of him."

The past couple years have provided Hanley and Eisenstein with opportunities to grow outside a traditional band setting. First there was Generation O, the hip, rock-oriented children's cartoon show for which they were retained to provide the rock. Hanley and Eisenstein were given three scripts at a time and had a week to write and record material for them. Then came Josie, a project for which Kay was originally picked to be a back-up singer. "Babyface had already hired a Josie. But by the time I got out to LA, they had fired her. So I auditioned for Josie, and Michael and Zoey and I were stuck in a hotel room in LA for almost a month last summer waiting for them to decide. It was nice, but we couldn't go anywhere. Finally we took off, and a week later they called and brought me back out."

In the end, not only did Hanley get the lead but Eisenstein was brought in to beef up the guitars, and the two even got to put one of their own songs, "Shapeshifter," on the disc. Having already endured the mixed blessing of being associated with a questionable Hollywood product -- "Here and Now" became a hit after it was included on the Melrose Place soundtrack -- Hanley wasn't upset to find her role in the Josie soundtrack played down. "It was definitely their decision and one that I fully endorsed. The last thing I want to do is go on the road playing Josie and the Pussycats songs. I've already lived through trying to live something down. I mean, I still answer questions about Melrose Place, and that was six years ago."

Nevertheless, she and Eisenstein, who currently plays guitar in Nina Gordon's touring band, aren't averse to doing more behind-the-scenes industry work. "Writing for other artists is something that really interests me a lot. That work is out there for us, and that's where I see myself ultimately. I mean, I'm not going to be skinny forever."

For the time being, though, Hanley is looking to see where a solo career might take her. A recent gig at NYC's Mercury Lounge, which took place on the same day Hanley and Eisenstein more than held their own as guests on Howard Stern's radio show, brought out a number of industry types, but Hanley remains reticent about taking that route again. "It's nice to see that people are still interested, but I wouldn't do the same kind of deal I did with Cleo. It would have to be something really special. So we are checking out the options. But, whatever I do at this point is completely for me. And I like having no pressure to produce a single or sell records -- except, of course, for this house that we just bought."

Kay Hanley will appear at the Sunset Music Festival at the Newport Yachting Center on Monday, June 25 with Dar Williams and Mary Ann Rossoni. Call (401) 846-1600, ext. 221.