The Portland Phoenix
Volume 3, Number 43 | November 2, 2001

Carefree highway: Abi Tapia goes to look for America

By Josh Rogers

The police report reads something like this: Stolen - various clothing, backpack, portable CD player, 20 CDs (Lyle Lovett, Shelby Lynne, Allison Moorer, the Dixie Chicks), camera, French pottery, soft guitar case, 50 copies of the new Abi Tapia album, and one notebook (with two years of songs in it). The victim - A singer-songwriter on a six-week, self-booked tour.

"Gone," says Tapia sadly. The biggest loss, of course, the irreplaceable notebook chock-a-block full of lyrics. "I'm hoping it will be good in the end," she says. "Maybe always staring at those verses I didn't like was stopping me from writing new ones."

The songs that remain intact, the ones on her debut album proper, This Life Will be Mine, reveal a voice that knows all too well the value of change, of leaving the known behind in search of the open road or the blank page. In "I'm not Listening," Tapia explores the unhealthy impulse to bolt for the door when things get too close: "Oh, but your hands on my back/Oh, your lips on my neck/Your fingers in my curls," she moans, betraying her desire to stay before she steels her will and walks out the door. "Words in my ear/Telling every part of me that I should stay here/And I'm not listening."

"Precious Things" finds the singer cursed with wanderlust again. Contemplative djembe patterings buoy a somewhat melancholy song and give a slightly upbeat cast to lyrics resigned to goodbyes: "The sky is clearing up now/And the roads are, too/West wind blowin' at my back/This morning instead of your face I saw the dawn/I have nothing to fear/There is nothing to make me stay/I'll pack my precious things/And send 'em on home to you someday."

The songs on the disc are solid nuggets of songcraft - distinct, evocative, and at times sensual. On occasion they feel a bit bare (as opposed to nude). Recorded with Jeff Ciampa and a handful of session guys in Columbus, Ohio, the band more often than not lays back, letting Tapia's voice drive the mood. Occasionally, though, the band's too quiet and unmemorable.

Briefly ditching the boys for the intensely up-close "Bottom of Texas," Tapia uses only her voice and an absently strummed guitar to bring you inside her world. Suddenly, as if a nervous actor has been pushed into the spotlight from offstage, a reedy clarinet stumbles into the scene. From there, the singer and the clarinet weave around each other in a lonely embrace. Although Tapia writes in several distinct voices, instrumentation like this (and the Wurlitzer on the spitfire "Motion Sickness") allows them to breathe and come alive (and break out of the trad singer-songwriter girl ghetto - she thanks Sark, joy, and contra dancing in her liner notes).

The clarinetist? Tapia's mom - a classically trained musician (Abi had to cajole her into loosening up and improvising). Her mom even played a show with her when Abi rolled into Ohio Wesleyan, near Mom's current home of Delaware, Ohio (outside Columbus), on tour. "I'm trying to convince her to go on the road with me," says Tapia excitedly. "Because I never have any sort of embellishment."

She knows this sort of collaboration is good for her own songwriting process. One of the biggest things she got out of her latest cross-country jaunt was a network of like-minded musicians. Connecting to these other labels, booking agents, and singers was the whole point of attending the Nashville New Music Conference on the last leg of her trip. It's a bummer then, that that was precisely when someone smashed her car window and stole her press kits. She was literally handing out photocopies of the one business card in her back pocket, she laughs. But she met a lot of good people.

"Did I tell you about the exercise room in Nashville?" she smiles. "At the conference there wasn't much chance to do any song-swapping. So late at night we'd get together and play for each other. One night we were playing in the Ramada Inn lounge but the muzak was too loud.

"We knew that there was an exercise room that didn't have the muzak, so we convinced a security guard to let us in. But it was really cramped with equipment. So here we were in this tiny mirrored room, folky singer-songwriters sitting around on stationary bikes and stairmasters, playing songs for each other," she says.

The sleepover camaraderie continues, "We smuggled in a case of beer in a guitar case - totally mafia style - but then we spilled some, and we're like 'Oh no, what do we do!?' There were these towels, so we soaked it up with that, but then we were like [panicking] 'What do we do with the beer towels?!?' "

This is precisely the community that Tapia has been running around the country trying to find. Turns out, they're all doing the same thing. Traveling doesn't have to be about running away - in this case, it's bringing her closer to her peers. She says her time away is allowing her to look at Portland with "fresh eyes." Then again, she just wrote a song that starts off "I never want to be where I am."