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SINGER/SONGWRITER: Lauren O'Connell's Sweet Lament By Frank De Blase on Jul. 24th, 2007
You've probably never heard Lauren O'Connell's "Sweet Lament." And a mere 24 hours before she sang it for the first time a few days ago, neither had she.
"Usually I don't get things done this quickly," the 18-year-old singer-songwriter says. "This one, maybe an hour, hour and a half."
The quickness in which "Sweet Lament" showed its face is matched only by the brevity of its composer's career. Barely on the scene two years, O'Connell has made a dent in the coffeehouse circuit with her insight and unconventional guitar attack.
O'Connell's dad's guitar had been collecting dust in the basement for years when she stumbled upon it in the seventh grade.
"I can't remember what provoked me," she says. "I certainly wasn't listening to good music at the time... Backstreet Boys... I think LFO was one of my favorite bands."
Dad showed her a few chords and she was off. Soon after she got a Washburn electric - "The greatest axe in the history of all guitars," she says - and started taking lessons. By 15 she had written her first song.
"I was pretty proud of myself," she says. "Looking back it wasn't a very good song. It was just a really good feeling that I could get something down like that. I guess I had just kind of assumed I wouldn't be able to do it. Musically I didn't know how to compose, I didn't know how to put chords together or anything."
But being a self-appointed "AP English geek," the thoughts and a concise, clever way to string them together were already there.
"I've got a stack of epiphanies collecting dustBut the change never got too farCause revelation and revolution ain't nothin' but miles apart"
O'Connell was initially convinced she couldn't sing. She would even sit "Happy Birthday" out.
"It was always something I was really embarrassed about," O'Connell says. "I didn't like singing in front of people at all. But then I started writing and nobody else was going to sing my songs."
A little quid pro quo brought her out while jamming with a fellow songwriter in her basement.
"He played a song he wrote so I in turn had to play one that I wrote," she says. "And he was like, ‘Shit, you can actually sing. That's not fair.' I guess that kinda boosted my confidence."
O'Connell began producing some lo-fi demos that made it into the MySpace ether before Saxon Recording Studios' Dave Anderson got hip to her. O'Connell's elegant debut, "Sitting In Chairs," was recorded in one day.
Confidence, gender, genre, age, and crowded medium aside, O'Connell's music is outstanding. She exhibits a strong, punchy finger-style that makes her curious, eviscerated chords pop. For lack of a better word it's jazz...sorta.
"I don't know where that really came from, honestly," she says. "It's one of those things I never liked listening to but once I started playing it, I really got into it. I've tried writing a few more jazzy tunes but they're not good enough that I'd want to play 'em anywhere necessarily."
This could be a clue as to where she's going; bridging singer-songwriter thoughts and words with jazz deeds, augmenting - perhaps even modernizing - the woman-with-a-guitar routine.
"I'm trying to do something different," she says. "I try to write things in either a different way or talk about something I haven't heard somebody talk about. I don't like to get bored when I'm singing." This, from a young lady who, before she picked up a guitar, had no performance inklings, desires, or experience.
"I played Lucy once in a sixth-grade production of ‘You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown,'" she says. But in order to keep it fair, the teacher had the whole class sharing roles.
"There were at least eight other Lucy's," she says.
But now there's just one Lauren O'Connell. She won't pull the football away, but she will knock you out.