Veteran LA-based singer-songwriter Eleni Mandell’s 11th studio album, Wake Up Again, finds her juggling the roles of musician, mother, teacher and student. While Mandell will admit to the difficulty of multi-tasking, she was able to focus this effort on what she experienced from teaching and giving assignments to women inmates at prisons in the Los Angeles area. Using her go-to coterie of just four musicians, Mandell delivers a sparse sound that lets these stories breathe. Fortunately, they are not all as dark as one might think. There was laughter and fun in many of the sessions, and, as you’ll learn, Mandell handed out dome provocative assignments. Some are portraits or amalgamations of two or more inmates. Some were inspired by things she heard them say. The liners give detailed background behind each tune and we’ll highlight a few of them as we go.
Mandell worked for nearly two years, through Jail Guitar Doors, the organization founded by MC5’s Wayne Kramer and Billy Bragg, and the William James Association teaching songwriting in these prisons, similar, one might guess, aside from the setting, to the workshops conducted with soldiers by Mary Gauthier and others. Mandell admits to initially not knowing why she was attracted to the work, except that she had an incarcerated family member in the 1940s. Pursuing her curiosity as to why one would disappear and why one would commit crimes to begin with, she later discovered that she was inspired by their stories, their laughter, commonality to with regular lives; and surprised by the diversity of occupations that ran from teachers to lawyers to drug dealers. From these interactions, Mandell probes the regrets, the guilts, and dashed hopes. She found she could relate to much of it more than she would have thought. She thinks we can too. We all make mistakes, yet we all don’t make ones as big as the ones made by the characters she writes about.
We could touch on every single song because the background behind each is very interesting, but we’ll cite just four of them and leave the rest for discovery. The dark opener “Circumstance” was inspired by two different women. Neither accepted responsibility for their given plight, one saying “it just happened,” the other blaming it on her boyfriend. The word derivation of circumstance is “around” and “stand.” Prison does involve plenty of standing around. “Air” is from an assignment, where she asked the ladies to write about the four elements for four consecutive weeks. They started with ‘”air” and the first two verses are exactly as you hear them in the song. Mandell was stressing that songs can be made of almost anything. She wrote right in front of them, initially not liking it but then changing her mind, perhaps because a woman likened the phrase in the second verse (“There’s no fun in this town…’) to being in prison.
What’s Your Handle” is CB radio terminology for a nickname. Some of the women in prison were taking the class not to learn about songwriting but because they wanted to feel closer to their children who had stopped talking to them. The song is a murder ballad with the idea that the room where the writing took place was like a CB radio tuning into the far away spirits of loved ones. The title track is about one woman who has been in prison for more than four decades for a horrible crime. Although she didn’t attend the class, she was often in the surrounding area. Mandell describes her as a lovely, old lady who made her ponder what it must be like to have major regrets that can never be compensated for. It makes one want a complete reboot, in other words, wake up and start anew.
Mandell walks a fine line between showing empathy while being stark and realistic. That’s challenging lyrically and vocally but also requires immense trust in a group of musicians that can walk the same line. The trio of bassist Ryan Feves and drummer Kevin Fitzgerald, (the rhythm section of her touring band since 2004) and guitarist Milo Jones are the core group she turned to. Producer Sheldon Gomberg was also familiar to her, having played bass on her second and third albums.
Give credit to Mandell for undertaking a daunting project and pulling it through with aplomb.
