Becca Stevens via Matrix

Becca Stevens I CURATE

Network Node

Name: Becca Stevens
City/Place: Brooklyn, NY
Country: United States

CURATION

from this node by: Matrix+

Life & Work

Bio: Since making her debut with the 2008 album Tea By Sea, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Becca Stevens has tested the limits of musical identity, mining everything from jazz to Irish folk to indie-rock in her striving for complete and authentic expression. In her latest musical endeavor—the five-track EP WONDERBLOOM and a soon-to-follow full-length of the same name—the North Carolina-bred, Brooklyn-based artist again defies all expectation, this time dreaming up a groove-heavy, dance-ready sound infused with elements of pop and funk and R&B. But despite its brighter textures and uptempo rhythms, WONDERBLOOM finds Stevens achieving a profound complexity in her lyrics, ultimately redefining what’s possible in creating music that elevates and edifies.

Centered on the captivating vocal presence she’s showcased as a member of David Crosby’s Lighthouse Band, WONDERBLOOM telegraphs an unabashed joy that Stevens partly attributes to the project’s production. In a bold new turn for her musical career, Stevens co-produced and co-engineered WONDERBLOOM alongside Nic Hard (Snarky Puppy, Ghost-Note, The Church), overseeing every aspect of the recording and claiming a sense of agency that had long eluded her in the studio.  “Nic and I truly worked as equals, trusting each other to get the job done, and it was an incredibly empowering experience for me,” she says.

In another major departure, Stevens purposely brought a communal sensibility to the making of WONDERBLOOM—an undertaking that resulted in more than 40 musicians contributing to the album, including Vulfpeck guitarist Cory Wong, longtime collaborator Jacob Collier, and all of her Lighthouse bandmates (keyboardist Michelle Willis, Snarky Puppy bandleader Michael League, and David Crosby himself). “My earlier records were all written by me, arranged by me, then performed by me and my band,” says Stevens. “But going into making this one, I made a rule for myself that anytime I had the instinct to turn inward and tough it alone, to instead stay open and share the process. And each time I did that, I was rewarded tenfold by what we all created together. Even with so many collaborators, the end result feels more honest than ever.”

In selecting songs from the dozens of demos she’d recorded in recent years, Stevens landed on 14 tracks rooted in her finely detailed, emotionally layered storytelling. “Some of the stories are very personal, some are from other people’s lives, and the rest are a bit more like fantasy,” she says. Co-written with Grammy-nominated musician Kaveh Rastegar, WONDERBLOOM’s lead single “Good Stuff” represents the album’s autobiographical component, emerging as a distinctly timely anthem. “It’s a song about things I’ve gone through in my career, and the struggles that so many women face in this industry,” Stevens says. Proving her ingenuity as a songwriter and performer, Stevens transforms those struggles into a triumphant pop epic, channeling a radiant confidence in her vocal delivery and embedding the song with soul-stirring gospel harmonies - which  is actually just 64 layers of Michael Mayo singing in 50 different personalities/vocal timbres.

A far more darkly toned track, “I Will Avenge You” shows the immense depth of Stevens’s imagination. “That was inspired by a script that Michael Showalter sent me for a pilot he was directing/producing called ‘In The Dark,’ explains Stevens, referring to the actor/producer who directed the Oscar-nominated 2017 film The Big Sick. “The show is about an alcoholic/self-destructive blind woman who’s determined to solve the murder of a young drug dealer who saved her life.” With its jagged guitar work and mesmerizing vocal performance, “I Will Avenge You” attains a cinematic intensity all on its own, gracefully unfolding as a narrative of irrepressible power and raging passion.

While much of WONDERBLOOM embodies the sheer effervescence of tracks like “Good Stuff,” the album ends on the heavy-hearted meditation of “Heather’s Letters to Her Mother” - a beautifully slow-building piece written for Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed while peacefully protesting at the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville. “David Crosby and I were on the tour bus one day, and he challenged me to find a song in the moment when Heather met the driver of the car that took her life… that these two humans should have met in some other way… any other way,” Stevens remembers. “After trying a thousand approaches to the song, I ended up thinking of the lyrics as little messages from Heather to her mother, leading up to the event and then finally from beyond the grave asking her mother to finish what she started.” Quietly heartbreaking and ineffably tender, the starkly arranged six-minute track takes on a subtle hope as a choir of children (including Stevens’s nieces and nephews, Hard’s teenage daughters, Crosby, Willis and Michael “Maz” Maher) lend their voices to the song’s breathtaking finale.

All throughout WONDERBLOOM, Stevens imbues her songs with unfiltered emotion, an effect achieved through equal parts spontaneity and intentionality. “From the beginning I set a goal for myself to be more direct, both lyrically and musically,” she says. “I have a tendency to overthink and over-edit, but for this record I really challenged myself to just say what I wanted to say and leave it at that.” Driven by a desire to “create music that allows and inspires me to be real, raw, and human when I perform it,” Stevens sometimes introduced a deliberate physicality into her performance. In recording the album-opening “Low on Love,” for instance, she conjured the track’s delicate ennui by lying down on the studio floor. “I was depressed and run ragged when I recorded my original home demo, so it felt right to get back to that energy tracking the song in the studio,” says Stevens.

Although most of WONDERBLOOM came to life in Brooklyn, Stevens journeyed to Los Angeles, North Carolina, and France in order to capture certain performances. Those travels included a trip to Paris to work with harpist Laura Perrudin, where the two musicians spent five days holed up in Perrudin’s apartment. “Laura is like some kind of mad-scientist fairy,” Stevens says. “She’d sit there turning knobs on her pedals, then take a shish-kebab skewer and put it to the strings and whack it with a padded drumstick, and suddenly it sounded like Satan’s cocktail party or something. “Laura created so many other worldly sounds like nothing I’d ever heard before.”

In reflecting on the six-month-long process of recording and producing WONDERBLOOM, Stevens recalls the relentless focus and often 18-hour workday with an unequivocal fondness. To that end, the album’s title nods to the Titan Arum, a plant whose singularly massive cluster of flowers takes a staggering eight years to blossom. “What inspires me about the Titan Arum is how hard it works and how long it takes to bloom, and how beautiful the payoff is,” says Stevens. “It’s about working for the long game rather than instant gratification, and resisting that temptation to get hung up on all the little things on the way to something great.”

For Stevens, the most glorious payoff in WONDERBLOOM lies in her utter delight in the album’s outcome. “This is the first record that I feel inspired to dance to, and I think that has everything to do with how much I shared the experience as I went along,” she reveals. And with the release of WONDERBLOOM, Stevens hopes that her audience might feel a similar lightening of the spirit. “I feel very strongly that music is a lifting force, and that many people don’t realize how deeply we need that right now,” she says. “I would love for people to have fun to this album, and to enjoy it in happy times and in sad times—the same way I find strength in all my favorite records.”

Contact Information

Management/Booking: Management/Booking:

Moema Parrott / CEO - Polyarts /
HarrisonParrott
[email protected]

Tabitha McGrath / Artist Manager - Polyarts / HarrisonParrott
[email protected]

Ed Williams / Logistics - Polyarts /
HarrisonParrott
[email protected]

Jan Esbra / Personal Assistant
[email protected]

Publicity:
Rob Krauser / Media Room REK (US)
[email protected]

Sue Harris / Republic Media (UK)
[email protected]

Uwe Kerkau (GAS)
[email protected]

Media | Markets

▶ Twitter: beccastevensbsb
▶ Instagram: beccastevensbsb
▶ Website: http://www.beccastevens.com
▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Q5rPInalv6Yz_6eyqjt8A
▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCUmwwA-7wXZQrqIJAidR-Rg
▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/1wfcewOdGGm8oqJL9E0Yap
▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/31DZzWTKtdnl4P3mt49ZKL
▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/0jHwBbCbMbUZGAGEoNYOxI
▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/38Z3ThlrNxIzvnPCNKNViE
▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/5dWvYzqdPCbXvWuhcJWTI0
▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/4ITWxingprskqcinkENWlK

Clips (more may be added)

Bathtub - Jacob Collier & Becca Stevens
By Becca Stevens

470 views
Becca Stevens - Queen Mab (Official Music Video)
By Becca Stevens

449 views
Becca Stevens - Well Loved (Official Music Video)
By Becca Stevens

396 views
Becca Stevens Band - Imperfect Animals
By Becca Stevens

335 views
Becca Stevens Band - Thinkin Bout You
By Becca Stevens

424 views

Becca Stevens Curated

What's Been Happening?

Thana Alexa → Singer-Songwriter has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jun 14
Thana Alexa → New York City has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jun 14
Thana Alexa → Music Producer has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jun 14
Thana Alexa → Jazz has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jun 14
Taylor Eigsti → Piano has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Apr 14
Taylor Eigsti → New York City has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Apr 14
Taylor Eigsti → Jazz has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Apr 14
Taylor Eigsti → Composer has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Apr 14
Justin Stanton → Trumpet has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jan 17
Justin Stanton → Sound Design has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jan 17
Justin Stanton → Multi-Cultural has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jan 17
Justin Stanton → Composer has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jan 17
Justin Stanton → Keyboards has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jan 17
Justin Stanton → Brooklyn, NY has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- Jan 17
Michael Olatuja → Composer has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- September 24, 2020
Michael Olatuja → Nigeria has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- September 24, 2020
Michael Olatuja → New York City has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- September 24, 2020
Michael Olatuja → Composer has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- September 24, 2020
Michael Olatuja → Lagos has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- September 24, 2020
Michael Olatuja → Jazz has been recommended via Becca Stevens.
- September 24, 2020

em português →

ARE YOU MATRIXED?

"Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
✅—Julian Lloyd Webber
We're touched too Mr Webber! (cello & Brazilian music fan)

"Matrixado!"
✅—Founding Member Darius Mans (economist, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology); president-elect of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
✅—Nduduzo Makhathini (piano, Blue Note recording artist)

"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
✅—Alicia Svigals (klezmer fiddle; founder of The Klezmatics)

"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
✅—Clarice Assad (composer & piano; compositions recorded by Yo Yo Ma and played by orchestras around the world)

This is a matrix in the original sense of "source" ("matrix" derives from "mater", Latin for "mother"). The platform was built in Bahia, Brazil in order to provide a means by which Bahian artists could be reached from around the world. But there's a beautiful catch: To work for these people the platform must work for ALL in the global creative economy. The matrix must engender an INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY.
How a) Inside this matrix you have a node (a page) — a calling card to the universe — from which you can curate (recommend) other people in the network, and by which they can recommend you.
How b) In mathematics there is something called "the small world phenomenon". Human society is "small world" (which is how most of the 8 billion of us of are within some 6 or so steps of each other). Neurons in the human brain are "small world". The internet is "small world".
How c) This matrix is "small world". Nodes tend to be a small number of steps apart. You can potentially step from any node to any other. You can get to João do Boi from Quincy Jones in 4 steps. And from Quincy Jones to you.
Participation is free to people. Businesses outside of Bahia, Brazil will be levied a nominal fee.
Artificial intelligence not necessary. Real intelligence, yes. The matrix is a real mother for ya! Odoyá!

"Thank you"
(Banch Abegaze, mgr)
✅—Kamasi Washington

← in english

VOCÊ ESTÁ NO MATRIX?

"Muito obrigado por isso - estou tocado!"
✅—Julian Lloyd Webber
Estamos tocados também Sr. Webber! (violoncelo & fã da música brasileira)

"Matrixado!"
✅—Membro Fundador Darius Mans (economista, doutorado, Massachusetts Institute of Technology); presidente eleito do Brasil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

"Estou realmente agradecido... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
✅—Nduduzo Makhathini (piano, artista da Blue Note)

"Obrigada, esta é uma ideia brilhante!!"
✅—Alicia Svigals (violino klezmer; fundadora da The Klezmatics)

"Este é um trabalho super impressionante! Parabéns! Obrigada por me incluir :)))"
✅—Clarice Assad (compositora & piano; composições gravadas por Yo Yo Ma e tocadas por orquestras ao redor do mundo)

Este é uma matrix no sentido original de "fonte" ("matrix" deriva de "mater", latim para "mãe"). A plataforma foi construída na Bahia, Brasil, a fim de fornecer um meio pelo qual artistas baianos pudessem ser alcançados de ao redor do mundo. Mas existe um porém lindo: Para funcionar para essas pessoas a plataforma deve funcionar para TODOS na economia criativa global. O matrix deve gerar uma ECONOMIA CRIATIVA GLOBAL INTEGRADA.
Como a) O matrix é uma rede de pessoas/entidades na economia criativa global. Você tem um nó (uma página) — um cartão de visita para o universo numa lista de informações do século 21 que circula o mundo — de onde pode selecionar (recomendar) outras pessoas na rede, e elas podem recomendar você.
Como b) Na matemática existe algo chamado "o fenômeno do mundo pequeno". A sociedade humana é um "mundo pequeno" (que é como a maioria dos 8 bilhões de nós estão dentro de mais ou menos 6 passos de um ao outro). Os neurônios no cérebro humano são um "mundo pequeno". A internet é um "mundo pequeno".
Como c) Este matrix é "pequeno mundo". Os nós tendem a estar separados por um pequeno número de etapas. Você pode potencialmente passar de qualquer nó para qualquer outro. Você pode chegar ao João do Boi de Quincy Jones em 4 etapas. E de Quincy Jones a você.
A participação é gratuita para pessoas. As empresas fora da Bahia, Brasil serão cobradas uma taxa nominal.
Inteligência artificial não necessária. Inteligência real, sim. O matrix é uma verdadeira mãe! Odoyá!

"Thank you"
(Banch Abegaze, empresário)
✅—Kamasi Washington

FAQ

Q: Why an Aleph on matrix node headers?
A: One of several inspirations for the matrix was the Aleph in Jorge Luis Borges' story of that name, itself certainly inspired in the Kabbalah.