Real Music by Robert Feuer - April 2020 - Beth Hart
Beth Hart is an open book, exposing an incredible depth of feelings and vulnerability to listeners. “I’ve always been open to being myself. My music and writing are about trying to get everything off my chest,” she says in our early March phone interview. “When I’m sad or scared or lost or freakin’ the frick out, that’s when I write. I would rather people not like me for who I am, than like me for what I’m not.”
Hart’s upbringing in Los Angeles was tumultuous. Her parents separated, her dad went to prison, her sister died from AIDS, her grandmother killed herself. Hart inherited a devastating bipolar disorder. She got into drugs at age eleven and was the victim of a lot of sexual abuse. She landed in nine psych wards and four rehab facilities. Healing is a major theme in her music. “I’ve been incredibly blessed, too,” she says. In her song Thankful, from her new release War in My Mind, she sings – “Oh my oh my, this is paradise.”
“Music was a way to try to feel better.”Hart began playing classical music on piano and cello, and writing songs at age four. Her mother turned her on to jazz, her dad to mariachi, her brother to punk and reggae. Friends exposed her to Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and Robert Johnson. Pop artists as well, including Carole King, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen. “When I discovered Leonard Cohen it was over,” she says, calling him “the greatest lyricist ever.”
In her performances, including London’s Royal Albert Hall with Joe Bonamassa and the Kennedy Center with Jeff Beck, Hart overpowers the stage with brassy sexuality, but she’s most concerned with relaying her issues and emotions “as honestly and vulnerably as possible.” “It’s not party music,” she says, though “I’m not the kind of girl who should run for mayor.”
The title War in My Mind, completely self or co-written, refers to her mental illness. In the first song, Bad Woman Blues, Hart sings, “Got the lips, got the legs, I was born to drive a man insane.” But, she doesn’t want to be pegged with that, or any other label. Only two songs emphasize that aspect of her persona.
Hart, 48, portrayed Janis Joplin in stage productions of “Love, Janis,” 20 years ago, but she has never sung Joplin songs onstage. “I loved her when I was young,” Hart says, but Joplin’s fragility and humanity, her themes of drug addiction, the sadness of her early death, hit Hart “too close to home.”
Hart connected with Bonamassa in 2011 for three albums and a Grammy nomination in 2013. That collaboration is ongoing, she says, but “I don’t consider myself a blues artist. It’s blues, jazz, soul, gospel, singer/songwriter, and rockin’- heavy-roll.”
Her songs are so revealing, sensitive, sensual, emotional, overpowering, that I can feel her joy and tears, and my own.
Hart’s April 15 show at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center has been cancelled.
