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"I write songs because I need to," said Yellow Springs singer/songwriter Dawn Cooksey. "I would write them even if I didn't play them for anyone."

It's therapy, she said, and she knows a little bit about that because she is a therapist and a licensed social worker. For a time, she worked for an agency in Hamilton, and through her contacts began performing for the Farmer's Market, which in turn led to her upcoming appearance at the Music Cafe on Tuesday, Dec. 23.

Born in Dayton, Cooksey lived several years in Austin, Texas, where she performed in the folk/alternative rock band Dik Dam Dyk. It was in the Austin open mic nights that she overcame her fear of performing her own songs.

"I didn't think anyone would care about my problems," she said. "I'd be a wreck for days before a gig, but I told myself I'd go every week until I'm not scared anymore.

"It took a long time."

Her songs tend to be sad, mad and everywhere in between, she said. "There have been a few exceptions, but I generally don't write when I'm happy and enjoying my life — which is most of the time.

"There are a few exceptions that blow me away, but happy songs tend to be kind of dorky anyway," she said.

She has a band, 68 South.

 Dawn Cooksey on MySpace

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Cincinnati singer/songwriter Ellie Fabe is still finding her way back into the scene, making her second appearance at the Music Cafe at the Fitton Center on Tuesday, Oct. 28.

“I have two kids, and that can check you out for a while,” she said. “But they’re a little older, 10 and 14, so I’m just now checking back in.”

Admitting that it’s hard to negotiate her way this time around — there was no MySpace.com when she first started playing her songs — Fabe said her strategy is just to play as much as she can, especially in performer-friendly venues like the Music Cafe.

“Sometimes you find yourself in uncharted territory at open mic nights,” she  said. “But I’ve been writing regardless of whether or not I’m playing out, so you start to get into this ‘if a tree falls in the forest’ thing.

“So for now, I’m just trying to stay next to myself and not get too far out ahead.”

Part of that includes recording. Although she’s recorded some demos of her work, she’s not sure what to do with it all other than post it on MySpace.

“I’d love to make a record, but I don’t see that as something that will catapult you to the top,” she said.

Fabe, who is also a working visual artist, said her songs, laden with girl-longing themes, seem to be especially popular among teenage girls.

“My work is a little self-confessional,” she said, “writing about what’s going on with me — although a lot of it is fictional. I also like words that just go together well.”

Also performing at the Music Cafe will be Christian pop artist Kevin Stokely, Debbie Silverman and Mitch Lieberman playing novelty and parody tunes, singer/songwriters Myron Gabbard and Brent Burch, and folk/rock/country band Diamond Blue.  

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It started out as a choice between acting lessons or violin lessons when Natalie Stovall was 4 years old. Because her mother had fiddled with a violin while carrying the child, music won out.

“I’m not even sure I understood what the instrument was at the time,” Stovall said, “but I had a lot of fun in class.

Practicing, however, was another matter.

“I liked the attention and I liked being on stage,” she said. “That was a big deal, but she couldn’t get me to practice until she figured out that if she took me to a park, people would gather around me to listen, and then I’d practice all day.”

She loved playing so much that her teachers sometimes chastised her for smiling too much during recitals. Music, after all, is serious business, Stovall learned, until she discovered the other side of the instrument, the fiddling side.

“You could play fast and you could play two strings at once and you could make it up as you go,” she said. “I continued classical training up until I was 16, just to work on technique, but I was really a fiddler by then.
When she was 10, she auditioned for a job performing in Opryland park when they asked her to sing something. She didn’t sing, she told them. Sing anything, they said. She sang “Happy Birthday” and got a job singing as well as playing fiddle, and taking voice lessons.

Stovall ended up studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she played in orchestras and formed her first band, taking them home to Nashville with her to play around there during the summers. The drummer in that band is still with her today, but it took her 27 different musicians to create the lineup, now together for two years, that will perform with her on Saturday at the Fitton Center.

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Although Mindy Smith spent some time in Cincinnati — and joined  her first band while there — one gets a sense that it was not exactly a memorable part of the native Long Islander’s life. For one thing, she was recovering from the death of her mother, her musical idol and inspiration.

“She had the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard,” said Smith, who was 19 when her mother died of cancer. “She had the ability to touch people, to move mountains with her voice. If I learned anything from her, it’s to put all of your emotion into your performance.”

So she found herself enrolled at Cincinnati Bible College.

“I went there because I had some friends who went there,” she said. “I was a lousy student, but I needed to get out of New York. I tried to do a band-thing, but that only lasted about two months. It was fun, but...”

After dropping out, she re joined her father, who had relocated to Nashville, and that’s where she found her voice and her instrument.

“That was my version of college,” she said, “learning how to write. I started out singing them a capella, but realized I needed to learn how to play guitar to accompany myself. But I felt like that’s what I was meant to do: Write original songs.”

Smith got to work on her career, going to songwriters showcases and open mics nearly every night. Winning the Tin Pan South writer’s contest in 2000 led to a staff position at Yellow Dog Music. The company allowed her to earn a living writing songs for others while she made demos and generated a buzz that earned her an appearance with Lee Ann Womack at South By Southwest and as the only unsigned artist on the Dolly Parton tribute CD, “Just Because I’m a Woman.” She was singled out by Parton herself for that project.

She’s still on the road for her 2007 album “Long Island Shores,” her second, playing solo acoustic sets.

“That’s really the way I like to do things,” she said. “That’s how I started out, so I’m quite comfortable out there alone.”

Official site

MySpace 

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Singer/songwriter Kate Voegele gets to add another line to her growing resume as she makes a seven-episode guest appearance on the CW series “One Tree Hill.”

“I heard about the audition from my manager and he encouraged me to do it, though I thought it was a long shot,” said the 21-year old during a phone interview from Los Angeles. “I was totally floored to find out that I got it.”

Voegele plays Mia, a (what else) singer/songwriter, who gets signed to the label of one of the show’s regular characters.

“She was really fun to play,” said Voegele, who studied at Miami University for two years. “In some ways she’s a lot like me, but she starts out very quiet and timid and I’m a really outgoing person, so it was really cool to be able to do something so different.

“As the story goes on, she gets to come out of her shell a little bit.”

Except for a couple of high school plays, Voegele said she’s not done any acting at all and was surprised by the feedback.

“When I was auditioning, the creator of the show said, ‘I know that music is your gig, but you could really do this, too,’” she said.

Voegele hopes that being on the show, however, will boost her recording career. Six of her songs will be featured in her story arc and her debut album, “Don’t Look Away,” will be re-released on Jan. 22, the date of her “One Tree Hill” debut, with a new cover that will reflect her role on the show.“‘One Tree Hill’ has been a great vehicle for new artists that have hit the spotlight yet,” she said.

AlThough it was a great experience, she said she’s not rushing out to every audition.she can just yet

“Right now, I’m focused on the record, but it’s definitely something I enjoyed doing and would love to do more in the future,” she said.

Voegele, 21, is from the Cleveland area and spent two years at Miami University in Oxford before taking what she thought would be a one-year hiatus this school year to focus on her musical career, but now, she said, her education may be on hold indefinitely.

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In 2001, Lisa Walker was consoling her friend Chuck Cleaver as he was preparing himself at the bar for a pending “dreaded” pre-show performance as part of the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards.

Cleaver — a former member of the popular Cincinnati band Ass Ponies — didn’t like performing alone, Walker said, so she kindly offered to come up with him.

“I was familiar with his work,” she said. “I didn’t know all the words, but I knew how the songs went. I just wanted to cheer him up, but to my surprise he said OK.”

So Cleaver wrote some lyrics on a napkin, and (little did they know at the time) Wussy was born.

“It actually went over pretty well,” Walker said, “so we immediately started talking about doing it again — maybe even rehearse.”

The downside was that Walker had just moved to Columbus, so it didn’t seem like a good situation to start a band, but Cleaver kept calling her to sit in on gigs he had, so they “met in the middle” to practice.

“I felt like I left too soon,” she said, “so I moved back after a couple of months.”

The rest of the band just sort of came their way.

“We saw (bassist) Mark (Messerly) while we were out and about one night and Chuck said, 'I think Mark’s supposed to play with us,’” Walker said. “And another night out of the blue Dawn (Burman) came up to us and said, 'I’m supposed to play drums for you.’

“So we said we better learn how to play together because a band has formed. It really was that spontaneous.”

Cleaver already had a name picked out.

“He seemed to know what it was going to sound like before we even played,” Walker said. “I don’t doubt him anymore.”

Wussy started forming — probably — before it was really ready, operating under the principal that the best way to learn is to fall on your face in front of a crowd.

Now with the upcoming release of “Left for Dead,” Wussy will have three CDs and glowing national reviews in Blender and Harp magazine, Village Voice and RollingStone.com, among others.

WHAT: Wussy with the Kyle Sowashes
WHERE: The Comet, 4579 Hamilton Ave., Cincinnati
WHEN: 9 p.m. Oct. 12
COST: No charge
MORE INFO: (513) 541-8900; www.cometbar.com
 

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Heather Turner and Katie Wefer knew each other for 10 years, first at Highlands High School in Northern Kentucky, then at the University of Kentucky, but it was music that turned them into sisters.

Neither had even started playing guitar until late in their college days when unbeknownst to each other, both started learning to play at around the same time. Turner picked up an old guitar that had belonged to her grandfather and mother, while Wefer learned a few chords from a cousin on a $20 garage-sale purchase. Both were hard guitars to play and keep in tune, but something they couldn’t quite put a name to kept them going.

But it wasn’t until they both suffered heart-breaking splits with the men they presumed to marry that they latched onto each other and started playing out their sorrow.

They learned about five songs to start out, but it was the Cranberries’ “Linger” that made them discover they could harmonize, so when they’d go to a campus party together, they’d play it over and over again.

“Then all these guys who played guitar would come around and show us stuff,” Wefer said, and the learning continued.

They entered a few talent shows, and even won $100 in Austin, but it was about two years ago that they had their first big gig.

“My boyfriend’s band had a gig in Lexington and they let me play a couple of songs,” Turner said. “I started talking to the bartender and he asked me if I was in a band, and I said I was, so he booked us for a whole night.”

Although they packed the place and everyone seemed to enjoy it, they realized that they needed to work things out better — learn parts on the guitar rather than just both play the same thing.

While Wefer was on a trip to London two summers ago, Turner visited Ashville, N.C., and fell in love with a restaurant called Tupelo Honey.

“It was just one of the cutest places I’d ever been in,” she said. “They served flowers with every dish.”

And because they liked the Van Morrison song of the same name, they adopted it as the name of their developing act. They started writing music together in addition to playing the cover songs and decided to put together a band.

Things really started coming together for them last fall when they took two weeks off their day jobs to visit a friend in Dallas. They went through Memphis, took the tour of Graceland, then decided to go to Tupelo, Miss., Elvis’ hometown, to get a picture of themselves under a “Welcome to Tupelo” sign.

While doing that, a group of young men stopped and asked them if they were in a band, so they not only serenaded them under the “Welcome to Tupelo” sign and even played at a party for them that night.

“That was a great trip,” Wefer said. “When we got back, we started getting everybody together.”

With the release of a seven-song CD — two by Turner, two by Wefer and three written together — Tupelo Honey is ready to play, and plan to do a lot of it this summer.

how to go
WHAT: Tupelo Honey CD release party with guests Lauren Houston, Wojo, Kelly Thomas and The Fabulous Pickupsm and Pete Dressman.
WHERE: Southgate House, 24 E. Third St., Newport, Ky.
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday.
COST: $5.
MORE INFO: (859) 431-2201; southgatehouse.com.
 

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