[ jazz/pop ]
Carsie Blanton has a vision for her first tour with a full band.
"I wanna be the girl in a beautiful dress with, like, a bunch of handsome men in suits behind her," she says. "Kind of classic, like the big band days. I wanna be like Billie Holiday. But healthier. No heroin addiction."
As visions go, it's relatively realistic. With her mass of curls, coy vocal delivery and dancer's physique, Blanton is a reliably charming performer, and she's told her four-man band to dress to the nines. But here she is, a few weeks before playing five East Coast shows to herald the release of Idiot Heart, and she's not looking so healthy. Venturing out to B2 on Passyunk after a bout with the flu, the singer-songwriter gamely discusses her new record and her new economic model over the din of old Madonna tunes and a screechy espresso machine.
Another sort of unhealthiness is evident on Blanton's third full-length album. Idiot Heart is full of fast-talking men who are quick to walk away and swivel-hipped women who keep chasing the last thing they need. Love gone wrong's nothing new for the characters in her songs. But where the dreamers on 2005's Ain't So Green drown their disappointments in tasteful jazz pop and the mismatched lovers on 2009's Buoy work out their kinks on the dancefloor, these idiots' caustic lines are things that might ring in your ear after yet another unsatisfying night in a noisy bar.
"Well, it doesn't take a lot to get you started/ And I don't know how to turn you back off," Blanton sings on the title track. "I guess there ain't no rest for the idiot-hearted/ Until your heart finally stops." Cue Rob Hyman's jumpy organ.
Idiot Heart lets no one off the hook — not the control freaks, and not their misused misses. "I try to write about it from both perspectives, which is that, yes, there's this powerful, abusive man," Blanton says, "but there's also this woman who's seeking that kind of relationship. And continually seeking it, over and over again, as I think a lot of us do."
Though the Luray, Va., native now lives in South Philly with her longtime boyfriend, she went farther south to delve into the darker side of love. In May, she wrapped up songwriting in New Orleans; in July, she headed to Oliver Wood's studio in Atlanta, where they cut the basic tracks live.
But what happened in between was just as important: In June, Blanton — unlike so many of the women in her songs — wised up. She stopped chasing record labels that were unwilling to commit and instead found backers she didn't have to beg.
"I wrote a letter to my fans, saying, 'If you want to invest in my next record, send me an email.' And I got a huge response. I was really surprised. The full budget was $30,000 from start to finish, and I ended up asking six investors for $5,000 each, and they did it. So I raised the money actually much more quickly than I expected to. Within a month, I had the money promised."
Her investors — from Philly, Boston and Washington, D.C. — included some fans who'd talked to her at shows and a few she'd never met. Blanton says she was happily surprised to learn that people thought their money was safer in the hands of an independent musician than in the stock market.
So far, everything's worked out. Though Idiot Heart's official release date is Jan. 31, Blanton brought the CDs along when she opened for Paul Simon in November and sold nearly 450 copies — using her "pay what you please" model. Rather than set a price for her music, she lets listeners determine what it's worth to them.
"I had several people just give me all the money they had," she says. "They were like, 'Well, I have $33. There you go.' I had people pay me with euros and pounds. I had people pay me with rolls of quarters."
Not everyone pays the going rate for CDs — whatever that is these days — and that's fine with Blanton. "The problem in the music industry is not that people aren't buying albums as much as they used to," she maintains. "It's that we ever made music a commodity in the first place." And why should music be accessible only to those who have money to spare or those who know they're going to love that album once they get it home?
Still, she says, it all balances out. "I've actually made as much money as I made with a set price, and a little bit more, because more people buy CDs."
But those CDs wouldn't be worth much if not for her way with words and melodies. See for yourself on Saturday. She'll be the economic theorist in the beautiful dress.
Sat., Jan. 28, 9 p.m., $10-$12, with Mark Erelli, MilkBoy Philly, 1100 Chestnut St., 877-435-9849, milkboyphilly.com.
