Photo Credit: Tim Rice
Gay Barboza is an artist at the height of her music career. Even though she took about 20 years off from the business to raise a family, Barboza has been releasing CDs, winning awards, and opening for name acts. Based in the Attleboro, Massachusetts music scene, Barboza, who has also been busy the last ten years running her own dance studio, plays out every weekend, all weekend long.
The first thing Ms. Barboza usually needs to clarify for people is her first name, Gay. It is not a nickname for Gayle. Her mother named her Gay for a positive sounding name just as her mother named her sister Merry. Her mother was going to name a third child Joy but she had a son whom she named Jay.
“It means happy, and it’s been joyful all my life, let me just tell you, I say with complete sarcasm,” she said. “When I was little, like first grade, I remember one of the kids came up to me and called me a fairy and a faggot. He stuck his tongue out at me and pushed me. I was this little kid. I was scared. But, I’d gotten really angry. I chased him in the school yard, and I pushed him down, and I punched him. I was six. Some switch got flipped when that happened, and I never took any crap from anybody.” Barboza said that people still talk about her behind her back regarding her name and she has had to deal with some jerks over the years.
“I am for peace, love, and happiness,” she said. “I am for absolute freedom of choice. I have plenty of friends that are gay. I have plenty of friends that are straight. I happen to be straight and married with the name Gay.”
Barboza recently won the WMRC Local Music Awards for Favorite Female Vocalist at Liz’s Diamond in Hopedale, Massachusetts. She was nominated for four other awards. “I was honored because that community is a bunch of really great people and talented musicians,” she said. “It’s been a pleasure to get to know everybody up in Milford.” Barboza is particularly happy about her acquaintance with WMRC DJ and awards host organizer Ray Auger who she said is very instrumental in making things happen.
Barboza was not familiar with the WMRC awards until she was nominated for Best Solo Acoustic Act in 2014. She pulled into the establishment’s parking lot at King’s and found three hundred people attending. “I said ‘What is this all about?’ I had no idea. I think that was the second year they were in existence. They’re very welcoming. It was super cool.”
Photo Credit: Deb Bettencourt
In 2008, Barboza played in a duo called Good Gravy with her son’s friend’s father which began at a neighborhood barbecue. Barboza reentered the music scene more formally by playing a small place in Franklin, Massachusetts where she was heard by someone who connected her to the Hopedale Country Club. She also played Pepperoncini’s in Milford, as a fill in for someone else, and that too lead to greater recognition.
“I went on my own after a couple of duos,” Barboza said. Her first full length CD, Little Pieces, released in 2013, was well received, selling plenty of copies and gaining her further recognition and some more new rooms.
“That was really exciting because I’d never done anything before. I had never had any projects of any sort, but I’d been writing all of my life,” she said. “The songs I’d been writing up until that point, I didn’t take them super seriously. I was writing them at my kitchen table. I didn’t know if they were any good or not. I was just doing my thing and that made me happy. I played a few songs for friends.” Her friends encouraged her to do something with her material, and that is how her Little Pieces CD was born.
“I didn’t have any experience with arranging the songs,” she said. “I let my producer do the whole thing. I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was different.”
Barboza’s latest CD, Work In Progress, released last Fall, also went over well in her local music scene. Her seven song CD was also released online as an eight track album. Producing herself this time around, she kept it stripped down to just her and her acoustic guitar, with the exception of electric fiddle player Kate Russo Thompson who accompanies Barboza on two tracks.
Photo Credit: Tim Rice
“I purposely left it like that because these songs were really raw,” she said. “When I went into the studio, I knew I wanted to just sit down and not have much going on beside myself and my guitar. I listened to (studio advisers) and I tried a couple of things, and we talked about doing a couple of things. But, every time I went back to the songs I said ‘No.” The feedback I was getting from my friends and my musician friends was ‘Geez, Little Pieces sounded great and the songs were great but I’d love to hear those songs without so much instrumentation.” So Barboza used the stripped down approach the second time around, recording her newer songs at 9B Studio in Milford, producing the work herself, letting those who were turning the knobs know what she wanted her songs to sound like.
Barboza feels she’s been equally influenced by singer-songwriters as well as bands. She had a weakness for James Taylor’s music when she was growing up. She’d sing along to his records while developing harmonies where there weren’t any.
“I think that his songwriting especially is very clear, very simple,” Barboza said, “but right to the heart of everything. His melodies, the hooks, the harmonies; they’re all put together well. He has a signature sound. You know who it is the moment he opens his mouth. I like the fact his music has evolved with the times. I like his old stuff. I like his new stuff.”
Like many of her generation, Barboza grew up listening to Journey, Boston, Heart, and more than she could recall off of the top of her head.
“I always kind of gravitated to really smooth sounding vocalists,” she said. “I also like hard driving stuff. I like Alanis Morrisette. I like how she had a rough edge to her voice and how she delved into different things. I like singers with distinct voices.”
When Barboza wasn’t busy with her music and raising her two children, one of whom just graduated high school last week, she filled in her spare time owning and operating an Attleboro, Massachusetts dance studio, AMJ Dance Studio, where she also teaches some of the classes.
“I took over the business ten years ago, and I’ve been running it ever since. I love teaching dance. Dancing has always been something I love to do. I never got to dance out professionally, but I’ve always taught classes.” Despite music having music and a beat, the art form has never influenced her music and her music has never impacted her interest in dance.
“They don’t go together at all,” she said. “When I perform musically, I don’t move around a lot like I do when I dance. All my life, I could do it whenever. When it comes to singing, I’m a little bit more reserved. They don’t really have anything to do with each other, although I love both of them almost equally.”
Barboza, unable to teach Friday nights and Saturday mornings when her music career took off, had to cut back on dance lessons to be able to focus more on her singer-songwriter career. As music became something she found out she was actually good at, venues came calling.
“Instead of me calling restaurants asking if I could possibly play in their restaurants, restaurants were calling me left and right,” she said. “I realized I must be doing something right.”
Just some months ago, Barboza got to be the local opening act for long time area legend Ellis Paul. “It was a fully amazing moment,” she said. “Even when it was happening, it was very surreal. I felt like I was out of my body.” Barboza had been familiar with Ellis Paul through his manager whom she had found out about through a venue owner. The connection worked well, as Barboza got to sell a “boatload” of her CDs to Mr. Paul’s fans.
“It was wicked cool. I was shocked. I kept having to go back to my bag,” she said. “I was like ‘Did I bring enough?”
Barboza has no delusions of grandeur. She knows music is a tough better. From this point in her career, she mainly wants to focus on self-improvement. She also wants to expand her audience.
“I really enjoyed opening for Ellis Paul,” she said. “I’d like to be able to do that more. I’d like to be able to open up at festivals. I mean who wouldn’t want to become a larger artist than what they are? But, realistically, I want to keep getting better as an artist and a musician.”
For someone who took a 20 year hiatus from the biz, Barboza hit the ground running, and she’s still running strong.
