Ilene Springer
Ilene Springer has been on the singer-songwriter scene since she started appearing at south shore open mics and jams 25 years ago. A few years later she branched out to playing restaurants in and around her home town of Weymouth, Massachusetts. After a while she found herself playing gigs in Boston, Providence and beyond.
“I’ve always been an assertive person. I want something, I go after it,” she said. “And back then there wasn’t a lot of competition. There wasn’t a lot of people who were brave enough to go out and get them by calling and knocking on doors. So I did that.”
There wasn’t a single venue that she can recall giving her her first break because she was suddenly playing a lot of them. She branches out far during the summer festival season. “I’ve been doing a combination of covers and venues that want to hear my originals too.”
Springer plays covers to entertain fun audiences but her true love is composing and recording new music. She does not play as many venues for her original venues because, as she explained it “there are no venues to play out frequently for songwriters unless you have a recording contract, which I hope is on my horizon. I’m working on my new CD right now.”
The songs on her third CD, 2016’s Got To Be Brave, were inspired by a need to love and inspire people who have been hurt and are hoping to fall in love again, including herself. Her song “Invisible,” also on Got To Be Brave was the exception. “It was about not having the strength to come out but hiding your emotions,” she said, “being invisible, wanting that love. ‘What if I was invisible/And you couldn’t see my tears/And all you saw was a super woman.’ It’s a little bit different but most of (the CD) was about being brave.”
Got To Be Grave was the umbrella theme, though, for an album being about courage. To fall in love one has got to be brave because you need to be vulnerable.
“A lot of people fall back and don’t get back into that space of meeting people and wanting to be loved because they’ve been hurt so much,” Springer said. “So they just put up these barriers and these walls. Got To Be Brave is you really do have to stand up with courage and think ‘Well, it’s not going to be like that again. It’s going to be different this time.”
Got To Be Brave album cover
Another song on her Got To Be Brave CD is titled “Skeleton And Bones” inspired by her chiropractor yet couched into a psychological context. The skeletons and bones are a metaphor for the feelings, good and bad, that we hide beneath the surface.
“I’m also a massage therapist too,” Springer said, “and I know that emotions, they hide underneath. ‘Is that all we are is skeletons and bones/That hide underneath/The vehicle that transports all our thoughts/Holding the past and the grief.’ It really gets deep underneath who we are. We’re more than just a body and everything hides underneath it unless we deal with it.”
A more autobiographical song from Got To Be Brave, “Girl With The Wild Hair,” was inspired by an boyfriend she had ten years ago. Her fellow did not like Springer’s natural wildly curly, wavy hair and there were no straightening products like they do today. “He did not hold back his feelings about it,” she said. “You should see it in the summer. It IS pretty wild. So, I wrote that song. All the words are pretty much true and it’s funny.”
Ilene Spring, October fashion
Springer learned music growing up in a musically inclined family. Her father would take her brother and her to musicals, started her on piano at age five, and listen to 1970s pop music. “I was raised to be freely expressed and not fearful of singing, which is a big part,” she said. “I started playing with my brother and hanging out when I was little kid. I joined choruses, high school musicals. I started voice lessons when I was 16 with Sara Evans. I’ve also taken voice lessons from three other people.”
Some of Springer’s voice instructors have notable names, including south shore’s recently departed jazz singer Rebecca Parris. “She taught me a lot about performance more than just singing,” Springer said. “How you hold yourself on stage, how you interact with the audience, how you emphasize words and how you phrase them is just as important as your vocal training. She showed me not what I needed to add to my voice but take away. It was all psychological. You just don’t think about yourself and your inadequacies because you’re bringing that to the audience. Rather, treat each individual with a hundred percent respect. They’re all the same. They’re all wonderful people coming to listen to you and hear what you have to say.”
Another of Springer’s teachers was Geoffrey Hicks who is trained in jazz and works in music ministry. Hence, a lot of the training with Hicks was spiritual and that got Springer interested in spiritualism. “He got me very enthusiastic. Now, I’m very spiritual,” she said. “He had a different take on things. He was another favorite of mine.”
Springer had recently begun working on a new CD titled Relentless. She is working on her recording project with Joe Clapp at his Ultrasound Productions Studio in Hanover, Massachusetts. She has just started laying down the initial tracks.
“For those who don’t know, CDs have layers on them,” she said. “You put down the vocals, the guitars. You add the bass. You add the drums. You add the piano, the violin, the cello, the flute. It goes on and on. This is just the beginning. It will probably take a year or two. It’s exciting. I listen to them every day. I’m liking it, and I’m feeling like every CD is better than the last. It’s been great for me. It makes me feel good.”
Springer does not know yet how much different Relentless will be from Got To Be Brave. She does not think about that during her recording process. “I try not to make them sound alike,” she said. “They all have different, lyrics, different melodies, different ideas.”
Springer likes working with producer Clapp, radio personality Sandy Streid, Host of Twilight Showcase on WATD FM 95.9 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and on air personality Aaron Bornstein, Host Of What’s Happening, on 91.7 Salem State radio in Salem, Massachusetts. Aside from finishing up her next CD, getting it on the air, and getting a recording contract, Springer is now at a point where she’d like to move on to having a band behind her at gigs, whether musicians find her or she finds them. She is often on social media making contacts and connections.
“I want to move it to a higher level where people can hear my music broadly in more areas with more definition,” she said.
https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/ilenespringer2
