TAE PHOENIX

Singer-Songwriter • Activist • Writer

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A natural-born storyteller with the polish of an accomplished actress and the authentic edge of a seasoned blues musician.

Seattle Weekly

Music

Featured Track: “I wanna see you be brave.”

Music is the art form we turn to when we need to build bridges and make ourselves plainly understood.

In January 2020, the United States was in crisis. The president was holding vital defense support to Ukraine hostage as a means of coercing their government into investigating the son of a political rival.

My civil disobedience action inside the Senate’s Russell Rotunda – performing Sara Bareilles’ “Brave” in an area where protest is strictly forbidden – was a call on Republican Senators to join Democrats in voting to remove that corrupt president from office.

More Music

Everyone You’ll Be EP • Studio Album Release Date: Feb 2024
Home demos…

Tae Phoenix · The Girls You'll Be Demos
Deep Cuts

Tour Dates

CityDateTimeVenue
Boston8/7/23TBABerklee Performance Center*
Boston8/8/233:30pmCafe 939
New York8/14/236pmRockwood Music Hall
Washington, DC8/17/232-4pmWOWD Radio
Reston, VA8/18/236pmLake Anne Plaza
* I am a backup singer as part of a larger ensemble.

Bio / Artist Statement

My name is Tae Phoenix and my favorite party game is “two truths and a lie.” See if you can guess which is which:

The answer is in the footer of the website.

My work is about themes that everyone can relate to on some level: rejecting conformity, embracing authenticity, and finding the connections between healing ourselves and building the world we want.

Sometimes, when I’m stuck on where a musical idea belongs, I’ll write lyrics from the perspective of a fictional character and see where that takes me. I love this approach because I tend to obsess over stories: telling them, absorbing them, analyzing them. It doesn’t really matter as long as I’m immersed. I’ve written songs that started out as screenplays and the beginnings of musicals that I originally thought were novels. It all makes me ridiculously happy.

My favorite thing about using music as a storytelling vehicle is that a well-timed and well-written song can convey a tremendous amount of information just with the placement of a quarter note rest. I learned this the first time I performed in a Sondheim show. (“Into the Woods.”) I looked at the score, thought, “wow! It’s turtles all the way down, “and never looked back.

The performing arts world is a wonderful place for many reasons, but it’s also not an easy space for me to enter. As an Autistic, I get easily overwhelmed by loud, chaotic environments like music clubs. In a people-oriented business, missing a social cue, facial expression, or change in tone of voice can have implications that aren’t always obvious in the moment. One of my goals as I work in this space is to build more inclusive and accessible spaces for “neuro-spicy” artists and our supporters.

Videos

Live

Music & Lyric Videos

New Cover: To Make You Feel My Love

 

You can get a free download of this song (and a bunch of other great free downloads) by signing up for my mailing list here: https://madmimi.com/signups/79634/join

I’m going to start posting more of these covers, and what better place to start than this classic song? I’ve loved it since forever because it conveys such longing and loss, and those are two really interesting textures to breathe into a song. As I’ve been polishing my singer-actress chops, I thought this one would make a good exercise.

But there are so many great covers of it up already on YouTube, so I knew that I was going to record and post a video I would want to do something different with it. So I pulled it in a bluesier direction by switching the song from the original 4/4 time signature to 12/8. (Non-music nerds, listen to the song and count along ONE-two-three-FOUR-five-six-SEVEN-eight-nine-TEN-eleven-twelve to see what I mean.) Then I created an arrangement that was driven by some old school organ sounds rather than the usual piano or acoustic guitar-driven arrangement.

Warning: deeper music nerd talk ahead…

I mixed the whole thing in GarageBand using an AKAI MPK mini MIDI keyboard (which I love) to arrange the instrumentation. The vocals were recorded on a Shure PG-42 USB Mic, which has been without a doubt the best piece of gear I’ve picked up this year. I have a big dynamic and vocal range and I use a lot of different colors vocally. Finding a USB mic that can keep up with me has been one hell of a challenge.

I used the camera on my iPhone 6. Next time, I won’t start recording so late in the day. I’ve been trying to use natural light from the Seattle summer sun for my videos, but this ended up being the best take vocally and I was already losing the light. I tried to correct for it as best I could in iMovie, but the sound is what’s important anyway, right?

I synced the recording from Garageband with the video from my iPhone using a neat program called WooWave Dreamsync. Just a few drag and drop operations and a few minutes of waiting for the files to export yields perfectly synced audio and video from separate sources. It’s totally worth the $99 once you consider that you could spend hours sliding an audio file back and forth in iMovie to get a less perfect result. The UI is janky as hell, but it’s a smart piece of software and if you read the first page of the instructions, you’re basically golden.


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