On and off Broadway, on concert stages and in cabarets, Melissa Errico has made standing ovations and critical acclaim almost a matter of routine. She has been lauded as “the voice of enchantment (New York Times) and “seductive, smart and sexy” (Washington Post). She has triumphed at New York’s most prestigious theaters, the Kennedy Center, the Hollywood Bowl and other celebrated venues, was nominated for a best actress Tony for the Michel Legrand-scored musical Amour, and has sung lead roles in Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, My Fair Lady and other productions along the Great White Way.
But there was one role she had never played out fully in song – for one of the most gifted musical actresses of her generation, perhaps the most difficult she had ever attempted. With Lullabies & Wildflowers, her latest album and first release in conjunction with Velour Music Group, Ms. Errico acknowledges and embraces that new audience – women who, like her, have undergone the exhilaration and joys of becoming mothers – and assumes the role, for the first time, of playing herself, fully, fearlessly, and irresistibly.
With the birth of her daughter Victoria in 2006, Ms. Errico found that her dedication to the theater hadn’t prepared her for the drama of bringing a new life into the world. Universal though it is, she understood that this journey is private even as it invites opening to others. This enlightenment animates Lullabies & Wildflowers. Its songs span a wide range: playful and winsome on “Someone to Watch over Me,” intimate and loving on “Mockingbird,” soothing yet stirring on “Hushabye,” upbeat and optimistic on “Wildflowers,” sensual and sexy on “Wind Says Shhh.” The feelings borne through Ms. Errico’s distinctive vocals and Rob Mathes’ spare but artful arrangements are as varied as those of women who have made the passage into motherhood.
This similarity is no accident. It is, in fact, the seed from which Lullabies & Wildflowers comes to life. To understand this project, begin with the basics. The title poses two concepts, one a dreamy reverie, the other vivid, full of sunlight and movement, each enriching the other. “This isn’t a drowsy CD,” Ms. Errico explains. “It’s gentle but it’s also irrational, eclectic and free, the way that wildflowers grow. There’s a wonderful line in the Judy Collins song, ‘Since You Asked,’ which is ‘as my life spills into yours.’ It brings to mind the combination of exhilaration and exhaustion that a mother feels while rocking and nursing her child through those many late nights. Sometimes you feel like you have nothing more to give and your life is spilling out of you, yet you’re giving all of it to this little person. The feeling of surrender and connection can be incredibly profound.”
That song appears as well on Lullabies & Wildflowers, with one small but significant edit: “Judy Collins sings, ‘I could tell you all the songs that I never sang to one man before,’” Ms. Errico says. “I changed that to ‘sang before,’ which takes this from being a beautiful romantic lyric to one that opens this landscape of passing your past and your future on to someone else.”
The current of life flows through Lullabies & Wildflowers, but its fount was the prenatal group Ms. Errico joined while in the fourth month of her pregnancy. “I didn’t know what was happening,” she remembers. “I didn’t know if I was going to be a good mother or even what the heck it means to be a mother in the first place. And there I met a group of women who were wondering the same things that I was. I met women from so many different backgrounds – Asian, Russian, French, Native American, New Zealanders. There were really alternative types and some very conservative women too. It was such a strange melting pot, but our pregnancies all became part of our collective experience.”
So deep was her communion with these women that Ms. Errico made it a point to bring her daughter to them, just four days after her birth. “I had come to this group skeptical and confused, and now I could say, ‘You guys are going to be able to do this. I did it – and her name is Victoria,’” she remembers. “It was a strange and wonderful moment that I was so happy to share with them.”
This assembly of women, drawn together as one, inspired Ms. Errico’s conception of Lullabies & Wildflowers. Her choices of songs, and her interpretations of them, reflected the essence of their experience – the honest professions of fear and love, the irrelevance of superficial differences. For this reason, Ms. Errico sings here as she has never sung before, with a conversational as well as a musical tone. We hear her as herself, yet she also sheds the element of “performance.” From the Celtic mist of “Gartans Mothers Lullaby” to the nestled comfort of “Goodnight,” her voice speaks from within the hearts of her listeners, as much as from her own.
Lullabies & Wildflowers, then, is a milestone in a career already bathed in the light of accomplishment. She has starred on television and in film, been nominated for and won theatrical awards, fronted a jazz quartet at Birdland and a 100-piece orchestra led by Michel Legrand. She will do these things, or things very much like them, again in years to come. But Lullabies & Wildflowers will remain unique in her catalog. “There was so much beauty in these melodies and stories and arrangements,” she says. “I felt everything so deeply. But I sang it directly, as if to the ears of a child. I sang vocally for the babies, for those innocent faces, but psychologically for the mothers. There’s no doubt that I’m more myself in these songs than I’ve ever been. There’s no mask, no makeup, no artifice: This is really me.”
Which is why Lullabies & Wildflowers is also the voice of everyone in that group before Victoria’s birth, and every woman who has gone down this road, and every man who has traveled at her side. This is music that will endure, like the cycle of life itself.
We wish you PEACE and LOVE in your home, your heart and in THE WORLD! Let it be a way of LIFE for the NEW YEAR. Sending musical love your way from the San Francisco Bay.
