Eve Selis - Angels & Eagles
When we see Eve Selis performing in small theatres, intimate clubs, pubs, bars and large festival stages across the breadth of the UK it’s easy to forget that the glamorous lady up there on stage opening up her innermost emotions and giving her all is in reality a housewife and mother back home in Southern California.
This hit home last year when she toured whilst six months pregnant. Now she’s getting ready to leave her young son, Henry, teenage daughter Sarah and stepson Jake to return to these shores and play for adoring audiences that have taken this singing lady to their hearts.
“My son, he’s ten months now. He’s amazing and he’s starting to figure out how to open some of the doors, that we’ve had baby proofed, he’s a baby Einstein,” enthuses a proud mom. “We’re so very excited about coming back over—I love England and I really miss not being there.”
It seems hard to believe that it’s been well over a year since Eve was last over here. Alongside giving birth and nursing Henry, Eve has found time to complete her first new album in almost four years. She co-wrote ten of the fourteen songs with her long-time musical partner Marc Intravaia and they explore so many emotional threads from a mother’s love (1000 Kisses) to overcoming heartbreak (Cryin’ Days) to optimism and hope in the face of what appears to be a hopeless situation (That’s Enough). Eve admits that four years since her last album, NOTHIN’ BUT THE TRUTH was certainly not intentional.
“We normally do an album every two years,” she explains. “We get the material together, start recording, tour with it the next year and then start on the new material. This time round we were getting ready to do that and we were discussing a possible signing with Proper Records. We were looking into that and then the whole economic climate changed and it was no longer a possibility to be a part of Proper Records. They still wanted to distribute us but we couldn’t be signed to them.”
Eve had started out financing and releasing her own recordings before, so it was not a major problem, more of just a blip that could be overcome with a little regrouping. “All my other CDs were independent, we produced them, we paid for everything, so we were headed down that road again,” she continues. “Then I found out I was pregnant.”
Recording got under way in December 2006. A talented sound engineer who had worked at the legendary Ocean Way studios in Los Angeles for a dozen years or so had walked away from the corporate world and moved to San Diego. After years working under intense pressure with such superstars as the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Elvis Costello, etc, he now operated the much smaller Street Sounds studios in San Diego.
“We went into the studio to see if we liked each other and to see what he could do. We recorded one song and it sounded great so we went back in January, and did twelve songs. I had planned on purpose, that what I wanted to do with this CD that I hadn’t done with the others, was to live with it for a while. Just do twelve songs, live with them, and see what we could do better, what we could add to it. So we did that and then came over to England in February, and I had a big event in Las Vegas and then by that point I was seven and a half months pregnant.”
“I was in that mode that I had to have my baby before I could have my music ‘baby.’ And then my son was a very needy new-born, and I was pretty much out of commission for six months. I had no sleep, and he was really just being a tough baby, until he realised that the world might not be as bad as he thought it would be, and he didn’t have to scream for everything or eat every two hours. That gave me the chance to concentrate and say: ‘Right, it’s time to go back in.’”
“It’s a pretty amazing miracle carrying a child and it really changes your life. A song on the disc, 1000 Kisses, was inspired by him. All my friends used to say take him in the car and it’ll calm him right down and send him to sleep—but my son hates the car-seat, wouldn’t take a pacifier, didn’t want the bottle and it was like nothing worked until at about seven months old he wanted to take the bottle. When I put the new CD on in the car, he just calms down right away. I think it’s because I was singing these songs during pregnancy and he must remember it and associate it with still being inside.”
Eve is full of that blooming ‘new mom’ radiance and without hardly any prompting is ready to talk about her new baby endlessly. She was planning to bring young Henry with her on the forthcoming UK tour, but common sense overcame the reluctance to be separated from her baby and she made the equally difficult decision to leave him at home whilst she hits the UK motorways.