Left to right, front to back: (Nic Lead Guitar), Kyle Crusham (producer, keys, all super cool effects and ambient sounds), Conrad Choucroun (drummer), Dan Flynn (Firefly Engineer), Rochelle Harper (Singer/Co-writer), Tom “TC” Carlton (co-writer), jack (Bass), Matthew Driskill (Firefly Engineer) – Photographer – Jim Carlton. – Recorded in Studios at Fishers, Texas!
Could you tell us a bit about your story for those who haven’t heard of you before?
I’m a self-proclaimed, “Genre Trip” writing songs as they flow to and through me. I found peace within music and created a symbol called the peace note when I laid my daddy’s ghost to rest 25 years after his death. Time can be a tricky bastard or a dear friend depending on my choice and perspective…mostly, it’s a friend. I’m in the middle of where I’ve been, on the where too soon I’ll be and trying not to escape from the now.
As a songbird in the 21st Century, I pen my emotional story that sometimes connects to a listener and then we find ourselves not alone. I’m not the prettiest voice and don’t care to be.
I’m filled with raw emotion when I deliver a story through a song and maybe someone else is stirred to feel their voice within too. I would get completely absorbed in the moment of a song being on stage with the band and it felt like the most natural place in the world I could be. I felt connected to the song, the band, and anyone listening.
Who inspired you to get on stage and perform?
I believe I was born with the inspiration. My mom says I came out of her womb singing. Crying – singing…it is all about perspective. Right?
Ahhhh, but the first time I heard Ani DiFranco on her album, Not a Pretty Girl I was stirred to the depths of my soul and I instantly wanted to get a guitar and get my feelings out thru it like she did. I have to laugh at myself in retrospect because, once I saw how she played which is unique and over the top skilled and creative, I came back down from the clouds and realized I would simply be learning to play guitar my own way which worked out pretty good
As far as who inspired me to want to get on stage: I grew up from ages 3-17 in a dance studio with two talented and hard-working dance instructors. I always attended the classes; ballet, jazz and tap but it was the weekends that we performed in our costumes having rehearsed all year long that felt so natural to me.
So when I taught myself how to play guitar by writing original songs on my pawn shop guitar, it seemed only natural to find an open mic and share what I’d been practising. I most often feel “Natural not Normal” while I’m performing on stage.
In fact, I was jamming at an open mic at the Julep Room, Ocean Springs, Mississippi with a few other musicians when someone from the Tiki Restaurant in Gautier, MS, saw me and asked to book me and the other players for six weeks every Friday and Saturday night! The guys agreed and I was off on the whirlwind of my 30’s. I fell deeper and deeper in love with performing every gig. We had over 100 gigs within the first three months of performing as the Rochelle Harper Band. I wanted to name the band, Flake but someone else had the name so the drummer said let’s just call it, Rochelle Harper Band and it stuck!
It was a natural dopamine hit, performing live, kind of like what I felt from performing as a child but this was magnified.
I felt as if the energy of the song and I were one which then merged with the players of the band forming a vortex of greater energy and then when the crowd of people joined in it was a seismic energy force that translated into peace within music for me. This is my mantra, peace within music and I still feel it.
What artists and albums have stuck with you and inspired your sound?
I was born in 1969 and the first decade of my listening to music life was full of the sounds of the 1970’s and it’s a part of the fabric of my soul and perhaps in my writing. Don’t know. I don’t think of a certain sound or vibe when I write a song. I grew up listening to vinyl and Casey Kasem’s Top 40 every weekend!
Our albums at home included: Supertramp BIA, The Village People(my first Boy Band:-), Donna Summer, Hot Stuff, Diana Ross, Ticket on an Airplane(cover), Barbara Streisand -You don’t Bring Me Flowers, Frank Sinatra, Styx-Snowblind, Earth, Wind & Fire, Patsy, Loretta, Merle, Hank, the Possum and Crystal Gayle. My mother was from Jersey and married my daddy who was from Alabama so I grew up with a diverse musical influence and loved the diversity!!
Women of the 90’s: Melissa Etheridge Sarah McLaughlin Tori Amos Tracy Chapman, TLC, Salt&Pepper as well as, The Commodores, House Music with Eagles being my all-time fave band.
Where do you write your music?
Wherever I am.
Are you someone that’s always coming up with song ideas?
Yes. I call them a SOC(stream of consciousness) and then some of them I spend more time with and they evolve into a “song”.
Could you tell us about the writing/recording of the ReverbNation Competition winning track Wait For You?
Yes. Thanks for choosing it! I asked Tom “TC” Carlton to co-answer on this since we are co-writers on the song.
TC: “Here is a succinct answer to the question, what is “Wait for You” about from my perspective:
When I was young trying to settle into adulthood and a career, I dated a girl for 7 years before we drifted apart. The song “Wait for You” was me trying to make sense of that emotional investment coming to an end. It also was an answer to Bruce Springsteen’s song, “If I Should Fall Behind” from his 1992 album Lucky Town.”
Rochelle:“A co-write between Tom “TC” Carlton and me. 20 years in the making. In 2004 TC shared his original version of Wait for You with me. I was currently covering Fade Into You by Mazzy Star and was learning how to play a b minor, as well as use my soft voice in a song.
When I heard the original lyrics, I felt as if the words saw Into a secret space inside that believes when my loved ones pass away, die, that they are actually in a place where they will be when I get there and that they could be, as TC penned, in a place where they, “Wait for You”.
I Played what he sent to me and then added the b minor and tried to emulate the Mazzy within me. Somewhere around 2014 Boz and I began playing it together and Boz is a rocker. He added his 1972 Les Paul through a Marshall amp sound to the song and it morphed into another version of TC’s original.
And then, August 2023, in Austin, Texas, we shared it with Kyle Crusham! Wow. What a creative energy he is!! In pre-production, Kyle played the song on the piano which stirred a different vibe within me and my voice. He encouraged me to use my pretty voice because he had a vision which you heard in this song.
Then, Kyle spoke about the lyrics and asked us to write a different line, the third line for the chorus with a different melody and for us to write a new verse which would end up being the second verse. Oh, and we had to have this done by the very next day for the major recording in Studios at Fischer down the road from Austin where Kyle’s studio and preproduction was. SAF is a dream come true kind of studio. Amazing!!!!
This is where we met the fab Ingrid, marketing and hostess extraordinaire, the two engineers; Dan Flynn and Matthew Driskell, and the talented musicians on this song, Conrad, Jack and Nick. added their talents.
Kyle was the maestro and the magic began. We ran through the song a few times just sitting around and then we recorded a few takes. I thought the vocals were scratch vocals but he kept them. I nearly cried during the second verse because of the lyrics: calling out to my friend, like a tear in my eye, your that cloud that’s floating by. Earlier that year a dear friend of ours we met in 2011 in CHÉDIGNY France, Michele had unexpectedly passed in an auto accident.
I could feel his presence as I sang the song in the studio and this song stirred me thinking that he was out there waiting for me/us.
Kyle did an amazing job of taking my perspective and belief about the lyrics of this song being beyond worldly and TC’s perspective and belief, of the here and now of waiting for the one you love no matter what and merged them Into this version of Wait for You that you hear now.
Kyle plays the keys on this and then created all the ambient sounds. He has his own unique style which plays its own part in this song, IMO. This song will always be able to stir me to tears…in joy and in believing that our loved ones will, as the song sings: I will stop and Wait for You!
What has been your favourite experience as a musician?
Gosh! It’s how I met my husband. He auditioned for my band for lead guitarist:-)!
So many and so many different faves. Opening and meeting legendary Creatives like Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Richie Havens, and Bobby Rush, having Mr. Clyde Stubblefield sit in with us on WhaddayaKnow live radio from the Biloxi Little Theater and sharing the stage with fellow Mississippi Singer/Songwriter Michael Grimm and Alabama Legend, Donna Hall Foster of Wet Willy, are tops.
The one I’ll share in-depth tho involves Boz and I meeting a guy named Cinsky in an elevator in Bratislava, Slovakia in a building where we stayed with a friend’s girlfriend who opened up her amazing apartment to us for the month of November 2015. Cinsky, who was working on a film in this same building chatted us up and we were like long-lost friends. When we shared that we were musicians travelling from France he invited us to his home in a small village with only three streets and two businesses, side by side: a restaurant/pub and a grocery store.
After our friend ran his name and information through her data system, she was an American consulate, we headed off to Lachnov, Czech Republic a three-hour drive away.
It was fall and this drive took us to the height of just the bottom of the Tetras mountains. This town had three streets with people’s homes whose yards were divided by fruit trees for fences. We learned quickly that they made firewater from the fruit which in the Deep South we call, Moonshine. Our second night there was the day of the dead, November 2, 2015, and Cinsky convinced the owner of the pub to let us play music and celebrate the day of the dead as we do in the south with second lines and jubilee, a “celebration of life”!
She agreed!
And this is the experience I’m getting at: here we were, me and Boz the only Americans in a room of about 50 people which filled the small pub wall to wall. Cinsky a friend of his and the bar owner made five people who SPOKE English. But the beauty, the magic the thing about music is that every person in the room spoke the same language when we played a song by Bob Dylan, or Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix or CCR or Fleetwood Mac and THAT language was MUSIC!!
They all sang in English and we all shared in the language of Music. It was deeply beautiful and stirring to my soul.
And then, I just started jamming and one of the locals picked up Boz’ slide and put it in front of Boz and said, you, play this! So Boz starts playing slide over my three chord progression and these words come out of my spirit; Hallelujah, we are all Children of the Universe. And we got into these words like a mantra as Boz played the slide and pretty soon the entire room was full of people singing these words together. Some of them picked up their own instruments: a harp(harmonic) fiddle, some used their hands and all of us were in one big beautiful vortex of energy singing, we are all children of the universe. I’ve got it on video.
I wrote 5 songs the month we were in Slovakia with the 7 unexpected days in Lochnov, Czech Republic. I’ve yet to release that album titled, Fleur Savages because it’s so personal and it feels like an appendage I don’t want to share.
Do you have any plans to release any music possibly an EP or album?
Yes! Sometime in the summer. I’ll release it on my ReverbNation.com/RochelleHarperMusic site.
What is the most memorable place you have performed?
The Home of Grace!!!!!!! Altho the Rochelle Harper Band was mostly known for original music with covers from the late ’60s and ’70s, mostly rock & roll, we did have an album’s worth of original music that was Faith-Based.
We got an invite to play at the Home of Grace in Vancleave, MS, for a group of men who were getting sober thru the program which was based on their relationship with God. Our six-piece band included a hippie rock & roll electric guitar player on a 1972 Les Paul thru a Marshall amp, an equally rock & roll bass player and b-3 organ player along with a drummer and a male background vocalist, also a preacher and me on lead vocals and rhythm guitar.
We were set up in a small chapel and around 100 men came in for the music. It just so happened that a guy who had been touring as a sound engineer was present and he ran sound for us. I’m guessing the organizers didn’t expect a rock faith-based praise and worship show but it was all that and full of the holy spirit. The 100 men were singing and praising and worshipping and I’ve never felt anything like it before or since then. Amen. Amen. The sound guy off tour who ran sound recorded us and captured the men singing and praising God along with the Holy Spirit. The recording still moves me to tears of amazement at the power of music and God.
Here at Artistic Echoes, we are always on the lookout for new artists. Do you have any to recommend?
Joe Taylor, Kyle Crusham, Conrad Couchroun, SeraBee, Dave Pahanish, Abe Partridge, Genesis Be, Lynn Drury, Gretchen Anderson and of course, Tom “TC” Carlton of the Carlton Brothers.
What plans do you have for the summer?
Enjoying being amongst nature and open to the vibes of the Universe that wanna flow thru me into a song.
I’m recording a couple of songs with Grammy Nominated Jazz Guitarist and Producer, Joe Taylor who I recorded my last album, Lilt. Also, wondering why you chose Wait for You as the winning song.:-)
TC and I thank you most verily!
Find out more:
ReverbNation: https://www.reverbnation.com/rochelleharpermusic
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rochelleharperband
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rochelleharpermusic
Apple: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/rochelle-harper/932151434
Spotify: Universal Love Ep – Autumn Miles
