photo by Linnea Helmersson
Sally Shapiro
Issue #34
The Swedish solo artist is actually a duo … or is she really a trio? After an instant-messenger interview, we’re not sure
By Caralyn Green
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 2:06pm
Sally Shapiro’s breakthrough album, Disco Romance, is a coy pas de trois between “Sally,” her producer, and her audience, knowingly veiled to the identity of the woman who sighs the sweetest, most angelically chaste Italo disco you’ll ever hold hands to. The Swedish duo is composed of writer and producer Johan Agebjörn and a hopelessly shy, anonymous ingénue going by the pseudonym of “Sally Shapiro.” Even after interviewing “Sally,” I’m not sure she exists. “Sally” has never done an in-person interview. Ours is over AIM. She’s too timid, I’m told, to converse over the phone.
This insecurity is palpable in Disco Romance, an icy album that’s both standoffish in its crisp, 1980s synth and strikingly tender in its placid divulgence of melancholy dance-floor longing. Released in Europe in 2006, Disco Romance got a proper American release Paper Bag Records in October with new artwork, three new tracks, and an extended version of “I’ll Be By Your Side,” the single that first earned Sally Shapiro fawning comparisons to Annie, St. Etienne, and Madonna.
Sally, as we’ll call her — no quotation marks from here on out — has never performed live and supposedly attended a release party for her first 12-inch in 2006 in disguise to avoid unwanted attention. Who can testify that Sally is real, I wonder, that she’s not entirely manufactured — the visage of a random button-nosed blonde attached to a studio-tinkered voice of another woman or machine? Sally’s publicist says that despite her shyness, “She’s a charmer,” and the folks at Paper Bag, Sally’s Canadian label, met the button-nosed blonde but never saw her sing. Who can confirm “Sally” is actually, well, Sally?
“If the face and the voice wasn’t the same person, Johan would probably have chosen a face that were willing to do live interviews and sing live,” Sally types in our private chat room. I respond with a, “True!” but really I’m thinking, “Huh? No.”
Sally tells me to, “feel free to improve” her English, but her imperfect vernacular strikes me as endearing. Perfection is boring. Fallibility is beautiful. I spend a good 20 minutes trying to convince Sally of this, trying to persuade her to perform live despite the possibility of error. “It seems scary, very scary,” she types after a prolonged lull. “But you’ve got a point; only people that like the music will probably come. But I’m afraid to do something wrong and people will be disappointed, and I will be embarrassed. Actually I wish that I would have the guts to sing alive.” “Live,” Sally undoubtedly means, but “alive” makes just as much sense, if not more.
So how does such a discreet, reticent woman end up an entertainer? “I would say I’m tricked into this,” Sally confesses. Agebjörn, whom Sally met through an office job in 2001, asked her to record the vocals for “I’ll Be By Your Side” just “for fun,” then uploaded the song to various Italo disco forums, creating a wave of admiration and demand for additional tracks. “I wouldn’t have done it on my own. But I like that it went this way,” she says.
Fear of failure aside, Sally maintains her anonymity for another reason — so as to not detract from the music. “I think music can be ‘destroyed’ if you know to [sic] much about the artist,” she insists, and I’ve got to agree. My enjoyment of vintage Britney Spears is forever corrupted by stains of lip singing, crotch shots, and K-Fed. At least that’ll never happen with Sally Shapiro, whoever or whatever she is … if she is.
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Sally Shapiro’s Most Listened to Albums of 2007
1. Mylène Farmer, Les mots (CD 1) (2001)
2. Belle & Sebastian, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (2000)
3. Javiera Mena, Esquemas Juveniles (2006)
4. Souvenir, 64 (2007)
5. Dido, No Angel (1999)
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