Hotel Café Tour: Lenka

By Naila Francis
Published: October 10th, 2008 | 1:15pm

"One bus, one band and a bunch of friends on the road." It's the tag line to what has become one of the most successful singer-songwriter tours of the last few years. And this time around, the Hotel Café Tour is giving it up to the women. Launched by that now venerable Hollywood venue with a reputation for breaking new talent, the tour has been throwing together headliners and local emerging singer-songwriters for the last four years, showcasing their music as much as the convivial atmosphere that the café is known for on jaunts across the United States and the United Kingdom. This year's tour, kicking off October 9 in Santa Barbara, California, features 18 of the most promising new female voices (including a few familiar favorites) to hit their stage in recent times.

"There are so many tours where it's a bunch of guys and this was an opportunity to show an area where females are dominating the current market," says tour co-founder Josh Neuman. "We wanted to bring diverse artists together from many different cultural and musical backgrounds. It's always exciting to see how people will get along out there and what collaborations come from it."

In this 10-profile series running throughout the duration of the tour, which concludes November 18 in Los Angeles (check thehotelcafetour.com for dates, tickets, and more on the featured artists at each venue), Venuszine.com puts the spotlight on the women who've caught our ear and the reasons we think you should tune in to them, too.

Lenka

Age: “I’d rather keep it a mystery”

Hometown: Los Angeles by way of Australia

Pick up: Self-titled solo debut, released on Epic Records September 23, 2008

Sound: Unaffected, whimsical pop with an irrepressible cheerfulness. It’s “where soulfulness meets circusiness,” says Lenka, who cites Burt Bacharach and the Beatles as major influences to leave their mark on her debut disc. “I wanted the album to have an uplifting feel. I wanted it to be artsy and creative and interesting and walk the line between pop music and experimental indie pop music.”

In a previous life: Prior to becoming a solo artist, Lenka was the former vocalist for Australian electronic-ambient band Decoder Ring. She was invited to join the band in 2004 after she contributed vocals to several tracks on the band’s soundtrack for indie film Somersault. VH1’s October You Oughta Know artist, Lenka also has appeared in independent films such as The Dish and Lost Things. One of her early compositions, “Follow,” provided the soundtrack to Courtney Cox’s masturbation scene in Dirt, which aired on her first night in Los Angeles.

Weird is good: Lenka is an art school grad who in addition to making music creates fanciful paper art and stop-motion animated videos with boyfriend James Gulliver Hancock, a visual artist and fellow Aussie. With an admitted affinity for craft styles with a childlike imperfection, she also brings this artistic sensibility to her music. “Bjork is my biggest influence. I know my music hasn’t turned out anything like hers, but I spent a great deal of my college years listening to her,” she says. “I feel like she helps me find my voice — she has a uniqueness and a flawed quality to her voice. Her voice is absolutely extraordinary, so I sort of had this connection where I could let my voice have the same weirdness and be myself.”

In the beginning: Although her father is a jazz musician and she was enrolled in piano and trumpet lessons at an early age, once her parents promised that she could get her ears pierced if she got a B on her music exams, Lenka rose to the challenge — and then she promptly quit her lessons. “I rebelled against music quite hard when I was a kid, which I think is pretty natural — to not want to do what your parents want you to do or what your parents do,” she says. Acting became her passion, with Lenka landing her first professional gig at 14 with the Sydney Theater Company courtesy of Cate Blanchett, who was one of her instructors at the Australian Theatre for Young People. “The music lay dormant until I started to write a few little folk songs. Then I was singing in a play, and the reaction I got from doing that, and what people said to me about my voice, and how they felt about it — I’m a sucker for approval — I thought maybe I should play with it a little bit for a while,” she says. “It was a good choice, because once I settled on that, the opportunities came along pretty quickly.

Deliberate juxtaposition: Lenka’s sonic effervescence plays in perhaps striking contrast to the broken relationships, yearning and even self-loathing that her lyrics mine. “I did do it on purpose in the song “Skipalong,” which is about being unaffected by the ways of the world and being able to shrug it all off … the human race is like that; we can go ‘la di da da, life’s great’ and ignore what’s going on in the world. The sound of the song is quite whimsical, and childlike, and soulful, but the lyrics — when you look at them — are a little negative.” Ultimately though, most of her songs contain a glimmer of optimism: “You can hear me trying to cheer myself up,” she says.

In the big leagues: “It’s going to be my first time on a bus tour,” says Lenka, of the Hotel Café Tour. “I’ll be really and truly in the rocknroll club after that. It’s going to be baptism by fire because every day, it’s like, ‘Get on the bus, let’s go, perform!’ I’m hoping there will be a lot of love in the room.”

—

Lenka's MySpace: www.myspace.com/Lenkamusic

Lenka's iTunes: