Hotel Café Tour: Brooke Fraser

By Naila Francis
Published: October 31st, 2008 | 1:25pm

"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 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.

Brooke Fraser

Age: 24

Home base: Sydney, Australia

Pick up: Albertine, her U.S. debut released in May on indie label Wood & Bone

Sound: Sublime, introspective singer-songwriter pop hinged on messages of hope and healing

Faith in art: “In Australia and New Zealand, there’s no such thing as a Christian industry, so I never had to face that as a believer,” says Fraser, who while not one to hide her Christian beliefs is also careful that they don’t overwhelm her lyrics. “… My faith does come through in my songs but I’m never bashing people over the head. I hope that I’m initiating a conversation and starting a dialogue rather than going, ‘This is it,’ and ‘You should believe this’ because I don’t believe that’s the way God works … it’s more about a journey and a process.”

Titular inspiration: Named for an orphaned girl she met while visiting Rwanda, Fraser’s U.S. debut (she is already a star in her native New Zealand, thanks to her 2003 album What To Do With Daylight) was largely inspired by that trip. Albertine, a Tutsi, had been saved by a Hutu during the Rwandan genocide after her entire family was killed. “I’d been asking myself and asking God, ‘What is my response to this? What do I do?’” says Fraser. “I knew I needed to write a song, but more than that, I needed to make my life the song. I couldn’t just put this in a book of good little life experiences and remember that time fondly.”

Love hurts: “In that moment, when he told me that story, and I realized what had happened and looked at this girl sitting here alive in school today only as a result of the actions of this man, I understood just for that glimpse what love is,” says Fraser, of her friend Joel Nsengiyumva, who as the one to save Albertine was also the one who introduced Fraser to the orphan. “It’s not a soft Valentine’s card kind of sentiment. It’s bloody, and sacrificial, and raw, and it might cost you everything, and that’s what I understood perhaps a little bit more.”

Songwriting as mystery: “I’ll get a lump of a song, or something, or an idea, or sentiment, or feeling, and then I apply the craft of songwriting to try to shape that lump and figure out what’s inside it and what it wants to become,” says Fraser, who initially dreamed of being a journalist, despite admitting “in my gut, I always knew music would be the thing that I would do.”

A “sucker for community:” Acknowledging the rarity of an all-female tour nowadays, Fraser is honored to have joined the Hotel Café lineup. “This is a tour that features a bunch of women songwriters in similar genres not competing with each other, but championing one another on. I love that,” she says.

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Brooke Fraser MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/brookefraser