"I honestly believe I could really live anywhere at this point in my life and believe that I was home," said the 27-year-old.
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Brie Stoner wsg The Soil and the Sun
Billy's Lounge, Grand Rapids
Sept. 10, 9 p.m. $5, 21+ billyslounge.com, (616) 459-5757 |
It took a long time for Stoner to come to that conclusion. Though she's an American citizen, Stoner and her family moved to Spain for mission work before she was a year old.
"My first words were this beautiful mixture of Spanglish," said Stoner, who attended Spanish public schools.
The Stoner family resided in Spain for 12 years, and worked with the government to create a youth center, basketball tournaments, and anti-drug programs.
"What they did was kind of liberal for that time," Stoner said.
When the family left Spain to move to Indiana in 1995, Stoner was 12 years old and unhappy with the move. She had a difficult time adjusting to the new culture and accepting her role as an American citizen.
"Obviously, I'm a US citizen, and I think it's taken me the better part of the last 12 years to feel that authentically, to feel that this is my culture, and this is where I'm from. It was very difficult for me when we first moved back."
In order to adjust, Stoner picked up a guitar and translated her angst to song. She wrote her first song in 1997. A year later, her family moved to Grand Rapids.
"That created a devastating crop of songs," she said. "That move was pretty difficult for me; I think in part that I hadn't yet dealt with the pain of leaving Spain."
"I love her old stuff, but there was a lot of angst," said David VanderVelde, a friend and fellow musician. "She has definitely gotten out of that and sounds a lot more secure."
Stoner began to get more serious about her music when she moved to Grand Rapids and met fellow musicians VanderVelde and Nathan Kalish, with whom she formed a rock band. She bonded with them not only musically, but because they had similar backgrounds.
Like Stoner's, Kalish's parents were missionaries, and the family lived in Austria and the Czech Republic. As a result, Stoner and Kalish were able to form an understanding that they couldn't find with other friends.
"We were both bilingual, we grew up in Europe, and have a different perspective of American culture," Kalish said.
Though Kalish was playing with at least 10 different bands during that time, he says VanderVelde and Stoner's music was the most influential to him.
"I'm really happy she's getting back into music," Kalish said.
Stoner took a break from music to focus on her family. She got married in 2007 and had her first child, a boy named Søren, in 2009. Before she settled, she was signed to the now-defunct Fonic Records, wrote songs for the NOOMA film series, and traveled to California for a year, as well as Chicago, to work on her music. While she was in Chicago in 2003, she recorded her first album with ex-Wilco multi-instrumentalist, Jay Bennett.
Stoner speaks highly of Bennett, who passed away unexpectedly from an accidental overdose in May 2009. She says he had a "mad scientist" appearance - his pants were too big due to weight loss, and instead of investing in a belt, he kept his trousers up with rope. He would wake Stoner up a 4 a.m. to hear how her voice sounded at that hour, and had her record in an elevator shaft, while he lowered a microphone down to her.
Stoner has a difficult time talking about her time with Bennett. Her eyes get misty as she conjures up past memories with him. VanderVelde, who was living with Bennett while Stoner was recording, also had a particularly difficult time with Bennett's passing.
"It was rough for everybody," he said. "[Brie] was heartbroken about it, but she was more concerned about me."
Shortly after Stoner recorded with Bennett, Fonic Records folded. Stoner continued recording with VanderVelde, then packed up and moved to Los Angeles for a little more than a year in 2005.
"A lot of people go there, and stay there, and don't grow up there," she says of LA. "There's something weird about that. You stay in this paralyzed state of lost boys. And the seasons don't change very much, so there is that endless summer there. And I was ready to leave that."
She thought her next stop would be Nashville, Tenn. since she had musician friends in the area. Her journey was interrupted when she fell in love with her now-husband, Steve Mayer. She stayed in Michigan to be with him, while continuing to work on demos. In 2009, Stoner got an opportunity to record in California. She flew out to the recording studio while she was five months pregnant with Søren. The result is her latest EP, Delicate Hour.
"To experience recording songs like those while pregnant — and Søren had just started to move around, and he responded to bass lines, to me singing — it was tremendous."
Stoner's Delicate Hour EP is a culmination of her influences of folk rock and the road she's taken to find her way home — with the exception of her gorgeous cover of Vixens' "Edge of a Broken Heart." The melodies are warm, peaceful, yet haunting with Stoner's hushed vocals blending with her acoustic guitar.
Less rock-y and angst-y than her songs from the past, the EP represents the destination Stoner has reached from being a troubadour to a singer-songwriter who is rooted wife and mother.
She recorded 10 songs in 10 days, and then chose the five to go on her album, with the title track being written the night before it was recorded.
"There was a feeling about that song. It was special to me," she said. "I don't want to say it stood out, but it seemed to capture a lot of my feelings at that time — of what it had been like for me to come home. I don't mean come home to Michigan, though I love it here — I mean come home to myself. To find who I am, to feel happily settled with a husband and a son — to find that in the most unexpected place."
