The Intimate and Emotional Spirituality of Odessa Chen

Oakland singer-songwriter Odessa Chen doesn’t necessarily want to rock your world or make you shake it like a Polaroid picture.

“I don’t do any dancing. I don’t perform nude. I don’t play my guitar with a vibrator,” she says, yelping with laughter.

Still, despite those resolutions, she’s had her share of bizarro interactions with out-of-hand audience members. There was the time, for instance, when she played with her former band Troia at the now-defunct Tip-Top Inn in San Francisco’s Mission District. The group — which comprised an upright bassist, electric bassist and vocalist — didn’t exactly fit the typical bill at the rock club, but they won at least one rabid fan that night.

“At the end of one of the songs, one of the guys in the audience screamed, ‘Damn! That’s some good singing!’ And then he jumped up and tore down this big paper banner that was on the wall, crumpled it up in a ball, threw it in a trash can and set it on fire,” recalls Chen. “We thought, this is the last time we’re going to play here.”

Nowadays, the 29-year-old solo artist finds her audience less demonstrative yet, at times, as deeply stirred as that punk rock firebug. Her self-released 2003 debut album, One Room Palace, evokes quieter responses, in keeping with its soft, ethereal and generally lovely qualities. Touched by classical music elements and driven by Chen’s achingly emotional soprano, One Room Palace’s ballads are adeptly filled out by double bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Rich Douthit and accomplished guest players such as Thee More Shallows’ David Kesler, Scott Amendola and Dave Brubeck’s son Matt Brubeck. Offbeat songwriters like Jeff Buckley, Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam and Kate Bush provided the inspiration but the songs carve out a territory all their own, insinuating themselves into your subconscious and stealthily setting up housekeeping. Though Chen’s emotionally naked tone sometimes resembles Chan Marshall’s or Shannon Wright’s (“Side by Side”), she more often resembles a chamber-folk Bjork (“Where Heaven Should Be”).

“To me, singing is a spiritual thing, not in the sense that it’s a religious thing but it’s intimate and it’s emotional,” she says.

Today, she’s hanging out in Golden Gate Park. The interview was set up at Amoeba Records where Chen might stroll the aisles and comment on favorite discs, revealing the passions, preoccupations and the pitter-patter of little beats that made her first gravitate toward music-making at the ripe old age of 21. But for some reason, she steers the talk toward the city’s green spot — perhaps because she feels so connected to nature.

In any case, here she is, in four or five shades of blue if you count her teal T-shirt, turquoise sweater, aqua ’70-style coat, and faded jeans. Grizzled hobos dragging shopping carts settle down near her park bench, and when a frazzled stranger, who resembles a once-suave extra from a spaghetti Western, waves at her, she waves back. It may be overcast and it may be chilly but the park is bristling with greenery and bustling with wild life. But that’s nature for you — and that’s why it appears so often as a leitmotif in her work.

“Nature’s just a theme that’s worked its way into everything I’ve done, be it painting or graphic design or music. I guess I’m a nature person,” she muses before quickly qualifying that thought. “I mean, I’m not a hippie at all, but I really do love nature. But I miss it being in San Francisco. It’s hard to access. I live by Lake Merritt, so there’s not a lot of nature.”

Well, some people would venture that Lake Merritt is as au naturel as downtown Oaktown gets.

She hoots again: “It’s not! It’s totally fake. I walk by and think this is like an overgrown duck pond. There’s no life in there — just moldy things.”

The Baltimore native says she’s used to being in close proximity to lots of natural beauty — as well as music. Her father, a physicist from Shanghai, worked as an organist and choir director for Methodist and Episcopal churches, when he wasn’t teaching at Towson State University. He met Chen’s mother, whose Anglo roots were set in the American South, at the college — though the relationship wasn’t completely rosy.

“My dad was actually teaching my mom. It’s bad!” Chen says comically. “But she asked him out so it’s not that bad, I guess.”

Her mother’s side of the family weren’t “psyched” about their in-law’s Asian heritage, she adds, “but once I was born … they wanted a granddaughter more so I kind of smoothed things over.”

She moved to Tucson, Ariz., to attend University of Arizona and studied English and writing there for two years before she realized that she had get more involved in her great early love, music. Chen started lurking around the college’s music department until she met players she could collaborate with.

“I always wanted to do it since I was really young, but I was more into visual arts as a child and I think I got intimidated because it’s hard to start something that you’re not already good at,” she remembers. “So you kind of go in and be really bad at it.”

Chen was good enough to catch the ear of a few musicians in a band called Port in 1995. She was already playing with double bassist Ashley Adams when a band asked her to join. So, the pair both got involved, creating a “doubled” bass sound that continued in Troia, Chen’s next band, with Adams and electric bassist Leigh Coonce. “I really like deep, soothing tones, even though I’m a soprano,” Chen explains. “I really like warm sounding instruments, growing up with classical music. The double bass is just a really beautiful instrument — it can also play lead melodies. It can play as high as a violin, and not many people know that, but it has a huge range. I just became enamored with it.”

Troia moved to S.F. in 1996, drawn by the larger musical community. And Adams, who came up for a summer, decided to stay and eventually joined Zmrzlina. Nonetheless the trio broke up two years later, before they could put out their first single, when Coonce upped and got married and moved to Seattle.

Chen began to develop songs she now describes as more lyrical than narrative, and she spent about a year and a half recording her album, off and on, on budget studio time and whenever her co-producer and engineer Jeff Byrd wasn’t on tour with local indie rock artist John Vanderslice.

Chen had a lot of learning to do but she says it was worth it.

“I didn’t want to give someone a CD and say, ‘Oh, well, this is sort of what I wanted to do but not quite,’ or ‘The next one will be really great!’ I didn’t want to waste people’s time, with just whatever came into my mind,” she says. “I wanted each song to feel essential.”

Those tracks’ themes revolve around life events, love, beauty, relationships and death as well as the natural world.

Chen is also planning to express her love for the environment in other ways: One of her goals this year is to put together a music benefit for an organization that purchases land for preservation. And despite the fact that she’s been laid off for more than half a year, she has plenty of other pursuits on her plate. She has an album’s worth of new lullaby-like songs stowed away, but she’s more interested in playing One Room Palace for listeners. She recently came back from a tour of the Northwest with Hoff, who also plays with Nels Cline Singers and Good for Cows, and Douthit, who is Chen’s boyfriend and has performed in Boxcar Saints, Drift, Jargon and Fort Erie.

Chen doesn’t necessarily feel much musical kinship with other female Asian American singer-songwriters such as Jenny Choi or Vienna Teng, though she’s met and likes many of them.

“I think they’re motivated, and that’s really inspiring. They have it together — they have their websites. Everything is really professional, you know. There’s no slacking going on in the Asian American girl category! They’re like, ‘I’m going to do it!’” she roars with Rosie the Riveter-style gusto. “But stylistically we’re really different. Like Vienna is really great at what she does but she’s a lot more mainstream sounding. … That’s versus the stuff I do, which is much more obscure with longer songs. Structurally it’s a lot more challenging and weirder than something you’d hear on the radio.

“I can’t help it!” she wails. “It just comes out like that.”

What Chen is really shooting for are extraordinary moments, ones that rise above the merely radio-friendly.

“When you sing sometimes, or when you play an instrument, you go into this kind of meditative state and you kind of transcend your everyday awareness and you become heightened, in a way. It’s a combination of adrenalin and concentration and some other thing you can’t define,” she explains. “That makes music a spiritual thing. It’s like giving a soul a voice. You’re bringing your spirit out in a tangible form — to me, that’s what it’s like. There are times when I sing and I feel like I’m flying. You really feel like you’ve transcended the person who makes breakfast, pets the dog and goes to work — you’re something else and hopefully something more essential.”