Meet Vanessa Lowe, dormant psychologist gone strange... an artist whose seductively entertaining songs connect points hitherto unrelated: suicidal cypress trees, a helicopter ice cream truck, a freeloading bug…

Vanessa picked up the guitar when she was eight and wrote her first song at 17.  What emerged were stories explaining the mysteries of life and human behavior from odd and unlikely perspectives.  The flow of songs never stopped and the hunger to see the underneath of things just got stronger, leading Vanessa to get a doctorate in Clinical Psychology, writing and performing music all the way through.  Fascinating as the study of psychology was, Vanessa only worked in the field for a couple of years before catching whiff of other ways of seeing the mysteries and the minutiae.

Migrating from East to West, Vanessa fled to a small seaside town in Northern California, where she married the love of her life, apprenticed a glassblower, and fed cut-up baby chicks to Western seagulls in the hopes of returning them to the air above the ocean.  From there she moved to Berkeley and met a strange and wonderful cast of musical characters, including the former lead singer for Laundry (Toby Hawkins), a 25-year-old flight instructor who likes to do loop de loops (Ben Freelove), and an eccentric visual artist/composer/sound designer (Kent Sparling).

Ms. Lowe currently tours with her band Bug Eyed Sprite, (Vanessa on voice and guitar, Sparling on tiny instruments, and Freelove on bass).  The result of this zany amalgamation is a sound falling somewhere between the classic pop songs of Neil Finn and the inventive cut-ups of Solex.  This is not the typical self-confessional singer-songwriter fair.  The songs are rarely literal, often surprising, and with arrangements ranging from lush and driving to starkly beautiful.

Lowe recorded her first record, Her House of Sin, while in graduate school in Denver.   Her second album, Barnacles of Joy (recorded in the living room and mixed at Skywalker Sound), received widespread college radio airplay and enjoyed positive reviews in print and web magazines.  “Barnacles” was also chosen as a “Hear Music Discovery” and featured on listening stations at Hear Music stores throughout California.

Lowe’s third record, 57 Suspect Words, was released in February, 2004.  It features performances by Bug Eyed Sprite, as well as avant-garde jazz guitar by engineer Myles Boisen (Splatter Trio), and theremin by inventor/songwriter Roger Linn (LinnDrum Machine).  The songs on “57 Suspect Words” are more bizarre, and the arrangements more textured than any of Lowe’s previous work. The music is guitar and vocal based, but the sound is strange and beautiful, with eerie atmospheric backgrounds, melodica, ukulele, innovative percussion, bass, lap steel, and eccentric electric guitar.  It was recorded at Guerrilla Recording in Oakland, CA, and was mixed at Skywalker Sound by Kent Sparling, who is a sound designer and re-recording mixer for film (Lost in Translation, Adaptation and The Virgin Suicides), as well as a composer.

57 Suspect Words dwells underground – “It feels like I went around my backyard digging little holes and then sticking my head in there for a while.  There are songs about trying to experience silence, being scared of the life of words, hearing messages in the songs of night frogs.  The next record is gonna be all from the air – this one was fun, but the holes fill with rain, and then you have to look up or you drown”.