Elli Fordyce – An Unusual Musical Journey
Comments (0) A highly accomplished vocalist and actor, Elli Fordyce had an unusual musical journey. 30 years ago, after a devastating car accident that ended a successful year-long “Elli Fordyce And Her Favorite Things” tour, Elli took time away from her musical journey. Although it took 15 years to heal spiritually, music was not over for her. An unlikely inspiration helped to get her back to singing: Elli discovered that her ginger-colored Yorkie pup named Dindi (which is pronounced gingy and means little jewel in Portuguese) loved hearing her sing that song to her. Urged on by Dindi, Elli made a successful comeback, releasing her first CD, “Something STILL Cool,” at the age of 70. It became an overnight sensation with rave reviews.
Ucombo Music Reviews editor Meg Dilts interviewed Elli this week about her early musical career and her comeback.
Meg: Hi Elli, thank you so much for talking to us. You had a successful musical career before you stopped singing for 15 years. Can you tell us your early musical training? How did you get started?
Elli: We sang group folk songs daily in the elementary school I attended and I listened to top-40 radio in Jr. high school; than at 15, a boyfriend and his dad introduced me to jazz, which we heard often, both in-person and on our terrific local AM jazz radio stations. I took a few voice lessons at 16 in Greenwich Village. When I returned to college for two more years at 25, I studied music education. The rest was on-the-job training from the age of 18 when I briefly sang in public with jazz trios.
Meg: You were on a roll with your career when the car accident ended your successful one-year tour of “Elli Fordyce And Her Favorite Things.” You gave up singing soon after. Was it physically too painful to sing after the accident?
Elli: Although I’m still working on physically healing my back injury after 30 years, the injury didn’t directly effect my singing. After the accident, my band was so emotionally distraught and when we couldn’t get work until 6 weeks later and then at a much lesser level than we’d previously achieved, none of us handled it very well. We took our frustration out on each other and with no work coming through, I wound up disbanding the group and trying to start from scratch. When the next band I was in — over which I was thrilled and which had so much combined potential — disintegrated (this time, due to drug use by its leader), I threw my hands up in despair and decided to eliminate what it was that was magnetizing all this drama into my experience and to turn my life back around. At the time, I didn’t know I would leave the business and I dabbled in a couple of short-lived projects not long after, but found myself in situations which led very far from those dreams for the next 15 years. To me, everything is based in the spiritual/emotional, the physical parts being the final but more obvious outcome. I finally took a stand and became more proactive about life.
Meg: The very unlikely inspiration that got you back was your Yorkie pup, Dindi. She loved hearing you sing the song for which she was named. How did you discover she loved it? What did she do when you sang to her?
Elli: I began borrowing her from her litter up the block when she was 6-1/2 weeks old, in 1991. Carrying her in one hand, I’d sing Dindi to her and she’d snuggle and calm down. Several months later, Frank Sinatra came on the air singing her song and she literally did a double take at me, as if asking me why someone else was singing that song. (At least that’s how it seemed; maybe she just recognized her name.)
The dog I have now is a much smaller version (Dindi was 12 pounds, Minty is only 5) and she’s the reincarnation of Dindi, coming back to the planet about a year after Dindi died. During the last year of producing “Something STILL Cool,” Minty was always in the studio and when it was time to do more vocal takes of Dindi, Minty was in the recording booth. I was focusing on her, singing directly to her. She’d been whimpering in the control room a few minutes before and I didn’t want her on the recording! That’s the best vocal track on the album.
Meg: After your inspiration was renewed, you had a series of coaching sessions and went to workshops, and eventually released your first CD, “Something STILL Cool.” Where did you draw inspiration for this CD? Can you tell us the story behind making it?
Elli: The music was inspired by years of listening to, singing and wanting to record those songs. The title and cover art are an homage to “Something Cool,” an album by June Christy to which I listened a lot in my senior year in high school after my family moved from New York City to a small town, seven miles from anything (and me with no license for 9 months), away from all my friends and from jazz. There was one classmate there who owned and loved that album; she and it saved my life that year by her sharing it with me after school on many an afternoon, both of us dreaming of being jazz singers. All the songs on my first CD mean a great deal to me personally, on one level or another, and each inspires me in some way.
The story behind actually making “Something STILL Cool” is a full-blown saga. I walked dogs and fed people’s cats full-time for 15 years and for three years prior to going in the studio the first time, worked 60-70 hours a week, taking every job I could and saving money. Finally having enough, hiring the musicians and doing a series of gigs with some of them as “rehearsal,” in two days we laid down all the instrumental tracks and I’d spent most of what I’d saved on fees and musicians. But I didn’t like the way the vocals were coming out and kept redoing them, finally giving up on working with that producer and going to a new one, Patrick Lo Re at One Soul Studios in NY (with whom I later also co-produced “Songs Spun of Gold,” my current CD). I soon ran out of money and a producer I’d hooked up with somehow on the internet asked if she could finish the album, re-recording the vocals and editing/mixing — in Philly. We did 4 sessions there from which I had a master of 8 songs on CD and was working on graphics and text for the insert to go to press when the producer disappeared. Not only from us but from her large tab at the Philly studio, which kept my separated tracks for ransom trying to get their bill paid. Later, I found an inexpensive producer in Brewster, NY where I did a few sessions, working with the already-mixed master from Philly and some instrumental tracks from the initial sessions (wanting more than 8 selections for the CD). Before we finished that version, I again ran out of money, but eventually, was fortunate to be subsidized by a family member and able to go back to Patrick. After looking at all the versions and renditions and formats I brought him, we decided how to come out with the best result, taking everything back to the basic tracks from the original two instrumental sessions recorded — at that point — five years earlier. Reworking those, we redid all the vocals yet again. A year later, as we were about to start on graphics and text for the insert, and move on to the production plant, a sudden illness in Parick’s family caused him to drop all his work for many months. Eventually I finished the CD, which he was co-producing, on my own and, nearly 8 years after starting the CD, it came from the plant: completed!
Meg: Your new CD being launched currently is “Songs Spun Of Gold.” At the age of 72, you prove that it’s never too late to re-launch a singing career. Do you find that life experiences have added more to your interpretation?
Elli: Good question. Sure, life experiences add to everything we do as we move forward, including my interpretations of everything I sing. We usually don’t get the significance of how those experiences have added to our wisdom and lives until much later.
Meg: Thanks again for letting us interview you and best of luck with everything. We hope to talk to you again in the near future.
Elli: That would be great and it was my total pleasure.
Elli Fordyce is represented by Redwood Entertainment, Inc. in New York city.
