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GREEN BAY – It’s not like Rändi Fay absolutely needed to change her musical direction.
After all, Fay, who splits time between her hometown of Green Bay and Sister Bay, has become one of the area’s most popular and well-regarded jazz vocalists over the last decade. Five consecutive WAMI (Wisconsin Area Music Industry) Award nominations from 2015 to ’19 for Jazz Artist of the Year and steady gigs in Door County and elsewhere as a solo artist and with her quartet Limited Edition testify to that.
But Fay’s music is evolving into the songs on “Intuition,” a new, 11-track concept album being released Thursday. It will be available for streaming at Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music or Pandora, and CDs may be purchased through cdbaby.com or Fay’s website, randifay.com, as well as in Green Bay at Fay Dental Care, 1543 Park Place.
The songs continue to feature Fay’s sometimes ethereal, sometimes-torchy voice that gained attention for her in the regional jazz scene. What’s changed is the setting for the voice.
Fay worked with Appleton-based producer and engineer Aaron Zinsmeister of White Raven Audio to create a sound they call “symphonic electronica,” which puts classical-based electronic music to Fay’s original lyrics. It’s akin to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra sound, but less like big arena rock and more like romantic, adult-contemporary pop.
Fay said writing and singing this style of music was definitely a shift from jazz’s nightclub-like, usually improvisational style, but she welcomed the challenge.
“This is the opposite of jazz. It’s very prescribed, very metered,” Fay said. “It’s completely, completely different. I love it. (Zinsmeister and I) are both kinda control freaks. We were doing a lot of spontaneous stuff but in a controlled space.”
Fay met Zinsmeister in 2016 through Timothy Perkins, bass player for regional reggae group Unity the Band, when she was writing a reggae song and Zinsmeister was working with the band. She said Zinsmeister introduced her to the possibilities of combining symphonic, electronic and pop-rock music.
It came at a time when Fay, who entered the music business with no training in that field, was striving to expand her musical and songwriting horizons. Prior to her music career, she was a veterinarian until a series of right arm and hand injuries forced her from the profession in 2001.
She said she scouted around for something else to do, then in 2005 ended up joining what was essentially a Fred Waring tribute band, a chorale that sang the music of mid-20th century hit-maker Waring and his choral group The Pennsylvanians in dinner theaters and other small shows.
Fay sang with that group for about four years until it broke up, but one of its members, well-known Door County musician John Contratto, encouraged her to continue singing in gigs in the area. Contratto eventually brought her to Studio 330 in Sturgeon Bay, where she recorded an album in 2010 of love songs and lullabies, “Close to My Heart,” with him, studio engineer and multi-instrumentalist Hans Christian, guitarist George Sawyn and saxophonist Woody Mankowski. She’s worked at music professionally ever since.
“All of a sudden, this unusual music thing opened up to me that I never would have thought possible,” Fay said. “I really had absolutely no formal training.”
Learning to write
Sometime around 2013, Fay started to contemplate learning to song-write, encouraged by her Limited Edition bass player, Mick Maloney. She took an online course in the subject from Boston’s prestigious Berklee School of Music and earned a master’s certificate in songwriting in 2017.
The Berklee courses changed Fay’s songs and musical direction.
“When I was working through the songwriting classes at Berklee, we discovered my songwriting taking me in a direction that was more lyrical, more complex,” Fay said. “It wasn’t necessarily jazz-based anymore.”
After meeting Zinsmeister, Fay wrote words for a song called “Moonlight” that includes a reference to the classical Claude Debussy composition “Claire de Lune” and brought them to him with a special request for the music. The resulting adult-pop love song was released as a single in 2017.
“I was like, how would you like to write music for this lyric and incorporate ‘Claire de Lune’?” Fay said. “And I could see his eyes light up, dih-dit, dih-dit, dih-dit (laughs), he’s already thinking how he’s going to do it.”
She said she found a vehicle in Zinsmeister’s music for her new songwriting skills and metaphorical lyrics.
“I was finding I was really liking these synthesized moods (in Zinsmeister’s music),” Fay said. “The really cool thing is my lyrics (are) very image-laden, a lot of metaphor, and he’s creating these beautiful synthesized sunrises, these images, these moods to complement these lyrics.”
Plus, Fay likes the way the songs come together through the gender and age differences between the two.
“He’s in his 30s, so he brings a male perspective and a younger perspective,” the 58-year-old Fay said. “There’s a lot of gelling.”
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Putting songs, concept together
Fay began working on the concept for the new album in the summer of 2017, and she and Zinsmeister started working on songs in February 2018. Their songwriting process has similarities to the that employed by Elton John and Bernie Taupin: Fay comes up with lyrics and sends them to Zinsmeister, who composes music to go with the words. Unlike Elton and Bernie (usually), they get together afterward to listen to the result and offer suggested changes to each other. Fay said it took them about a month to finalize each song, followed by a full day to record each.
“It’s kind of a 70-70 relationship,” Fay said with a chuckle.
While working on “Intuition,” the two released a single in 2018, “Supernatural,” which not only won a songwriting award from the Great American Song Contest but also saw its music video, directed by Jocelyne Berumen, named Best Music Video of the 2019 Wildwood Film Festival in Appleton.
Fay said the concept of “Intuition” is exploring people’s dualities. That’s found within each song, but Fay said it’s also there as an overall theme of a person who deals with and overcomes her or his self-image, doubts and fears and is willing to hear out her or his intuition, especially in a world of increasing independence at a potential cost of human interaction.
“I find that people are becoming isolated,” Fay said. “Being fiercely independent is so valued in our culture today. I would challenge that being fiercely intimate is more rewarding. In doing that, you can find yourself.
“I think the big duality is the cost-benefit of going it alone versus taking a chance on love.”
While the songs advance the concept, Fay said they work as purely individual songs as well. The first single from the album, “Lone Wolf,” had its video — filmed in and around Sister Bay and co-starring Sturgeon Bay musician Troy Therrien — recognized at several film festivals across the country, including as a Wildwood selection for 2020.
“Yeah, I think each song (stands on its own),” Fay said. “I can see people really attaching themselves to different songs, because different emotions are expressed throughout … Each song is extremely emotional. Each of these songs is a little vignette. You could put them in a different order but come to the same conclusion, which is that love is worth it … I want to inspire people not to let go.”
Fay drew on life experiences for much of her songs, although she said she took further inspiration for the last track, the triumphant “Rise in Love,” from her son being diagnosed last year with leukemia. She said he’s doing well, but the fight and the fear helped contribute emotion.
“I think it added intensity,” Fay said. “I think his diagnosis expanded how I ended this (album).”
Fay wants to give live performances of the album but isn’t planning on it as of now, given the complexity of the music and the cost of playing them live. Given that she’s worked on the album full-time since June while also performing as the mother in the Birder Players productions of “Mamma Mia!” around Northeast Wisconsin last year, she said she’s ready for a break.
In the meantime, Fay’s “Intuition” is coming, and she can’t wait for fans to hear it.
“It’s very different from contemporary music,” she said, “really engaging, and I’m proud of it.”
Contact Christopher Clough at 920-741-7952, 920-562-8900 or cclough@doorcountyadvocate.com.
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