 Danielle Brisebois - bio As the force behind a juggernaut of a pop single, Danielle Brisebois has lately enjoyed tremendous acclaim for her evocative, hook-heavy songcraft. And though she arrived at this lofty perch via a winding career path, it’s clearly where she was headed all along. Long before Brisebois penned and produced “Unwritten,” the international #1 smash for singer Natasha Bedingfield (which has topped the Billboard AC chart for nine weeks, was the #3 most downloaded song of 2006 and earned more than 300,000 radio spins) – and wrote for or with such high-profile acts as Kelly Clarkson, Mandy Moore, Rod Stewart, Clay Aiken, Leigh Nash and New Radicals – she recorded the vocal for a massive crossover single – though some 20 years elapsed between the vocal and the single. As a young cast member in the acclaimed Broadway musical Annie in the late ’70s (and its beloved 1982 soundtrack album), Brisebois belted out “Hard Knock Life,” the downtrodden urchin’s anthem that was later sampled and turned into a chartbusting rap track by Jay-Z. “It took two decades,” Brisebois says with a laugh, “but I was finally street.” Even at the tender age of six, Brisebois was fascinated by songwriting; taking her dancing and singing classes across the street from the famed Brill Building – the workspace of some of pop’s most successful tunesmiths – she was magnetically attracted to the corridors of creation. “Somebody told me this was where they wrote songs,” she recalls, “so on my breaks from class, I’d go across the street with a piece of pizza and sit in the hall, trying to hear people writing songs. I’ve always had an obsession with songwriters. I even found sheet music beautiful.” She did eventually bear witness to the process. “I was in the room with Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin when they were writing songs some of the songs for Annie, like ‘Easy Street’ and ‘Hard Knock Life,’” she adds. “I was just a tiny kid, but they were sitting around the piano and coming up with ideas and I thought it was so exciting, that they were writing songs everybody would be singing. How cool is that?” Her instant infatuation with the songwriting process would ultimately ripen into the love of her life – and the flair she later demonstrated for soaring melodies and compelling lyrics suggests that her Broadway experience and brush with the Brill Building sent deep roots into her imagination. But while they germinated, Brisebois continued to develop as a performer. “Annie” would’ve been a mad whirlwind for any new performer, but for six-year-old Brisebois it was purely surreal, punctuated by Barbra Streisand asking ‘Can I adopt you?’ and visits to the White House. Her Broadway success turned into TV fame, as Brisebois played Stephanie Mills on the historic series All in the Family; her character became a regular on the spin-off Archie Bunker’s Place, for which – at age 11 – she earned a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress in a television comedy. Her ’80s acting work included a recurring role on Knots Landing and appearances on Murder, She Wrote, Days of Our Lives, Mr. Belvedere, Tales From the Darkside and in the TV movie Mom, the Wolfman and Me. As she entered her late teens, however, the tug of celebrity proved less strong to Brisebois than the emotional pull of music. “I was really listening to a John Lennon record for the first time,” she recalls of a decisive moment. “I knew the Beatles as a child, but the first time I heard ‘Mother’ from the Plastic Ono Band record, I had tears in my eyes – but also the strength to follow my heart, let go of my agent and make music my life.” Armed with this intense conviction, she leapt in – working as a backup singer, arranger and keyboardist on ’90s recordings by artists as far-flung as rock icon Rod Stewart and Spice Girl Geri Halliwell as well as collaborating with pop-rock wunderkind Gregg Alexander, who would later form New Radicals. “I fell in love with Gregg’s first solo record and decided I had to meet him,” she remembers. “We’ve been best friends since we were 18.” Alexander produced Brisebois’ own solo debut, Arrive All Over You, which was released on Epic Records in 1994. Her passionate, barbed blend of singer-songwriter pop and alternative rock hit store shelves at the same time as Alanis Morissette, but didn’t achieve quite the same impact on the marketplace. Nonetheless, the disc – which featured such tracks as “What if God Fell From the Sky” and the Top 40 U.K. hit “Gimmie Little Sign,” would prove influential on the subsequent wave of alterna-pop troubadours. Brisebois appeared, performing her own songs, in the celebrated 1997 film As Good as It Gets. She also joined Alexander’s New Radicals crew, serving as co-writer, keyboardist and backup singer on the band’s successful 1998 debut disc, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, and subsequent tour. “A lot of the songs on that album were our demos,” Brisebois declares. The album’s second single, “Someday We’ll Know,” was her composition. At around the same time, her childhood vocal was blasting out of car radios nationwide, atop the hip-hop beats of Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life.” Switching to the RCA label for her solo recording, Brisebois worked (in part with Alexander) on her follow-up album, Portable Life, but experience told her that the timing wasn’t right. “The record company was completely focused on Christina Aguilera,” she relates. “I needed to take a breath and find a more productive environment.” She struggled for a while to determine her next move. “I had a period of, for lack of a better word, confusion,” she volunteers. “Then my manager said, ‘Why don’t you just write some songs and produce other people?’ So I did. I sort of fell into it; I didn’t really try.” It may have seemed like serendipity at first, but her abilities as a writer, arranger and singer served her well in helping bring other artists’ visions to fruition. She began by collaborating with singer-songwriter Carly Hennessy, and though the project was ill-fated, it turned out to be a milestone for Brisebois. “Carly made a pop-rock record, and the label was trying to make her into the new Britney Spears,” she says of the project. “But it was fantastic for me, because I ended up writing and producing seven songs – and she was a joy to work with.” And then one of Brisebois’ songs from that record, “Just Missed the Train,” ended up on Kelly Clarkson’s album Thankful. Brisebois also produced the Mandy Moore-John Foreman duet version of her New Radicals single, “Someday We’ll Know, for the film and soundtrack A Walk to Remember. She also saw her work recorded by high-profile pop artists Clay Aiken (“Perfect Day”), among others. In addition to the runaway title track, Brisebois also contributed the songs “Drop Me in the Middle” and “We’re All Mad” to Bedingfield’s Unwritten album. “I have a knack for pop music,” Brisebois asserts. “I don’t mean schlock. I like stuff with a twist.” Sometimes the “twist” is what makes the cocktail work, as was shown by the enormous success of “Unwritten.” Brisebois recently returned to the studio with Bedingfield to record the follow-up to Unwritten. As a producer, Brisebois has found understanding the process from the artist’s perspective extremely beneficial. “Everybody brings a different energy into the room,” she muses. “Whenever I work with an artist, I focus on what I like best about them. I try to create a relaxed environment to bring that out.” Rather than enforce some ideal of sonic perfection, she emphasizes spontaneity and feeling. “I’m not a producer who sits at the computer and pushes buttons – I have more of an old-school mentality,” she says. “I’m always looking for the heart of the matter. Sometimes the best results come when performers make what they consider to be mistakes. Music’s not about being perfect – it’s about creating those kinetic moments that really excite you.” The collaborative process, she finds, often yields such moments. “The greatest thing about this work is that you get to meet people on a more intimate level,” she relates. “When you really connect with somebody, as I did with Natasha, you get inspired and it’s so easy to write.” “It’s wonderful having a hit,” Brisebois confesses. “But I don’t live in anything but what I’m doing right now. I’m not too far in the future, and I’m not too far in the past. You’ve got to have fun. This is the job that people who are stuck at desks all day dream about doing. If you’re not having fun at it, you’re not honoring that dream.” |