Ottawa singer-songwriter Kellylee Evans is entering the next phase of her music career with her sophomore album, Good Girl.
The alt.-soul pop recording follows her 2006 critically acclaimed urban-jazz debut, Fight or Flight, which helped garner the Toronto native Juno and Gemini award nominations in 2007 and a win for best female artist at the Canadian Smooth Jazz Awards.
Good Girl was written and produced by Kellylee at Audio Valley Recording Studio in Perth, Ontario, with the help of engineer and co-producer Steve Foley and her trusty touring band since 2005.
“With my last CD, which I did back in 2004, I felt that I didn’t get a chance to get a lot of my ideas out. I wanted that opportunity this time to see where the songs would go on my own,” she says. “The song ‘Good Girl’ is about not wanting to live up to anybody else’s expectations. The whole album is about being true to yourself and the idea of trying to please everybody around you. It’s just this desire to not be anybody’s good girl.”
From the reflective “Questioning My Path” about searching for one’s identity to the aforementioned inspirational groove “Good Girl,” and playful eye-opener “Tonight” about not wanting to fall in love with someone, many of the new songs deal with obsession of one kind or another and an ever-evolving stance on things big and small.
“If I just look at simple things, like a month ago I didn’t wear make up and now I do everyday. A few years ago I was told I was allergic to fragrances and so I didn’t use anything that was scented and now, everywhere I go, I’m looking for a perfect scent to wear,” she chuckles. “And there are still people in my life who I haven’t seen in a while who are like, ‘Oh Kellylee, you’re eating meat. You were the biggest vegan!’”
As for her trademark bald pate, she says, “I’m pretty sure that’s going to stay for a while, but I have no plans.”
Kellylee just lets her career unfold, never knowing where it might lead. Her first batch of original songs — which ended up on Fight or Flight — was more jazz oriented simply because she was singing standards at the time with jazz musicians.
“When I started writing my own stuff, I was always thinking that it wasn’t jazz, but everybody thought it was, and when I looked for musicians to make Fight or Flight, everybody that I knew was in the jazz world, so it sounded like jazz,” Kellylee explains. She even took second place in the prestigious Thelonius Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition, whose judges included Quincy Jones and Al Jarreau.
But Good Girl is different.
While “Questioning My Path” has a jazzy-pop vibe she can’t escape, “Tonight” is as poppy as she gets and “Is It Love” and “Lost” have a reggae/dub feel that’s entrenched in her culture. “It’s a very vibey album,” she says. “It’s more atmospheric than Fight or Flight.”
“Good Girl” sums up the album more than any of the other songs, but “Questioning My Path” does come close. “It’s about constantly trying to figure out the right way to go and who I should be and who I should listen to and realizing that I should just listen to myself,” she concludes.
Good Girl is just that — Kellylee Evans listening to herself, and now it is yours to listen to.
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