She went from having never sung a note
in her life to releasing three albums - and being compared to
June Carter Cash. Meet Carrie Rodriguez.
It could have been so easy for sultry Mexican-American songstress
Carrie Rodriguez to play up the June Carter Cash comparisons on
her upcoming solo debut,
Seven Angels on a Bicycle (Back
Porch Records), due in August. With the success surrounding Walk
the Line, the biopic about the rise and fall of Johnny Cash,
audiences would have been already tuned into that somewhat lost
1950s country, 4-H-fair twang - the dominating sound on Rodriguez's
first three duet albums with country-folk legend Chip Taylor.
Instead, on
Seven Angels on a Bicycle, the 27-year-old
Berklee College of Music grad has gone with less bluegrass and more
sass.
Despite having grown up in a family steeped in music - she's the
daughter of well-known
Austin songwriter David Rodriguez and the
great-niece of even more famous Mexican bolero balladeer Eva Garza
- Rodriguez had never thought about singing; she played violin
instead, from the age of five. In fact, she had never even sung a
note outside of the shower when Taylor, with whom she was touring
as a fiddler, forced her to the stage in
Sweden in 2001.
"I honestly never thought there was any reason I should sing in
public," says the Texas-born New York transplant. "My voice always
sounded kind of harsh to me ... still does. Every time a song was
coming up in the show that I had to sing on, I would get terribly
nervous - to the extent that my knees were literally shaking!"
Still, Rodriguez soldiered on, and the fruits of her partnership
with Taylor produced three duet albums, including 2005's critical
favorite,
Red Dog Tracks. "Singing in a recording studio or
onstage when you don't consider yourself to be a singer is a little
nerve-racking," she says. "When we made the first record,
Let's
Leave This Town, I remember thinking, 'People are going to hear
this or, God forbid, buy this and know that I'm not a
singer.' "