There's a scene in the new film, Cherish, where the character played by actress Robin Tunney, a maniacal pop music freak with a passion for Soft Cell, is asked what she's listening to. She coolly replies, "Noe Venable," as if everybody should know who that is. That may soon be the situation. Noe Venable is, in fact, a San Francisco-based singer/songwriter with a sometimes scratchy, sometimes smooth, always provocative voice who writes like Emily Dickinson on mushrooms. Noe's been gravitating above SF's songwriting scene for a while, constantly composing, performing, recording her stuff, growing as a writer and an artist. Now two of her songs are featured in a major motion picture, another two grace that film's soundtrack, she has a new CD on the racks (Boots), and she and her band just returned from supporting Ani DiFranco on tour. It appears that after several intense years of staying passion-ately focused on her words and tunes, Noe Venable's star has risen. It's been an eventful climb. "I've really been through so much as far as how I think about my music," she says. "In the beginning, I wrote songs purely as catharsis; I had a lot of pain and issues to deal with. In retrospect, I realize that a lot of it was related to simply growing up female." While on tour with Ani DiFranco, Noe was inspired by scores of young women who traveled great distances simply to be in the presence of strong-willed, like-minded artists. "There are a lot of things that girls don't get to say when they're growing up that they need to say. There's so much pressure on girls to be a certain way, to be pretty, to be sweet. I didn't feel that I was repressed, but now I see that I was, and it came out in my music. I had this kind of crazy, ugly, dark voice. People heard it and they usually thought I was angry, but actually I was just being real." Noe moved away from the deep, dark introspective stuff for a while, choosing instead to speak through characters. "For a while, I wrote from many other perspectives‹cars, men, through all sorts of different voices. I didn't feel as if I were hiding, because it still felt very real. But now I'm writing from my own perspective again, from a strong female perspective. It feels like coming home." Noe attributes her success, in part, to feeling more "conscious" than ever before. Phrases like "less to hide" and "less to fear" recur in her comments. It seems a certain self-confidence, an artistic maturity, may be kicking in. "Since I started making music, when I was 19 or 20, the whole process has been like peeling back layers, until I've got nothing left to hide, nothing left to fear. That's where I am today." Noe's song lyrics don't read like song lyrics, but more like lines from poems. I asked her if she'd been a poet first. "I was a real bad poet. I wrote a lot of plays and I did a lot of theater, acted, directed. I coordinated a Shakespeare program for middle school kids. And I've always hated the word Œpoetry.' It sounds so hoity-toity." Whatever. But I insist to Noe that she's not a bad poet anymore, and she doesn't deny it. "I guess that music kind of unlocks something for me, which doesn't happen when I try to write poems. Some sort of door opened when I began to write songs. I've always loved words; I've always loved reading poems. But it wasn't until I started making music that I wrote words that surprised me." She continues, "When you approach music from the point of view of a writer‹and I feel I've always been a writer at heart‹you're never satisfied except when you're writing and stuff is coming through you. Any other time‹you might have played five great shows in a day, or recorded a whole CD‹is just meaningless." Noe describes the creative process as "a moment of time disappearing." Her enthusiasm rises as she says, "It's wonderful. It's a moment of being suspended. You lose the need to eat and sleep for a while. There's a feeling of floating, of not being in your body, when the writing is going good. It takes you over. But it's so brief; I feel like an addict when it happens." Let's just hope this is one addiction Noe Venable is able to nourish. Noe Venable opens for They Might Be Giants at The Fillmore on Wednesday, July 17. Her CD, Boots, is available at Streetlight Records on 24th Street, at Amoeba Records on Haight Street, at www.amazon.com, and through her Web site, www.noevenable.com.
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