Eclectopia Blog

Going over EclecTopia’s playlists, I realized how much music was by women artists. A decade or two ago, this might not have been the case. 

In the dark ages, the female singer, the typical front person in a band, was usually dismissed by musicians as being, well, just the singer. Innovators in the 70’s and 80’s, like Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush, proved that women were a musical force to be taken seriously and it is now de rigueur for women not only to write, but play and produce their own albums. Here’s just a small selection of such artists.

Jesca Hoop was Tom Waits' nanny. Knowing Waits helped launch her career, but her album, Kismet, reveals creativity with an enviable musical maturity. Love and Love Again sounds like something out of the Edith Piaf catalogue. How does a thirty-something do that? Hoop states that on this album she wanted her "inexperience to show,"  but I find no evidence of such.

Imogen Heap bursts with creativity. A bold explorer by nature, she uses every sort of instrument and sound, including her voice as percussion, to make music that defines eclectic. Her performance on YouTube of Just for Now is exciting and innovative. Ellipse is her latest and it's clear that no matter how diverse the sound sources, she can deliver a cogent collection of songs.

Butterfly Boucher (pronounced bough-chur) laid down all the tracks at her home studio, performing on all the instruments herself, before taking her ScaryFragile album into the studio. When she sings on Gun For a Tongue, “Love it and leave it, and know when you're done, Watch out for this girl, she's got a gun for a tongue,” you know this is one artist not to be taken lightly.