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Heather
Eatman was born in Jacksonville, East
Texas, a town so small, as Heather describes it, "the phone book is only
a quarter-inch thick". She was a quiet, studious kid with an active
imagination. Her dad taught drama at the local college and Heather
eagerly absorbed the  world of magic he brought into the house. Eventually, the Eatmans moved on to Ann Arbor for awhile and finally ended up in Johnstown, PA. The teen-aged new kid in town had trouble fitting in and her natural shyness pushed her further to the margins. At seventeen she made the huge leap of moving to New York City, entering the Parsons School of Design and supporting herself with several simultaneous part-time jobs. In New York she began the long journey of becoming a performer. "I spent many years staring at the tops of my sneakers," she recalls. Heather explains her stimulus into songwriting as normal teen rebellion. Her father's taste in music ran to Stephen Sondheim. Rock music was an anathema. So naturally Heather had to try it. She describes the influences that got her going in the early '80s as "anachronistic" -- bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who led her to discover seminal blues artists like Elmore James and Robert Johnson. Cinematic songwriters Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones also struck a nerve, clearly making a mark on Heather's rich storytelling style. After college, Heather started booking herself into local clubs and landed a "day job" at the New York Daily News where she still works as a graphic artist. Oh Boy Records' A&R rep Tom Lewis caught one of these early gigs and discerned a very special talent in the singer/songwriter who was still at the self-described "early, early stages." Heather had made up a very rough demo tape, just for booking gigs, but hadn't even begun to consider the wider world of recording contracts, national tours and tv appearances. She was stylistically undefined, but had amassed a cache of about 50 solid songs with new music pouring out of her at an impressive rate. She signed to Oh Boy in 1993 and spent the next two years readying her debut album MASCARA FALLS. It was "a massive learning experience." The album was produced by Roger Moutenot, who also handles producer duties on the new release. Heather toured the US, opening for Oh Boy owner John Prine and appearing at such illustrious venues as the Fillmore and the Ryman Auditorium. She landed a booking on The Conan O'Brien Show. Robert Hilburn, pop critic for the Los Angeles Times, praised her debut: "...there is a sizeable portion of Eatman originality in her music, and it will be interesting to see how she expands on that freshness." Heather treated complex people with compassion, drawing well-constructed lyrical portraits over plain-spoken tunes. Her stage performances reiterated the album's atmosphere -- simply dressed, armed only with an achingly expressive face and clean musical accompaniment, she allowed her characters to speak for themselves. Critics also warmed to her subsequent release, CANDY & DIRT (1999), which Heather released on her own imprint Impossible Records. The New Yorker Magazine described her as a "...guitar-slinging, spiky-haired New York City transplant fomr Jacksonville, Texas with a wispy, smoky voice and a serious talent for writing compelling songs." Billboard, Stereo Review, Interview, and Request were but a sample of other publications weighing in on the charm of her sophomore project. In 2000 Heather teamed with manager Mike Maska and together they brought her new project, REAL, to Nashville's Eminent Records. Mike encouraged Heather to experiment with co-writing and introduced her to songwriter Bruce Brody. Heather says she didn't want to seem difficult, but inside she felt herself to be a loner who couldn't share her work with a collaborator. "I was as shocked as anybody," she says, "that we immediately wrote a really great song!" Heather penned two of the album's tracks with Brody and also included her first cover, the Willie Dixon tune "Spoonful." REAL represents a breakthrough on many levels to Heather. As a songwriter she feels more focused on musiciality and melody; she's balanced her sharply-drawn tales of outsiders with unabashed love songs; and she's reached the point in her career when she can fully trust her own artistic instincts. She's excited by this new departure from second-guessing and self-criticism. "You can't know the future," she says, "but you can have faith -- wonderful things can happen." |
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