Nobody’s Girl

Rebecca Loebe, Grace Pettis and BettySoo supergroup comes to Portsmouth

To a generation of musicians, Austin is the new Laurel Canyon. Every day, at almost any hour, music pours from hundreds of venues across the Texas city. It’s the product of a seemingly nonstop influx of creative souls flowing in from across the globe and colliding with a vibrant local scene that deservedly calls itself the Live Music Capital of the World.

With the arrival of Nobody’s Girl, Austin may have its own Crosby, Stills & Nash – in female form.

Each member hails from elsewhere. Grace Pettis grew up in Alabama and Georgia, Rebecca Loebe was born in Virginia, raised in Atlanta. BettySoo is the closest to a native; she came from Houston to Austin in 1996 to attend the University of Texas, learned the guitar and started writing songs, then never left.

“Austin is like the bat signal for all the weird kids in the South,” Pettis said in a recent phone interview. “We all just kind of end up there.”

All three have solid solo careers; each is a winner of the coveted New Folk Competition at Kerrville Folk Festival, where they first hung out together. But when the longtime friends joined forces for a brief “in the round” tour together dubbed Sirens of South Austin last year, alchemy occurred.

First, they worked up a version of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” as a show closer, and posted an iPhone video. It promptly got thousands of views. Inspired, they set out to write an original song. “What’ll I Do” leads off Waterline, a six-track EP released in September 2018. It features a near-acrobatic triple descant that coalesces into spine-tingling a capella harmony at the close.

Thankfully, the trio didn’t stop at one tune. When the studio owners heard what they’d done, they responded with an offer of a record deal. “We hadn’t even played a gig together yet,” Loebe said in a February interview. “We all just went along with it; we weren’t going to slow down something that had momentum on its own.”

Their name is shared with a Bonnie Raitt song (originally written by Larry John McNally), but the moniker is also a commentary on the trio’s purpose and place in the world. “It sort of sounds like a pop group’s name but it also sort of doesn’t, it’s a little more grown up,” Pettis said. “You know, none of us are 20; we know who we are and we’ve been doing this a while.”

Lucky area music fans will have a chance to see Nobody’s Girl before they hit warp speed, on November 15 at Portsmouth Book & Bar. The show is part of their first official tour as a group, though it’s not a New England debut – they did Me & Thee in Marblehead, Mass. in late 2018, and played Vermont’s Roots on the River Festival last June.

A two-sided holiday single dropped in October. The old chestnut “Merry Christmas Baby” gets some Muscle Shoals soul, while a cover of the Jackson 5 hit “Someday At Christmas” hews closely to the original, but adds a re-imagined chorus and soups up the melody to give it a unique stamp.

Michael Ramos produced the new songs; he also helmed Waterline and is supervising their long player, hopefully due out in 2020. Pettis gushed about Ramos, who’s worked with many of her heroes – Patty Griffin, Lucinda Williams. “He puts together his dream team and lets the chemistry of the players create a lot of the magic,” she said of the backing group used for the session. “It’s like cooking; he knows what ingredients are gonna work… I think he got it just right.”

Amidst other projects – Loebe released an album, Give Up Your Ghosts, in February, Pettis put out Blue Star in a Red Sky, a duo EP with Calloway Ritch, last fall, and BettySoo performs frequently, both solo and with her trio – Nobody’s Girl continues to gel as a group. Pettis expects their first full-length will draw from this maturity.

“We’re going to be really intentional about harmony lines, descant and lead parts on this record,” she said. “I love that everybody is the lead singer in the band – I think that’s one of the things that kind of separates us. We’ll be spending a lot of time trading off within songs, and our goal is for people to not necessarily know who is singing what part. We all do all the parts – we do low, we do high. I love that about our group.”

Nobody’s Girl

When: Friday, Nov. 15, 8 p.m.

Where: Portsmouth Book & Bar, 40 Pleasant St., Portsmouth

Tickets: $20 at bookandbar.com

To be Rebecca Loebe

The title of Rebecca Loebe’s new album Give Up Your Ghosts is a mission statement for the singer-songwriter: nothing is impossible. Fearlessness is in her DNA, so it’s really a continuing idea. Loebe (pronounced low-bee) made it into Berklee Music College at 16 years old, landed on Season 1 of The Voice (she’s the only non-champion with a track on the show’s compilation album), and is indie as it gets; the latest release is part of her first-ever label deal.

This time around, courage paid artistic dividends. When asked to compose a couple of very specific songs for a television show, Loebe initially balked. “I was reading the email and thinking, ‘no, can’t do it, that’s not how I work,” she said from her home in Austin. “I’m inspired organically; I’m not just this monkey who can crank out a song.”

Spurred by a big potential payout, Loebe relented. Though neither song made the show, both became standouts on the new album. “Tattoo” is a lovely breakup ballad, while “Got Away” rocks with edgy danger. Writing them taught Loebe “a concrete lesson about self-limiting beliefs; what is actually true, or what is me being afraid that I can’t do something, and therefore telling myself it’s impossible.”

Loebe’s previous four albums were arduous and time consuming to create. The new one, however, came in a creative burst that lasted only a few months. “It was just wild, I never experienced anything like it before,” she said. “Rather than write for the art of crafting songs over a several year period and choosing the ones that feel the strongest, it was a process of expressing what was currently happening, currently on my mind, my heart … it felt very cohesive and timely, right now.”

She’s something of a reluctant songwriter and performer. Although she’d established a reputation in her hometown of Atlanta before setting out for Boston, Loebe shied away from performing at Berklee. She majored in sound engineering, and took a job at a studio upon graduation.

“The average age of a freshman at Berklee when I was there was 25,” she explained of her reticence to perform. “I felt like basically still a high school kid who sneaked in off the street. So overwhelmed by the talent around me, and a little intimated.”

Focusing on production turned out to be a good choice. “If I had been trying to divide my attention between performance and engineering, I wouldn’t have gotten as far in either,” she said. “It also gave me a way to participate in the school, to be a member of the community and the ecosystem there by helping other students, by having something to offer that wasn’t musical but I was comfortable with.”

Fortunately, an instructor coaxed Loebe into finishing the many songs “secretly” written at Berklee in her spare studio time, so the world wasn’t deprived of her talent. She got back into her performing groove and by 2009 she’d won the New Folk prize at the 2009 Kerrville Folk Festival. Having established herself as a songwriter, her singing led to a spot with Team Adam on The Voice two years later.

On Give Up Your Ghosts, Loebe hits many lyrical highs, looking at social anxiety with the inspirational “Popular,” riffing on fame with “Everything Changes,” sounding soulful and scrappy on “Growing Up” and, on the title song, casting off demons that are “never holding you as close as you are holding them.” It’s solid effort from start to finish.

The new disc builds on success achieved last year with Nobody’s Girl, a supergroup including Loebe, Betty Soo and Grace Pettis. The trio began as a three-headliner package tour, but grew bigger. “Something magical happened in the planning phases,” Loebe said. “We got together to try writing one song, for a show finale. At the end of the writing retreat… they offered us a record deal as a band. We hadn’t even played a gig together yet.”

This originally appeared in the 21 February 2019 issue of Seacoast Scene

BOX ME

Rebecca Loebe w/ BettySoo

When: Thursday, Feb. 21, 8 p.m.

Where: Windham Ballroom, 36 The Square, Bellows Falls, VT

Tickets: $15 at popolomeanspeople.com