Actual fire: Eleni Mandell is as smoking as ever

By Erin Lyndal Martin
Published: February 13th, 2009 | 9:00am

While Eleni Mandell has zigzagged through genres in her career, there have always been some constants: imagistic lyrics, smoky vocals, and twisting melodies that navigate every song like a maze. Artificial Fire (Zedtone) has all of those hallmarks. But there’s also a lot that’s new, like the electric guitar she rocks throughout the album, a change from the acoustic one she’s always played. Prior to Artificial Fire, Mandell tried to avoid being photographed with her guitar for fear of falling victim to stereotypes about girls with guitars. “I’m playing electric guitar now, which is really fun, so I don’t have that insecurity about the guitar at the moment. I’m excited about the guitar and want everybody to see it,” she says proudly.

There are other moments where career-long fears are conquered. “I didn’t want to sing like a girl. I didn’t want to have a breathy, feminine, operatic sound like some of the folk-singing women of the ’50s and ’60s. I specifically wanted to not sound like that,” Mandell admits. “And on this record, I do sing up high for the first time. It’s such a small detail and it doesn’t happen for very long, but I remember thinking ‘wow, I’ve come a long way.’”

Fear not, she still doesn’t sing like a girl. As ever, Mandell is all-woman: “My eyes are the color of martini olives / I only drink two, maybe three,” begins “Personal.” And then there’s the title track, a funk-tinged rocker set in late-night Montreal that finds her Lothario’s clothes on the floor as he shows her his “artificial fire.” Mandell reveals that the artificial fire is wordplay, not wizardry: “I was in Montreal and there were fireworks. They have a lot of fireworks displays in Montreal in the summer. And I asked my friend ‘How do you say that in French?’ and he said ‘feu artifice,’ artificial fire, which fireworks actually are. I was inspired just by the literal translation of French and English and going back and forth between these languages.”

The fireworks are metaphorical as well. “I had a romantic encounter while I was there and it was with somebody that I’d met six or seven years ago when I was on tour in Nashville and had this fleeting crush. Then all these years go by and we are suddenly back in each other’s lives. You know, your life takes you in all these different directions, then you end up here, and it just felt like this completely fated event.’ On top of that, feeling disappointed by it, it wasn’t everything that I thought it would be. It wasn’t fireworks. It was artificial fire,” Mandell pauses, “I was trying to explain this to Manny Marquez, the video director, and he said, ‘oh, I get it. It’s more like Labor Day than the Fourth of July.’”

Asked about fireworks with Ryan Adams, who asked her to write a song with him, Mandell laughs. “I recently found the piece of paper with all the lyrics, and I thought ‘I wonder if I could sell this on eBay and anybody would believe me that that was his handwriting.’ But, yeah, I was invited to go to his hotel and write with him, and I ended up watching him write and feeling kind of ridiculous.”

Fortunately, Mandell is more excited about the musical pyrotechnics she and her band have been making. Artificial Fire is the first album she and her band produced together, and that whole-hearted labor of love shows throughout: “I’m so pleased that it changed me from being a person who hated rehearsing and did as little work as possible to a person who loved rehearsing,” Mandell said. Having recently played three shows at L.A.’s Hotel Café, Mandell is eager to take the new songs on tour. “I really like performing, I’m really excited about this record, and I love playing with my band. There are so many moments on tour where I think ‘I can’t believe this is my life.’ And sometimes you think that because it’s great and sometimes you think that because it’s so humiliating and horrible. But for me there have definitely been more good times on tour than bad.”

In addition to plenty of tour dates, both of Mandell’s side projects (the Living Sisters and the Grabs) have albums due out this year. It’s a lot of fire juggling for one woman, but at least the show will never get boring.

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