Shilpa Ray: Rock 'n' Roll Songstress Tells it Like It Is

By Jamie Ludwig
Published: January 17th, 2011 | 12:00am

Shilpa Ray is a little groggy this morning. She’s recovering from a particularly explosive show last night at the Southpaw in Brooklyn, where her band, Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers, performed alongside Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye. The performance was a benefit for the launch of the Fortnight Journal—an online multimedia digest that pairs Gen Y creatives with long-established artists who continue to inspire others with their work. Given Ray’s particular brand of NYC proto-punk, blues, psychedelia, pop, and cabaret, the lineup seemed especially fitting as a musical representation of the non-profit’s mission to see the “passing of the torch,” from one generation to the next.

Months before the release of Teenage and Torture, the second full length from Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers, Ray is fast becoming a critical darling. The praises are more than hype; to nearly anyone who listens, it’s clear that the singer/songwriter is the proverbial “real deal.” Ray sings songs about love, loss, being an underdog, and the darker sides of life in a voice that is so raw and arresting you’d have to be dead not to take notice. Her talent for storytelling is parallel to greats like Lou Reed, PJ Harvey, or Nick Cave, who, just days after the Fortnight benefit, personally called to ask if she and the band could fill a last minute opening slot for Grinderman on it’s U.S. tour (The two bands wound up doing nearly a week’s worth of shows together). Shilpa Ray just may be the songwriter a generation of music lovers has been waiting for, even if it didn’t realize anything was missing.

Ray, who grew up in New Jersey, began to find her voice at an early age. “I always wrote poetry as a kid. My parents are from West Bengal. The culture is super poetic. I wanted to get them to share their stuff with me and my sister when we were kids.” She also took music lessons, becoming adept at the harmonium (a keyboard instrument with a hand-operated bellows that sounds like a cross between an organ and an accordion.

It was inevitable that the two hobbies would converge. “I never really thought about connecting my poetry with music until my later years of high school,” says Ray. The years of classical music lessons were tempered down into rock ‘n’ roll. “I didn’t really know how to write a song until my early 20s, when I finally realized, ‘If I simplify the chords and put the words to it, then I can do this.’ In rock music your sense of rhythm and tone are more important. In classical, it’s more about dexterity.”

Ray landed in New York City in 2002. She began singing in the local coffee shop scene before forming Beat the Devil, her first full band. The group received accolades in the local press for it’s raw, bluesy rock ‘n’ roll, but broke up just before the release of its first album.

Soon after, Ray formed Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers. The group’s 2009 debut, A Fish Hook An Open Eye, flaunted Ray’s tendency to tell it like it is in a way that is often witty, and more often, poignant. While the music is appealing to all of the sexes, songs like “I’m not Frigid...Yet,” and “Woman Sets Boyfriend on Fire” openly reflect the modern world through a modern woman’s eyes.

“I don’t have any issues talking about it to say that I’m coming from a female point of view when I write. There are so many protagonists in literature that are men—you always experience what it’s like to be a man. You don’t get that as a woman unless it’s on Desperate Housewives,” says Ray.

The women in Ray’s songs are tough, worldly, and street smart, much like the prototypical New York City woman that she admires. “There is something about the New York City woman—she’s attractive, she’s hot, but guys are scared of her because she’s so smart. I love the New York City woman.”

Across Teenage and Torture—a colorful, volatile collection of songs that already stands as one of the most powerful albums of the new year—the characters, whether real or inspired by real life, are far from perfect packages. Instead, they’re multi-dimensional, unapologetically misfit, or otherwise flawed. In “Venus Shaver,” the narrator fetishizes and tries earnestly to become the idyllic “Blonde Venus” before launching into a fit of desperation and anger. “I wish my burnt brown fingers had the Midas touch / so they could defecate across your clean slate / Now darling would you care to look like me? / As I change myself to look like you.”

In “Stick it to the Woman,” Ray—who for years worked in a Manhattan department store—likens the role of salesclerk to drug pusher, her customer a junkie looking for a quick fix to her life’s problems. Even the credit card gets in on the action.

“I don’t represent a certain population,” says Ray. “Sometimes you don’t want to label it. I’m just a person who is really aware and not ashamed of saying what’s on my mind.” But against the backdrop of Her Happy Hookers‘ music and Ray’s guttural delivery, the songs become even more appealing because, in a sense, these are stories we deal with every day.