The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 86

F12 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Sunday, March 28, 1999 She's a singer, a songwriter and incidentally- a teenager 'A jry To bring her to the attention of alternative-music programmers, Starner appeared at radio conventions and has done the usual interviews. And the WB prime-time blockbuster Dawson's Creek used her "Don't Let Them" in promo spots, and may include several more songs in the show itself. Among the label's other launch events: a mini-concert by Starner at the Warners Olyphant, pressing plant, where the CD was manufactured. The performance marked the first time the assembly line, which can crank out 700,000 discs a day, had been shut down for an artist. This month, she'll take off on a mini-tour of the Far East and Australia, in preparation for a fullblown U.S.

tour that's still being planned. It seems a lot to take in. But Shelby's mother and stepfather, an English professor at East Stroudsburg University, are confident she can handle it. "There's lots we don't know about how she'll do with trav eling and everything, staying healthy," says her mother, who will be her daughter's companion on the road. "But in terms of the business, she's always been a little She's very comfortable in those situations." Still, there's no question Starner is a kid.

"I called Liz Rosenberg yesterday to tell her I was pretty sure I was with the only Warner Brothers artist who spent most of the day making a snowman with her friends and her little her mother said, chuckling. For her part, Starner says in no rush. "If ft doesn't work out, at least I had a great time in the studio, and I learned a lot." She points to a collage of fat men on her bedroom wall; a huge headline is clipped from a magazine: "Bigger is not always better." "That's not just to remind me not. to eat," Starner says as she and Jordan giggle. "That's my thing for' life.

I don't need the star treatment. I'd rather get better than be huge." "Kids are as diverse as adults," says Shelby Starner, resisting attempts to lump her with bubblegum-pop performers. SHOHBOJff lt CASINO-HOTEL' ATLANTIC CITY "When we sent the tape," Starner's mother, Kathy, recalls, "nobody had a conscious goal. It was just to get feedback and see what happened. Then each time the phone rang, it seemed like another positive thing came along." One was the collaboration with Street.

In addition to liking some of the same music, Starner and the producer discovered they are temperamentally similar: Both like to work quickly, and they finished the bulk of Shadows in three weeks. Street set up shop in a studio in Upstate New York and invited a small group of musicians who, he said, "wouldn't be hung up about working with a 14-year-old girl." Street's goal was to make Starner feel at home: "I wanted it to be a good experience for her, so that no matter what else happened, she'd always know that she did her best and the decisions were hers. And I wanted it to be low-budget, so it would be easy to recoup the cost of the recording, which is charged to her advance. "The shock in the whole thing for all of us veterans was that here was this person who'd never sung with a rhythm section before, coming in and doing her vocals on the first or second take. She took in everything, was very open, and you could almost hear her get better.

After we finished, all of us said this was the way making a recording should be." Starner's life changed to accommodate her new career. Last year, she went to public school half-days and devoted the rest of the day to music and dance lessons. This year, she's following a home-school program her mother, who quit her job in retailing, describes as more rigorous than the public school curriculum. Starner stays in touch with her old gang, though: Her best friend, Jordan, who's still in regular school, says people ask about her friend all the time. "They want to know if she's changed.

I'm like, no, she's exactly the same." Since she finished the record, Starner has been getting a different kind of education in the not-so-gentle arts of marketing and promotion, that are vital to every artist launch. She's been assigned to Liz Rosenberg, an elite Warners publicist whose high-profile artists include Madonna and Cher. Her publicity campaign began months ago, with introductory "one-to-watch" pieces in magazines and a cover story in the music-industry trade magazine Billboard. and you could tell they were bracing themselves," Starner recalls. "But then they heard the songs, and they were like, 'She's really That led to another session, at which she recorded four originals, including "Fall" and "Northwind Woman," that ended up on her debut.

When it was done, Starner's mother sent the tape to a family friend who worked in the finance department at Warner Bros. He passed the tape to McEwen, an industry heavyweight who signed Wil-co, Son Volt and Steve Earle, among others. THE FUN CITY For a good time and a great May bonus. minutes or 15 minutes, or it doesn't happen. I'm not one of those people who spend time worrying about every line." Though she set her sights on a dance career when she was a toddler watched a ballet on TV, and made up my mind I was going to do she drifted into music around age The next year, she received three hours of time in a local recording studio as a Christmas present.

After she sang some of her favorite songs by others, she casually mentioned she'd written a few of her own. "The engineers were like, 'OK, go Review Music STARNER from Fl Either perfect little angels or they're dealing with crack or something. There are a lot of kids that are in the middle, going through stuff, and what they're dealing with is closer to reality." It doesn't take long to find out 'that Starner whose bedroom is filled with pictures of Aerosmith and the Black Crowes and Styro-foam wigstands she's transformed (into likenesses of Freddie Mercury and Stevie Nicks is sick of the Britney comparisons. "I'd rather be lumped with Blondie and Stevie i Nicks, because these other girls don't even write their own songs." Starner's songs aren't just in the pretty-good-for-a-kid category. They're thoughtful, mature compositions.

They're understated and melodic, with lyrics that conjure scenes in cinematic detail. They follow twisting harmonic paths as they muse on rejection and betrayal: Not even the most overt ends quite where you'd expect. The influences are varied a touch of Tori mysticism, a bit of Alanis anger. Some, such as "Masquerade," involve unusual tempo changes; others exude the crooning cool of a woman who's lived her share of heartbreak. Starner has a back-story for every tune.

"I have to have a connection to the idea of the song. I went to Lilith, and it seemed like all of the women singers were singing about thejsame affair with the same guy." "Masquerade," for example, has none of the usual boy -girl dance. It's about "someone who will do stupid things and make huge mistakes and go about their business as though everything's fine." "A lot of what's in her songs is old soul material," says Craig Street, who produced From in the Shadows. "She's telling stories all of us understand, and that's the mark of a mature songwriter. She's figured out something that's usually the hardest thing: how to write about things in a universal way." 1 Street, who has produced critically acclaimed albums by Cassandra k.d.

lang and others, came into the project with no idea Starner was so young. "I heard the lyrical content, and the structure of the songs, and I probably assumed this artist was in her late 20s," he recalls. It wasn't until McEwen, the Warners executive who signed Starner, was setting up a meeting that he got the whole story, i "He says, 'There's something I should tell and then he sort of mumbles something. I tell him I didn't catch it. He mumbles again.

'She's My first reaction was I didn't want to do it, but I finally realized that the job was to capture her songs, and doing that makes age irrelevant." "The thing is, she's such an individual," McEwen says. "That's what will come out as people hear the record, so that's what we're going to emphasize. Not her age." i Starner says she doesn't think much about being a kid in a cutthroat business. Her desire has remained the same: to write songs, sing them, and have fun. i "The whole key for me is the doing.

If I write a song, I do it in 5 I Mi SgturdaY April Charter Reservations $14 Bonus Sunday through $12 Cash Saturday. Interesting structures support Starner's songs Charter Bus bonuses are good for groups of 40 people JL i A NJ By Tom Moon INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC Every 15-year-old kid knows what it's like to be shunned, or betrayed, or puzzled by a friend who's gone squirrelly. Shelby Starner. transforms those emotions into powerfully revelatory songs, with lyrics that alternate between the scribbled journal entries of a tetchy teenager and the thoughtful, disarming observations of an of 13 origi-'i nals on, heb debut From in the' Shadows (Warner Bros. is typical.

Throughout the allegory about speaking your mind no matter the consequences, Starner's voice is filled with resolve. "I let the truth out in the open, and there were many sighs," she sings, mourning an unspecified slight over a slinky late-'60s blues-rock She's hurt, but not about to dwell on the pain. Instead she finds comfort in knowing she did all she could: "Well, at least I didn't let it go by." Not much gets by Starner. Shadows gives a thorough going-over to those who present a false face and those who squander their hopes You friends who shatter fir 10 Still Available: Friday; ($11 Cash $3 Food) 0200. -sV TffiQl if vJK7Ii an 3 lliMtl 1 I I m-1 Hit 1 8M MDl'h to an animated future or more.

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fat: ONLY fi 11 WITH UteJij C0MP ITT fUsi More trust and others who are trapped by their own delusions It's not your typical teen pop. Where most current poprock hits you over the head, Starner's work is nuanced. Her composing skills are evolved beyond her lyric-writing abilities, which tend toward the self-conscioiisly elliptical. Her songs are built on genuinely interesting structures; "Masquerade" turps on a dramatic tempo change, while' other tracks, such as "Mind-reader," travel unusual harmonic pathways, flirting with jazz and blues but never quite settling into an identifiable groove. Craig Street's austere production, which relies on businesslike keyboards and stabbing, pointillist-guitars, maximizes these highly textured atmospheres.

Even the most straightforward tracks the ballad "You," the rhythmic "Fall" -feel as though they were realized in candlelight. They unfold slowly, their moods getting thicker with each chorus, creating the perfect cushion for Starner's singing. Unlike her peers, who are in a rush to grab attention, Starner phrases with the calm cool of a saloon veteran, letting little sighs and ad-libs fill in the details of her stories. spot and that Futurama will be strong enough to lure viewers to the shows around it. "Futurama is enormously important to us," he said.

"Matt Groening, quite frankly, helped put this network on the map." The Simpsons, at age 10, is currently TV's longest running fiction show. It survives on a world of supporting characters none of whom ages or asks for a big raise and its intelligence. It may be a cartoon, but The Simpsons is one of the smartest shows on television, sending a myriad of fast-paced messages to be picked up in increasing doses depending on how much a viewer knows and how much effort he or she is willing to make. "If you really want to pay attention," Groening said, "there's stuff hidden in the backgrounds. And we even have gags which you can't get unless you videotape the show, go back and freeze-frame it.

We're doing the same thing on Futurama." "The three-camera sitcom is getting a little tired," Herzog said. "With animation, you can go anywhere and do anything." He's hoping Futurama will allow Fox to go a little bit higher in the ratings and do a little bigger numbers on its bottom line. And it has pretty good chance. This program that stars an alcoholic robot and a one-eyed fighting machine who could give Chuck Nor-ris a run for his money, if only her depth perception were a little better, has just enough familiarity mixed in with its freshness to be the surest thing iij new TV shows this year. it) ft 'Eg? al 1 Fox is drawn FUTURAMA from Fl his So we have a new era in which the motto is, "You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do," everyone is matched to their job by aptitude whether or not they like it, and unemployment is a major crime.

Futurama also lets Groening loose on the subject of science fiction. I "When I was a kid," he said, "I would read these books, and I was excited, but I grew up, and I found a lot of science fiction concepts really annoying, so this show an opportunity to both honor some of the conventions and satirize them." First up, Star Trek. Fry gets conked by an automatic door, just like the ones on the Enterprise, and then he meets up with Leonard Ni-moy, or at least his head, which has been preserved in liquid in a jar. "Hey, do the ear thing," Fry, a big Spock fan, asks Nimoy's head. Sorry, times have changed, it explains.

"Now I lead a life of quiet dignity." I Until the attendant comes for feeding time, pouring flaky food into the jar. Nimoy's head puckers and gasps like a ravenous goldfish. Later on, Dick Clark's head presides over a special 3000 edition of New Year's Rockin' Eve, President Nixon's head escapes its jar and starts biting people, and Fry and the robot, who calls humans "meat bag" and "skin tube," try to hide between the heads of Dennis Rodman and Groening himself. Try doing that on Home Improvement. 'j Nearby Rodman and Groening on the head shelf are Liz Taylor, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson and Streisand, whose first name, misspelled "Barbara," gives a clue to the kind of student Groening might have been, when he was goofing around drawing cartoons instead of drilling on his grammar.

Groening's success has spawned scads of dreamy drawers. There could be 10 network cartoon shows in prime time by next fall, and Fox will have a night of them next month. "The primary reason animation is so big right now," said Fox's Her-zog on his cell phone last week, "is because there's so much talent producing it. "It's strange to call Matt a grandfather at his age he's 45, but The Simpsons inspired a whole generation of animators." One of them, Seth MacFarlane, not even five years out of the Rhode Island School of Design, creator of a cartoon called Family Guy, will get the permanent lease on the prime piece of real estate that Fox is using to launch Futurama. Fry, Leela and the robot (whose name is Bender) will show up next Sunday at 8:30 one more time between The Simpsons and The X-Files, before moving to Tuesdays at 8:30 on April 6, as part of an 8-10 p.m.

Fox block of animation: King of the Hill, Futurama, The PJ's and an as-yet-to-be-named cartoon rerun, which will usually be The Simpsons. Though he would not acknowledge it, Herzog believes Family Guy, which pushes sophomoric humor to its limits, needs the cushy COURTYARD BUFFET COURTYARD BUFFET More choices, new Itdisn menu. choices, new Italian menu. $6.99 $5 comp per person, up to two people. $5 comp per WITH C0MP person, up to two people.

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