Strong songstress carves her own sound
by Joe Tarr
Danielle Howle has a bone to pick with Shaun Cassidy.
When she was a little girl, Howle wrote a letter to the teen heartthrob and star of The Hardy Boys.
"He never wrote me back," Howle complains from her Columbia, S.C., apartment. "He was not on my happy list. I'm sure he was real busy. I wanted to send him my favorite game. It was this big thing where these marbles went around. You would turn these round things and these marbles fell down."
Now that she's sort of famous, Howle doesn't make the same slight to her own admirers. She diligently responds to each letter she gets, sometimes including prizes like a sample bottle of shampoo or an odd key chain.
"It's kind of weird that people are taking time out of their lives to write me and they don't even know me," she says.
But it's kind of hard not to feel endeared toward Howle, who will perform with
her band The Tantrums tonight
at the Tomato Head. On stage, she is a quirky bundle of energy, joking with the audience and going off on strange tangents between songs.
The music has been described as a genre-bending mix of country, folk, and rock;
and Howle's voice compared to k.d. lang, Joni Mitchell, and Melissa Etheridge.
There is some truth to these descriptions, though it makes the music sound as
if it has no identity, when in fact it has an earthy, down-home kind of feel.
The group has played the Tomato Head before, most recently when they opened for D.C. indie-heroes Tsunami. Tonight is the first time they will headline.
Howle has been getting the opening spot for a number of big hitters, notably Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls. Later this summer, she'll play four dates with Lillith Fair, the traveling festival spotlighting female musicians. She tours alternately by herself and with The Tantrums.
Shows with the three-piece band are invariably more energetic and the band gives pathos and bite to Howle's songs, which tend to dwell on the ambivalence of life and love.
"Big Front Porch," the closing number on the band's latest release, Do A Two Sable, is both bitter and romantic in its treatment of the Southern custom of sitting on the front porch for hours on end. "Sitting in a big fat dream/That came from a country spring/See the water it is poison/To never move again/See the fire that is burning lies/A cinder in the end." But the song turns into a love song. A woman playing "Shakespeare games" with her eyes mesmerizes a local man, who ends up proposing. The woman says yes, on the condition that "we'll stay real still...in this town, on this porch."
"I was 18 when I wrote that. I had been taking these classes about Southern writers, people writing about their regions. I was like, 'Shit, I'm going to write a region song.' I guess I'm making fun out of some of the things about the South we do mechanically," she says. "I was probably a lot more bitter when I was younger. I didn't know how to have fun, as I do now."
A slight woman with long kinky brown hair, Howle takes control of the stage between songs. Her personality is not so easily described.
Halfway through our phone conversation, the computer I'm taking notes on crashes, erasing her quotes. Howle gives me permission to just make some up.
"Everybody changes the quotes anyway," she says.
It's unnerving being interviewed and written about, Howle admits.
"It's the only view a person has of you. They think that a quote is you, when you're this whole human body walking around out there. It's real easy to say something dumb and it gets construed as your whole personality.
"Oh, man, I've said some stupid shit. They always get the stupid stuff I said right."
Howle describes herself as a "manageable crazy person" who is "usually sweet but sometimes can be the opposite."
This is what I think she might be like: The kind of person you could drop by on just about any time of the day or night, and she'd let you hang out on her couch. Amusing people would always be coming in and out to be entertained by Howle. Or, at the very least, she'd make you something to eat.
"People come here when they don't have food. They know no matter what's going on in my life, I'll have food," she says. "I kind of feel necessary when stuff like that happens."
Howle begins listing the number of dishes she's mastered: chicken soup, chickpea dishes, salads.
"I make a pretty lousy spaghetti sauce though," she says without shame. "I can't get it right. I'm searching for spaghetti sauce help if anybody knows a good recipe. I need a salsa recipe. It's just bad. I need real help."
Recipes can be sent to: Blue Halo; P.O. Box 5134; Columbia, S.C., 29250.
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