The musical past was a rich prologue for Sylvie Lewis. Specifically, her grandfather’s record collection, which ignited her early love affair with the Great American Songbook. Lewis acknowledges becoming smitten with Ella Fitzgerald and many of that era’s great voices and song crafters, including Duke Ellington, the Gershwin brothers, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill and many others. To her music appreciation she added her own musical development, which included formal study of piano, cello, guitar, opera, and the great poets.
While it’s no surprise to hear strains of these vintage influences filtering through Lewis’s original neo-classic pop, being a student of great songs from that period wasn’t simply a means to becoming a Songbook interpreter. She has become a compelling tunesmith herself.
Lewis’s warm, crystalline voice radiates a worldly, old-time sophistication that grows even more enchanting with the layering of her vocal harmonies. Fans of both Madeleine Peyroux and Leslie Feist will find much to like here. In Lewis’s songs, one hears an artist who knows how to infuse an elegant melody with sharp lyrical wordplay and phrasing, as did the Songbook greats.
The title of Lewis’s second release, Translations, might seem to allude to the cultural differences she has experienced living abroad. (Raised in the UK, she studied music in Switzerland and later in Boston, and has lived in Los Angeles, South Africa, Spain and Italy.) But it actually speaks to navigating the subtext of relationships and the ways in which lovers, ex-lovers and friends can have such skewed emotional reference points. Lewis understands that the theme of falling in and out of love remains both universal and mystifying enough to explore in contemporary ways. She paints lyrical pictures as a narrator and through the conversational elements of her characters. Sometimes Lewis feeds the ambiguity by dropping the lyrical sentiment into a slightly different melodic mood. On “Starsong…What Became of Us,” a jaunty rhythm section sets a toe-tapping beat even as Lewis’s character delivers a breezy post-mortem to her ex.
Producer Richard Swift is a superb musical foil for Lewis, bringing a skilled ear for classic and chamber pop arrangements to her melodies without getting too baroque on her silky voice. Swift’s recording techniques warmly capture some of that a classic bygone era sound without trying to uncannily recreate it, and he adds other light touches like Mellotron, synth and reverb effects that create a certain dreamy vibe. Sometimes in the course of a song the sound seems to shift eras, like in “Cheap Ain’t Free,” where a ’30s-sounding piano/clarinet/string arrangement morphs into Brill Building pop before fading out. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Of course, Isabelle,” is a beautiful piano waltz that one could imagine in a musical, in which Lewis shifts points-of-view between two former lovers to underscore the dramatically different ways they remember things.
Whether singing of mistresses or monogamy, as a romantic or a realist, this lovely songbird has found her voice, and it gives her words wings.
— Jim Kirlin
The musical past was a rich prologue for Sylvie Lewis. Specifically, her grandfather’s record collection, which ignited her early love affair with the Great American Songbook. Lewis acknowledges becoming smitten with Ella Fitzgerald and many of that era’s great voices and song crafters, including Duke Ellington, the Gershwin brothers, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill and many others. To her music appreciation she added her own musical development, which included formal study of piano, cello, guitar, opera, and the great poets.