Shea Seger - Brief Article - Interview

Interview, June, 2001 by Dimitri Ehrlich

TURNING AN ODDBALL CHILDHOOD INTO IRRESISTIBLE POP

When Shea Seger was growing up in Quitman, Texas, her father, a disabled Vietnam vet suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, intermittently pulled her out of school to immerse her in home schooling"--which, in this case meant listening to his record collection. "He picked me up when I was in third grade, saying I had a dentist's appointment," recalls the 21-year-old singer. "And then we just hung out and listened to music for a few months. It's not like we had a legitimate educational program."

Eventually, Seger put herself through correspondence classes and moved to London, where she found her voice as a songwriter and released her debut album, The May Street Project, on RCA Records. And the musical education her dad gave her paid off: On Seger's debut, released stateside this month, you can hear hooks which might have blasted from AM radio 10 years before she was born combined with beats that are very much 2001.

Seger sings with a sexy slow-motion drawl, and you can hear the sensual pleasure she takes in allowing each syllable to drip from her lips. Like Fiona Apple, Seger is precociously knowing and writes songs that hint at plenty of childhood drama, such as the lovely ballad "Shatterwall" about bottles being smashed, fathers walking out on their kids and lives falling apart.

"My childhood was tumultuous," she says, "but in really different ways. I wasn't an angry kid. My upbringing was definitely quirky and possibly somewhat dysfunctional. But it's not a rags-to-riches story. Sometimes we had meat and potatoes, but it might have been at one o'clock in the morning."

Dimitri Ehrlich is Inteiview's Music Editor at Large.

"The fact that Macy Gray manages her was what initially piqued my interest," says Dimitri Ehrlich, Interview's Music Editor at Large, of new soul sensation Sunshine Anderson. "Since then, everyone from Missy Elliott to Elton John has identified her as the singer to watch this summer." Ehrlich, who also profiled Shea Seger, another rising music star, for this issue [page 32], moonlights as a writer for the nationally syndicated entertainment TV show The Source: All Access.