Bolinas musician sings fairy tales with an edge

A frying pan and a colander hung from the ceiling of Gospel Flat Farm’s art venue on Saturday evening, a percussive flourish that made a few in the audience chuckle. But by the end of the sneak preview of Vanessa Waring’s new album, In the Giant’s Kitchen, it was the thread of her voice—precise and enchanting, which on her record is equally at home amid the sweet flutter of a flute, the folksy strum of a banjo and the ominous bow of a cello—that had captured the rapt attention of dozens in the audience.

In the Giant’s Kitchen is comprised of 20 brief tracks: lyric songs tell tales of kids, a giant, a mushroom hunter, a delivery man, a guy cooking on the side of the road. In between, snippets of instrumental pieces (“Tree to the Other Side,” “Surviving the Storm,” “Down Stream”) offer hypnotic experiments that reflect Ms. Waring’s attempt to capture the landscape around her.

Ms. Waring, an art major who moved to Bolinas five years ago to farm, began to experiment with music in the past few years; she played cello growing up but never had formal voice training, guitar or piano lessons. She moved to West Marin alone; between the farm, the library, a preschool and other jobs, she had time to teach herself, leaving her free to play with her sound uninhibited.

“Because music is something I haven’t totally claimed for myself, as part of my identity, it’s easier to do. It’s a fun, playful thing to experiment with,” she said.

But the new album, recorded two years ago and mixed by a friend this summer, is also her most polished effort. She sings and plays virtually all the instruments—guitar, banjo, piano, flute, cello. (Her husband, Jeff Manson, also plays guitar on a few tracks. She captured bird song as they recorded outside her old home.)

The new album, Ms. Waring said, is still not quite finished; she hopes to have a fuller story connecting each song and perform (with friends) using shadow puppets at the Bolinas Community Center. “I still don’t have a narrative fleshed out, but each song is a profile of these different characters, and how they’re dealing with landscape,” she explained. The characters mix her inventions with real people she has met. “There’s a couple of portraits of characters that have come through Bolinas,” she admitted.

The album cover—a drawing of a man with utensils braided into his beard, a frying pan in the sky, two mice and a cat by his side—reflects what she called its whimsical nature, though she sometimes feels frustrated by her playful instincts.

“It’s a pretty whimsical album, and it’s definitely a kind of fairy tale,” she said. “At the same time, I always have this underlying feeling I want it to be a little more aggressive and have an indirect political slant, but it never totally comes across. I try to be more intense, but it looks pretty innocent. With my fine art too, the painting always ends up looking like a children’s illustration, even when I want it to look like an edgy piece.”

But In the Giant’s Kitchen is more in the vein of true fairy tales—playful and imaginative but darker and more unsettling than the white-washed versions peddled today.

The track “Giant’s Secretary,” for instance, begins with the illiterate giant ask- ing his subjects to return to his kingdom. The lyrics—supported by dark piano chords and a throaty cello interspersed with the lightness of a flute—toe the line between sympathy for a lonely ruler and the unlim- ited power he lords over them: “He calls them all/‘Come back to the kingdom, come back to the kingdom’/She writes it down…/ He is not that bad/We’ve got a lot to give/ And you can live on this land/All you have to do is not think twice again/Be nice to your giant.” Later: “And when she puts it down/She gives a different spin to make the people relax/There’s some casualties/ That just his style/This is his kingdom/ He’ll look out for you once in a while.”

Another track, “There Will Be Plenty,” is about a girl, “nostalgic and searching for the ancient ways, and searching for mush- rooms on the forest path and wanting to find other ways of existing and surviving,” Ms. Waring said. But the search isn’t al- ways easy: “Waiting for the wizard of last year/Don’t hold your breath/Now there’s nothing left/A basket and a knife.”

Others, like “Delivery Man,” leave out giants and children and forests in exchange for a tale about a man simply delivering a package. On their face, each line sung above Ms. Waring’s classical guitar is sim- ple and straightforward. Yet, like in a fairy tale, each phrase or action seem pregnant with other meanings: “A long road ahead/ Bringing a box to you/Sorry if it’s broken/ It took me awhile to know where to find you”; “But when I get to you/How do I get to you?/Leave it on your doorstep/Knock a little more/Wait for you to grab the pen from my hand/To your hand/From my hand/To your hand.”