Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Inara (on guitar) and her entourage of Bee Girls

Love Letter to Japan- the Bird and the Bee

The Bird and the Bee's 2nd album Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future is their first album to penetrate the lower regions of the American music charts (#78 on the on the Billbored sales charts back in Februrary 2009) but the band is also getting some well deserved critical attention for Ray Gun.

The two principals band are Greg Kurstin, a multi-instumentalist and vocalist Inara George a coquettish jazz oriented vocalist in the vampy manner of Julie London. Greg Kurstin studied piano under the legendary jazz pianist Jaki Byard. Kurstin has played keyboards with Beck and has produced the Flaming Lips and Lilly Allen among others.

The band's focal performer is Inara, a self styled It Girl who has a tres chic, haute couture, retrograde fashion sensibility that falls between late 50s Coco Chanel and mid-60's Mary Quant. She has a similar taste for the jazz, tropicala, jet lounge, B-move sountracks, and Europop from the same 1950s-1960s time frame. The Bird and the Bee has a lot more going on than simply Inara's campy and ironic musical oeuvre.

Inara is an interesting study in artistic extremes. She was studying to be a Shakespearean stage actress in Boston and left drama school and returned home to form almost famous post-grunge band Lode with her high school friends. Lode was signed by the mega-label Geffen and after recording a well received debut Lode called it quits. Inara is, incidentally, the daughter of rock and roll icon Lowell George who founded the well loved Seventies rock band Little Feat.

The prestigous jazz label Blue Note was very anxious to sign the band to a long term recording contract and it's rare for Blue Note to take interest in performers with more of a pop orientation than a jazz background. The last artist pop oriented artist signed by Blue Note was Nora Jones and she has become a mainstay of the American popular music scene since the meteoric rise of her 2002 debut album.

Over the the past few years a new crop of female music performers has sprung forth, and each of these rising stars has her own unique fashion sensiblity and idosyncratic approach to making music among. Among those women are E.U. based performers like Lily Allen, Sia, Natasha Kahn, Imogen Heap, Karin Dreijer Andersson, and M.I.A.

The American female artists attuned to this E.U. phenomena are New Yorkers Santigold, Karen O., Sabina Sciubba and L.A. based Inara George. Sabina is frequently compared to Inara but the similarities in the musical style and fashion sensibility of the two women are superficial.

Brazilian Girls singer Sabina Sciubba's musical personae is close to that of Inara's but Sabina often overplays her hand with her international mystery girl routine and her flamboyant Eurotrash fashion sensibilities. Both Sabina and Inara are abudantly talented and serious musicians with an ironic sense of style and musical sensibilities.


Sabina Sciubba(pictured above) of the Brazilian Girls goes over the top with her taste for Eurotrash fashion decadence while Inara George is more of a tres chic House of Chanel kind of girl.

In two albums and one EP the George/Kurstin songwriting team have a catalog of around 30 original songs that would give Burt Bacharach and Hal David a good run for the money. I'm posting both a live version and the band's official video for Love Letter to Japan because there are some interesting contrasts between the live performance and the studio version of the song.

Love Letter From Japan- Live @ The Indie, San Francisco 2/9/09




Love Letter To Japan Official Video