In 2003, when Peter Margasak wrote about Azita Youssefi in this space, he mentioned a prerelease rumor about her solo album Enantiodromia—that it “sounded like Steely Dan”—and pointed out that this was “mildly shocking.” Youssefi had been working toward that record for upwards of three years, but until it dropped, her public persona was still that of a no-wave scene star—people knew her as the raccoon-eyed imp who fronted the Scissor Girls or the burka-clad leader of Bride of No No, not as an auteurist one-named piano balladeer.
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The average listener isn’t going to mistake Azita’s thorny, sometimes dissonant piano songs for anything on Aja, but the Steely Dan comparisons aren’t entirely off the mark—like Becker and Fagen, she’s working in a pop idiom, where broad strokes usually suffice, but seems to want to express something that requires a finer brush. Though her songs are hardly busy or frantic, their long, ornate lines and jazzy rhythmic tweaks prevent even the most relaxed numbers from sounding easygoing.
Azita also has points of contact with musicians who’ve played around with pop using a toolbox of techniques borrowed from 20th-century avant-garde composers: like Laurie Anderson she has a mannered, theatrical vocal style that enforces a detachment from her material, no matter how soulful her delivery, and like Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola she has odd ideas about what constitutes a hook, pulling her songs into unexpected detours that take them well outside the usual verse-chorus-verse structure.
In many cases it was difficult for her to fit words to her melodies because “exactly the vocal vowel that I wanted on that beat was written. That’s the old-school way of—not everybody, but a lot of the old standards songwriters work that way.” It says a lot about the nature of the process that she refers to it as “solving” a lyric.
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