Blundering about the second floor of the BCA Center on Church Street last Saturday, I played fly-on-the-wall amid the frenzy of pre-show buzz. The evening’s program consisted of the Heloise crew along with Burlington music cornerstone DJ Disco Phantom. The Savoir Faire sans Heloise carried amps and instruments from an elevator held ajar by a snare drum, maneuvering respectfully around an art piece called “Perpetual Motion Device” set in a corner of the Lorraine B. Goode room. In the opposite corner, a determined Mr. Phantom erected his turntables and regalia with consummate poise. “What, are we all going oxfords and skinny ties tonight?” asked Williams’ husband and Savoir Faire guitar player James Bellizia to bassist/synth-man Rob O’Dea. O’Dea was in fact dressed in oxfords and a skinny tie. The black beanie covering his baseball hat rewarded no comment from Bellizia. Keyboard player Angie Mae Lizotte was to join the group for the first time that evening. Also in tow was drummer Steve Hadeka, who plays in just about every good band in town. Williams arrived wearing tall boots and knee socks, shedding her jacket soonafter to reveal a well-worn Funkadelic shirt. A film crew in another corner of the room was busy maneuvering expensive-looking equipment. “There’s a lot a lot of shit going on at the same time right now,” she mused to no one in particular. Luis Calderin of Okay Okay Creative, the production company putting the show on, made his rounds. He checked in intermittently with the film crew and the bar service, occasionally offering glances of curiosity in my direction. At one point I heard him muttering, “we have to roll out the red carpet!” to one of his two accompanying children. On a projection screen behind where the band’s equipment had taken operable form, a video mashed together by Rebecca Kopycinski, aka local vocal sensation Nuda Veritas, played silent non sequitur clips gleaned carefully from 50s cartoons and gangster films. A member of the film crew asked O’Dea if it would be alright to shine an LED towards him during the show. “I don’t like lasers in my face,” he said. “I like lasers in my face,” Bellizia offered. “Yeah, me too,” said Williams. She then sang an abrupt aria-esque melody amidst the ado, and a brilliant red carpet unrolled down the length of the room.

Raised with a very French name by very British parents in the Hennepin County suburbs of Minneapolis, Williams grew up in a house lacking a healthy variety of musical exposure. “My parents didn’t have any records besides Edith Piaf and the soundtrack to A Man and a Woman,” she told me. Though Williams still maintains a solemn respect for Mrs. Piaf, her horizons found greater expansion at the MacPhail Center of the Performing Arts, where the five-year-old was nurtured musically via the Suzuki method. Conceived by Shin’ichi Suzuki, the Suzuki method encourages children to consider their environment as an essential component of the creative process. “We were just, like, wearing leotards and doing the bunny hop,” Williams remembers. After an experimental stint with the clarinet and the marching band, Williams joined the choir, where she was soon offered the lead role in “Annie.” Her choir director encouraged the young singer to take a non-traditional approach to playing the orphan: “He wanted me to be Annie, but, um, drunk.” Outgrowing “Tomorrow,” the aspiring songsmith later bent her ear towards the reining minstrels of 80s radio. Prince, Madonna, and Culture Club would soon define for her the onslaught of hairspray and theatrical pizzazz that remains prominent in her shows. The glitter and maquillage, however, would wait nearly a decade to resurface, while Williams explored alternate paths to the stage. Continue reading here.

Check out Heloise & the Savoir Faire's website here.