When Lois Walden was told that a listener was having trouble pigeonholing her style, her reaction was explosive.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” shouted the petite redhead, pumping her fists into the sky and startling bystanders out for a morning stroll in Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side.
The singer-songwriter hates being squeezed into categories.
“The biggest problem in life for any of us who think of ourselves as artists is that people keep trying to put us into boxes,” said Walden. “We are multi-dimensional individuals.”
No boxes for Lois Walden. Her recently released first solo album, Traveller, is less a blend of modern musical styles than a patchwork quilt. The first song, “Woman in the Wind,” written after the death of a close friend, is a mellow New Age meditation. It’s followed by “I Only Sleep With Strangers,” a 1950s-style torch song. Move on to “Everyone’s Gonna Be Saved,” and you find a rousing gospel chorus.
Walden’s career similarly defies categorization. In more than three decades, Walden, 52, worked as a resort entertainer, a Hollywood television writer and a yoga instructor. More recently, she sang with the Sisters of Glory, the gospel group that opened the Woodstock ’94 festival, while continuing to work as a cabaret singer in some of Manhattan’s most exclusive nightspots. No boxes.
The roots of Walden’s eclecticism run deep. Even as a teenager growing up in the early 1960s in the affluent suburb of Larchmont, N.Y., her tastes in music ranged from rock ‘n’ roll and pop to Broadway show tunes and Brahms. Her tastes in pop music were similarly broad. She once wrote “I love Johnny Mathis! I love Elvis Presley! I love Pat Boone!” on the back of a shirt her father had given her to wear as a sleep-shirt. (The shirt accidentally ended up back in her father’s drawer. Unwitting, he wore it to work, much to his co-workers’ amusement. “He was so mad!” she recalled, laughing.)
She studied theater arts at Boston University but dropped out to move to New York at the urging, she said, of a Broadway casting director who had seen her perform in a local production. In New York, however, the director proved to have less than honorable intentions. “After he chased me around the desk a few times, I realized he wasn’t interested in me for my talent,” she recalled.
Undeterred, Walden stayed in New York, acting and studying voice. When some friends needed someone to record a demo of a song they were trying to sell, they asked her to sing. While she was at the studio, she recalled, “A little fat man came in and heard me. He asked me, `Are you a singer?’ I said, `No.’ He said, `You are now.’ “
“Thirty days later, I was singing in front of a 30-piece orchestra,” she said.
Before long, Walden was working the Borscht Belt, a cluster of resort hotels located in New York’s Catskill Mountains, wearing long, glamorous dresses and introducing headline comics such as Rodney Dangerfield.
“My career was going very, very well,” she said, “but I never really enjoyed it. The thing I loathed about singing early on was that they put you in a dress, you had to look as sexy as you could, and there were certain songs that you were supposed to sing. That’s great for someone who’s a singer, but I was always more of a thinker than a singer. I always had something to say even though I didn’t know quite how to put it into words.”
Despite these reservations, she said, she was having a wonderful time with a “wild coterie” of interesting friends, most of whom were in the arts. But when she was 27, her mother’s suicide brought it all to an end.
“When my mother died, I stopped singing,” she said.
Walden, who had moved to Los Angeles, worked for a while as a television actress before shifting to television writing. She wrote music and lyrics for television specials featuring Hollywood luminaries such as Jane Fonda, Debbie Boone and Suzanne Somers. At the same time, Walden, who was born Jewish, began studying yoga, meditation and Eastern religions.
“I was developing a lot of survival skills.” In writing, Walden discovered a new kind of voice. “If I write it, I can say exactly what I mean. What a concept! It gives me so much freedom.”
Walden stayed in Los Angeles until 1983, living what she described as a “wild and crazy life.”
But then her father became terminally ill, and she returned to New York to help her sister care for him. In New York, she met Jennifer Cohen, who later became her business partner and producer when the two women worked together on an animation project. Walden had written some songs for the project and had recorded the demos for the songs in her own voice. When Cohen heard the demo tapes, she urged Walden to start singing again.
“She said, `How can you not do that? You’re really being selfish not sharing your gifts with the world,’ ” Walden recalled. “And it got me, hook, line and sinker. I said, `Oh, man, don’t tell me this, that there’s something I’m supposed to be doing.’ After all, when you start reading about karma and life and destiny, whether or not you believe it or not, it does have an impact.”
Shortly after her father’s death, Walden began to sing again. Her first gig was as a volunteer singing for catatonics and schizophrenics in Manhattan Psychiatric Center as part of a music therapy program.
“I did it once a week for about three or four months, and every day I’d have to come home and sleep the entire next day. It was so powerful. I watched people who hadn’t spoken for years make sounds.”
Walden said she came away with a sense of the “power of voice, the power of music.”
She began to study the history of songwriting, developing a special feeling for the singer-composers of the 1930s, when, she explained, “music was really only about music, and everyone was in service to the composer and the writer because they understood that the song is where it came from.”
With Cohen, Walden produced and directed Songmasters Inside-Out, a series of live-performance benefits celebrating master songwriters that ran for 13 weeks at the Hotel Algonquin in Manhattan in 1994. The series featured 65 well-known performers, such as Roberta Flack, Brian Wilson and Laura Nyro, as well as Walden.
A Songmaster segment about female gospel singers featured performances by Walden and Thelma Houston, Chaka Khan, CeCe Peniston, Phoebe Snow and Mavis Staples. The performers, who were invited to open the Woodstock ’94 concert, eventually went on to form the gospel group Sisters of Glory. An album, Good News in Hard Times, co-produced by Walden and Cohen, soon followed, as well as an invitation to perform before the pope for a television special, Christmas at the Vatican.
“There we were with a 100-piece orchestra without a drum,” recalled Walden, laughing. “Now how can you sing gospel music without a drum?”
Walden is proud that the Sisters of Glory included black and white women, as well as Christians and Jews and young and older women. No boxes.
Walden’s commitment to crossing boundaries was tested in 1995 when she was invited to a songwriters convention in Bali. At one point, she found herself in a room with three other composers, including Malaysian pop superstar M. Nasir, an Indonesian songwriter and a Vietnamese songwriter.
“No one really spoke English,” Walden recalled. “I turned to the Vietnamese and asked, `What’s your name?’ and he said, `Yes.’ “
Despite the language barrier, the group decided to write a gospel song.
“Here we were, in Bali, with an American, a Malaysian, an Indonesian and a Vietnamese, writing a gospel song that was then sung by a Scotsman (singer Paul Buchanan). It was insane.”
Insane or not, the song, “Everyone’s Gonna Be Saved,” became one of Walden’s biggest successes. Recently, it was selected as the 1998 anthem for the Reebok Human Rights Awards. What Walden likes about the song is its upbeat message.
“I keep thinking to myself, Why, in human rights, does everybody always come out so strong?” she said. “We really should be celebrating the fact that there are these endless possibilities. We’re not there yet. We’re not close. But the point is to look over the horizon and say, `I can get this. It is attainable.’
“It’s not about gays. It’s not about blacks. It’s not about women. It’s about people.”
No boxes.
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Walden will headline the third annual Girls on Top concert and dance Saturday in the Andersonville neighborhood. The concert, which benefits the ACLU, runs from 7 to 11 p.m. (with Walden expected to perform about 9:30) in the Firstar Bank parking lot at Clark Street and Summerdale Avenue. Tickets are $25 through TicketMaster in advance or $35 at the gate.
