I spoke to Wensday about her recently released debut record, Torch Rock, and here's what she had to say:

antiMUSIC: For those of us that are new to you, tell us how you got involved with music and what led you to do this full time.

Wensday: I've always been involved with music. I begged my parents for singing lessons. I was always in theatre. I did children's theater when I was a kid and was dying to sing. And finally when I was 13, my parents let me have voice lessons and my voice teacher taught me jazz and my parents were already listening to jazz. They had tons of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. That's what I grew up listening to and then I just started singing all that stuff. My tastes were always kinda different from what I was singing. I was into punk rock, rock and roll and hip hop and all kinds of different stuff. And it all kinda snowballed. I was singing in the jazz bands from grade 8 all through high school. And then I lived in New York, I did some studio recordings and I eventually made it back to Providence, I had my own band and also started singing jazz again. I was like 25 or something and so I was singing all the old songs that I'd sung in high school. And so then I was in Providence and I also worked at a children's theatre and I started working with Dick about a year and a half ago. Susie, who runs the record company with Dick….it's Dick, Susie and Alex, came into providence to look at Brown for their daughter and heard me sing and brought me to phoenix to start working with Dick, like doing demos. And the demo turned into the four song EP project that you heard. And then it got turned into an album and now I'm signed with them as their first artist.

antiMUSIC: Wow nice connections.

Wensday: (laughs) Yeah, it kinda works.

antiMUSIC: Tell me about how Torch Rock came to be? Which songs started things off and how did it all come together?

Wensday: Actually the first song we wrote is your favorite song, 'Arizona Man'.

antiMUSIC: Cool.

Wensday: And it came from this completely different riff that I had on the piano that I was just like obsessed with, and kept playing and became 'Arizona Man'. And then we actually took the riff out of it. That riff will probably pop up somewhere else. And then we did, I believe, 'Predatory'. So Torch Rock kinda came up in the middle of the sessions because you know I'm a torch. I've always been a torch singer. I've always gravitated towards the more deep and emotional songs, probably from being an actress and emoting and all that stuff. And then Dick is like the rock guy so it's kinda bringing like the torch signing and the rock and roll together. He says he introduced me to rock and roll and I let him believe it (laughs) but it's not true. (laughs) It just manifested this way. It was kinda like the middle of the album, he thought of Torch Rock and the whole concept. It just kinda fit because it's like, we started with 'Arizona Man' which by all means could be considered a country song, but then we have a song called 'Sky', which is like a Polynesian lullaby, for my little niece. So it was hard to find a genre that encapsulated everything we were doing, so we created a new one.

antiMUSIC: Cool. What are the rest of the songs like on the record?

Wensday: Yeah, pretty much. Let's see, you have 'Arizona Man', 'The Rise and Fall of Love', 'Only Women Bleed', and 'After You'. Yeah, even just those four songs are kinda diverse. You have the ballad, love song and then the sexy kinda like ballad rock, and then the gospel version of 'Only Women Bleed', and there are some songs that are a little more jazzy, and little more honky tonk but it's kinda the same elements going into each of the songs. It's like a little bit of blues, rock and roll a little country, little jazz, with different results.

antiMUSIC: Did you write exactly what's on the record or did you have many leftover songs?

Wensday: We didn't eliminate any. There were definitely some songs. Dick and I got together for songwriting a lot when I first moved here in October. There's definitely some songs that we only half wrote or we didn't even consider. But everything we recorded we used.

antiMUSIC: The material really seems to be the kind of bluesy/jazzy type stuff that is not the kind of fluffy stuff we've heard on the radio for the past few years. Do you really have to get in touch with material before you record it or can you make any song your own?

Wensday: Yeah, I just kinda did it. I mean we wrote some songs we wrote together. Some songs he had already written and then some songs he wrote specifically for me. And he will, if it's a song that he's already written then he'll give me a demo and I'll learn the demo. And I can't help but make it my own because our voices are so different. And he doesn't do a vocal performance. He'll just do it for accuracy of the note, and like the rhythm. So it's not too hard...and then also he'll record the demo on a keyboard, just himself and he'll do the beats and everything and so it sounds like the song but so much different when we get the band in there. And then when the band plays it, then it even sounds like a totally different song and it just takes on a life of its own.

antiMUSIC: Is this the first time you've written with someone else?

Wensday: Yeah, I was writing original stuff before but I never really collaborated per se with another artist like that. As I told you, I was heavily involved in the children's theatre and I taught a class called Creation Station. And we would make an original musical so I have collaborated with like 20 children at a time to make an entire musical, so songwriting, is something I've actually taught and worked on with kids. So collaborating came kinda easy to me. I love collaborating on anything.

antiMUSIC: And if you can do it with 20 kids…

Wensday: (laughs) Yeah. Really.

antiMUSIC: Do you find having connections such as Dick and Alice Cooper handy or does it somehow put more pressure on you to produce?

Wensday: I don't think it puts any pressure on me. I think it's nothing but handy. I don't think anything has been given to me just because of my connections. I think I had to prove myself even to Dick and Susie and not so much prove myself, but just really show myself and just be myself and let it happen. But I definitely probably wouldn't have been booked at Christmas Pudding if they didn't know some people. But then again, they weren't like: Please book our artist. They showed them the EP, the same thing you have, and they asked me to play theirs. So I think it's half merit, half connections.

antiMUSIC: Sure, sure. What circumstances led you to cover Only Women Bleed?

Wensday: Yeah, he wrote it and he actually recorded the version with Etta James, which is amazing. Like 25 people have covered it over, in the past 30 years that it's been out. And through all of those versions, whether he had a hand in them or not, Dick never thought, really the essence of the song was being conveyed, and even with Alice Cooper, there was a lot of kinda confusion when the song first came out. It sounded like it may have been misogynistic, and he was like, he wanted the women to bleed or something. It was kinda a miscommunication being sung by a man. So Dick wanted to add that extra verse that we put in there. That we wrote together. Which really just plainly states the meaning of the song, because that's really what he was trying to convey, you know, singing to the women of the world not to let your man hurt you. So we just did a literal kinda translation of the song at the end, saying this is what it means, this is what it is. And it turned out pretty powerful.

antiMUSIC: What's your fav track on the record?

Wensday: What's MY favourite track on the record? It changes all the time. But as far as singing is concerned, I love to sing on 'Bulldog Blues'. That was just a fun song to sing. It's just a fun song to perform. And I love 'Sky', the song we wrote for my niece, but it's kinda sad because I'm in Phoenix or L.A. most of the time, and she's in another city. It's a beautiful song and it makes me even sad just to listen to it or even sing it.

antiMUSIC: Sure. This isn't MTV music. How and where do you plan on marketing yourself?

Wensday: You know, that's a big question. Who and where to market my sound because it is unique. And also it's kinda unique the person who's singing it because here I'm this like, I mean, I look like a rocker chick, I'm all covered in tattoos. Yet I'm singing these plaintive, sophisticated songs. How do I find a market that's going to accept who am I and what I sound like and not treat them as separate things? So it's challenging. I do fall into the category of adult contemporary so that's one avenue. But then also there are songs that I think are so universal like 'After You' that could be an MTV song. I mean Jessica Simpson could be singing that in a video or one of their ballads or something. And songs like 'Arizona Man' could be on like CMT. So it's just a matter of who's going to like me the most I think. So we're just kinda waiting to see where the response is.

antiMUSIC: Any ideas yet of your live show. What sort of venues would you like to play in?

Wensday: As big as possible. (laughs) As many seats as humanly possible. I'd like to open for like Bonnie Raitt. That'd be awesome. Sheryl Crow. Someone like that. I think that would be a lot of fun. And I think our songs are kinda similar enough but different that it would be, we wouldn't take away from each other. It would be a nice complement.

antiMUSIC: Sure. Usually first records have been a long in the making. By the time it gets made, people are looking forwards towards the next record. Is this the case with you and are there any other styles or things you would like to do on the next one that you didn't have time or whatever to do on this one?

Wensday: I think we definitely want to do more straight rock and roll on the next album. More of the rock, less of the torch. And also we were talking about doing an album of all old, you know, blues from the 20 and 30s. So we were talking about that. And of course definitely at some point, you know I've been a jazz singer for years, so at some point I'd like to do a jazz album. After singing them for 17 years I'm fairly comfortable with them. (laughs) So, yeah, I'd like to have a jazz album too.

antiMUSIC: Anything else you'd like to add?

Wensday: Just that it's fabulous. (laughs) Thanks for the interview.