By Chris Kocher
ckocher@pressconnects.com
Press & Sun-Bulletin
Folk-rock singer/songwriter SONiA is thinking a lot lately about language — how it divides us, and how it can ultimately bring us together.
“You can see, through time, there’s all kinds of connections with languages. I think if we look at it and we don’t understand it, we think it’s very separate and very different – but when you start to understand what it is, you see that it’s not so different and that there’s all kinds of connections with it,” she said last week from her home in the Baltimore area. “It’s like how the Earth is round, so it’s not like anyone is really on any one side or the other side, we’re just on the Earth and on everybody’s side.”
Such musings are understandable as she works on her thirteenth album, “La Tormenta Santa,” a “world CD” that will feature seven songs in Spanish, two in Hebrew and one in Arabic. The CD won’t be released until September, but SONiA promises she’ll sing some of those new songs at Friday’s Night Eagle Café show.
Like the best of folk musicians, SONiA’s songs are a mix of the political and the personal. As a peace advocate and proud lesbian, she certainly has causes that she believes in. Engage her in conversation, though, and it soon becomes obvious that she’s a good-natured, fairly down-to-earth soul. (The small “i” in SONiA seems to be her reminder to keep any ego in check.)
Likewise, her antiwar songs don’t seem strident, but are cleverly written starting points to a dialogue about important issues of the day. Maybe her sweet, almost girlish voice bypasses the “NO!” centers of our brains that can cause us to tune out viewpoints that don’t match ours.
“I write about what’s in my heart and in my head — I don’t sit down to say, ‘I’m going to write a political song.’ It becomes political like the same way I would write about anything,” she said. “For me, it’s a homogenized situation, really writing about what I feel.”
SONiA (born Sonia Rutstein) rose to prominence in folk circles in the late 1980s as half of disappear fear with her sister CiNDY (that small “i” seems to run in the family) — but after CiNDY dropped out of the music scene to raise a family, SONiA continued solo for almost 10 years. In 2005, after getting CiNDY’s blessing, SONiA reformed disappear fear with Laura Cerulli on percussion and harmony vocals.
“When I first became solo, I just wanted to get closer to my guitar — I wanted to write songs as a songwriter, not just being a band leader,” SONiA said. “Then I missed singing with my sister, for one, and then having that train going on, the different colors. You can blow off the roof of a club with just your guitar, but it’s really fun when you have ongoing fireworks with different people. It just creates more of this incredible sound together.”
SONiA’s last studio release, 2004’s “No Bomb Is Smart,” earned her a Grammy nomination for songs such as “Won’t Let Go” (a touching tribute to her father), “Rio’s Home” (mourning the victim of a fatal Baltimore robbery) and “I Am The Enemy” (about the fear after 9/11). The CD’s title song, as you might suspect, takes on the war in Iraq but also the 2000 presidential recount and the disposal of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
In 2005, the aptly named “DF05 Live” documented the new disappear fear as the band traveled from Texas’ Kerrville Folk Festival to a small club in Ohio and other points in between. Among the highlights are the pointed “Washington Work Song” and a suggestive ode to turbulent romance called “Ride This Ride.”
Certainly SONiA’s riskiest move of 2006 was to perform in the Mideast while Israel was fighting a two-front war with the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas. She hunkered down with Israelis in their bomb shelters and tried her best to keep the frightened citizens entertained — and distracted.
“I’m dedicated to the fact that when you disappear fear between people, what you have is love — so I needed to live that out in Israel and Palestine,” SONiA said of her decision. “I wasn’t bringing a gun with me — I was bringing a couple of guitars. I knew if I did meet my end, it would be in the right place for the right reasons, and if I survived — which I did — I’d be very happy I survived. Either way, it was win-win situation for me.”
Throughout her travels, SONiA believes she’s witnessing an evolution in the way people relate to each other on a one-to-one level.
“There’s a secret turning that seems to be happening, and it seems to be about taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other. I say it’s a secret because it’s sort of happening, but there’s not really a documentation of it,” she said. “You’re not going to see it on ‘Oprah,’ but maybe you are. But it’s happening anyway, and the disappear fear fans, the ones that are currently on my e-mail list and the ones that I’ll have tomorrow — because my career grows in increments a little bit every moment, every day — are a part of that movement of taking care of themselves and in turn taking care of each other.
“So that’s not necessarily in Billboard or on MTV or VH1, that’s not really my playground so much — I mean, it is to some degree, I’m getting some airplay and some attention — but it’s more personal. My music is what’s more important to me. I love that.”