Stephanie Adlington:Music with Both Glamour and Swagger
NASHVILLE – When Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and their legendary Rat Pack cohorts were spending their days filming the original Ocean’s Eleven in Vegas, they spent their nights performing a series of nightclub shows there which became known as The Summit.
The Royal Academy-trained Nashville singer and songwriter Stephanie Adlington is combining that same spirit of the Rat Pack with 21st-Century urgency. It’s a breathtaking combination.
“What’s really important to me is class,” she says after an appearance in Music City, where she not only wowed the crowd with a varied set list stretching from the Gershwins to Etta James, Billy Joel, and Patty Griffin, but also showed the chic, high-fashion sense rarely seen in Nashville’s female stars. “If you’re going to be on stage, you should look your best and say something meaningful.”
She continues: “I loved the Rat Pack, and everything about it. There really was that swagger. Plus dressing up really makes you feel like such a girl.”
As a little girl, Stephanie was brought up in Grafton, W. Va. She was serious from a young age. Stephanie studied music at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh during high school summers, and was then accepted to the famed Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. After two years at Eastman, she went on to an even more legendary school, London’s Royal Academy of Music.
Even though she was one of a tiny number of Americans in her class, Stephanie felt right at home in the Royal Academy’s intense, fiercely competitive environment. Top Broadway composers would try out their new shows at the Academy before opening them in London’s West End, so Adlington got to sing for – and dazzle – Stephen Sondheim and other theater superstars.
One of these composers was Michael Dunford, who heard Stephanie sing during auditions for his upcoming Song Of Scheherazade. Dunford immediately hired her for another project, his updated version of the famous 1970s Progressive Rock band called Renaissance. This new band quickly became a favorite in Britain in the late 1990s, and Stephanie recorded a pair of albums with the group.
In time Adlington returned to the States. She had earned not just a Bachelor’s at the Royal Academy but a Post-Graduate degree as well. She also earned an LRAM which enabled her to teach voice, as she does now at Nashville’s Belmont University. She also eventually discovered the music in her own heart.
“I was going from a soprano theater singer to what I’m doing now,” she says. “The biggest benefit of my period with Renaissance was that I went on a musical journey and asked myself, What do I want to be musically?’ I found out I wasn’t singing the way I heard the music in my head. I was wanting to sing like Etta James, but sounding like Julie Andrews.”
The transformation has been remarkable, and Adlington’s adoring public couldn’t be more thrilled. She absolutely inhabits difficult, rangy songs like Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” Etta James’s “At Last,” Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” and Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World.”
Best of all, Stephanie is working on an album of brand-new songs that carry on the feel of these earlier classics combined with modern lyrics and sounds. Michael Buble and Harry Connick Jr. are among her current icons. One of Adlington’s upcoming projects will find her fronting a Big Band with soul flavorings, combining elements of Etta James and Donnie Hathaway.
We just know that somewhere, the Rat Pack guys are listening and loving every note Stephanie sings and every show she performs.
By PHIL SWEETLAND
Music+Radio contributorNew York Times
