Then came music.
“I was very timid and just liked to observe. It felt safe,” Sudol says. “That changed when I started making music. When I was writing the album [One Cell in the Sea, her debut album available July 17], I found a place where I could be safe. I didn’t have to be so nervous and it really changed the way I acted.”
That change is probably for the best, given the newfound attention being paid to the emerging songstress. Now, Sudol, the lead singer and songwriter for L.A.’s A Fine Frenzy, finds herself center stage at the Viper Room and starring in music videos after inking a deal with Virgin Records. The red head’s stunning copper and cream complexion has even graced the pages of Interview Magazine, with a three-page photo spread at the recommendation of Selma Blair.
Sudol may still be sitting on the wrong end of a telescope, but nowadays her subjects are the one staring at her.
“It’s an interesting sensation, that interview being out there,” Sudol says. “I want to get my music out to as many people as possible. It’s nothing I’m terrified of.”
Sudol’s music stems from a childhood spent fascinated with fantasy and the words of C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll and E.B. White. A lover of long-form writing, which she still practices and posts on her blog, Sudol’s songs stray into worlds of wonder, but always return to their anchors in actuality. They are stories known to Sudol and familiar to her fans — the sort seen in everyday life, but painted with a magic wand of metaphor.
“When I wrote ‘Almost Lover,’ I didn’t really know how to play that well,” says Sudol, who didn’t learn piano until age 18. “When I wrote that song, I just wanted to write the most honest song that I could. And I couldn’t go back from that.”
Everything, she says, is anchored in truth, even when she sets off down the proverbial rabbit hole with songs like “The Minnow and the Trout.” That track features a series of conversations between various members of the animal kingdom. In her video for “Rangers,” creatures that look like jackalopes — mythical antler-sporting rabbits for the uninitiated — watch as Sudol and a sweetheart frolic in the forest.
“I really, really love Alice in Wonderland,” Sudol says. “It’s really incredibly random and even insane when you step back from it. There’s a caterpillar smoking mushrooms, and you’re like ‘Huh?’ But when you’re reading it, it’s magic.”
According to Sudol, the same could be said of her upcoming album.
“People are either going to understand this or think I’m mad as a hatter,” Sudol says. “It’s a gamble.”
Fortunately for her listeners, it was one she was willing to take.
• A Fine Frenzy plays this Friday night at The Black Cat. Tickets are $10 and the show starts at 9 p.m. For more on Alison Sudol and A Fine Frenzy, visit www.afinefrenzy.com or www.myspace.com/afinefrenzy.