Ann Schaffer

 While Ann was growing up, her father, an acoustical physicist, shook the house day and night with Beethoven and Wagner. Ann played percussion in grade school band. And her older brother, David, gave her his collection of 60s and 70s rock albums to take to Catholic girls’ boarding high school. Ann learned to play piano while in college at Harvard University and guitar upon hearing “Exile In Guyville.” Actually, the photo on the back of her soon-to-be-released, debut cd, “A Pink Motel By the Seashore,” is an homage to Liz Phair; the shot was taken in front of the strip mall that had housed Idful Studios, while that strip mall was being torn down. Ann wrote music and played out between ages twenty-six and thirty in Chicago and between ages thirty and thirty-two in Los Angeles. Also during this time Ann sang in a jazz trio with King Fleming and composed several songs for “Aurora,” an Equity-produced play in Chicago written by National Book Award nominee, Thomas Geoghegan. At the age of thirty-two, however, Ann was diagnosed with a chronic illness. This commenced an eleven-year hiatus from music. It wasn’t until one evening when she heard a cassette tape of herself, a cassette tape a friend had saved, that Ann realized she was healthy enough to invite the muse back into her life. Ann’s influences include early Liz Phair, Suzanne Vega, Nina Simone and everything the radio played in the ‘70s; also the poets Wallace Stevens, Anne Sexton and William Butler Yeats; as well as the short stories of Tennessee Williams; and the novels of the old Thomas Wolfe and Dostoevsky. Fareed Haque co-produced “A Pink Motel By the Seashore” with his Mathgames drummer and bass player, Greg Fundis and Alex Austin respecitvely, and with Rollin Weary, who engineered, mixed and mastered the cd at IV Lab Studios in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. Ann feels honored to have had world-class musicians play on and produce “A Pink Motel By the Seashore.” In particular, Fareed’s indelible musical stamp is on the cd, as he played all the guitar parts, led most of the arrangements and offered up a harmonium solo. One of the themes of “A Pink Motel By the Seashore” is psychosis. Standout cuts include “Crazy Janey” – surf punk with a gooey center, “Rebecca Had a Sadness In Her Soul,” a hip-hop influenced fable, and “I Will Come” – an apocalyptic ballad. 

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