Chantal Foster • Duke City Fix

Bye, Bye, Bernadette Seacrest

Apparently after her successful tour in France, Albuquerque’s jazz sultress Bernadette Seacrest has gone MIA from the music scene. Her website lists no upcoming events and she has officially broken up with her band. Stephen Terrell had the scoop back in December and The Dish tells us all where we can find the guys from her former band “The Yes Men,” now reincarnated as The Bitter Sermon.

TONIGHT 8:30 at Gulp. No cover.

But what everyone wants to know is this (and we’ve already received emails asking the question) — what happened to Bernadette? Honestly, I don’t know. Do you?

UPDATE: I just received an email from Bernadette. Here’s what she said.

[A compilation of 2 emails from Bernadette Seacrest. And yes, she gave me her permission to publish them.]

hi chantal,

i just thought i’d send you an email regarding my recent “disappearance”. a friend of mine forwarded me your blog, so i thought i would offer up whatever info you think would be good juice.

i honestly had no idea people were wondering. i sent out an email when i got home, to my “fan base” of around 300 folks and thought that would suffice. always elusive i suppose, though it really is not intentional.

i will say when i got home [from France] i had interviews lined up regarding the new cd release. i had to cancel everything though, not feeling too well.

i would say that the reasons i quit were many. it’s hard to put it into a concise little package because it feels incredibly overwhelming to me still.

i suppose the bottom line, the “straw”, was when i got home i had what felt very much like a nervous breakdown. three days after i got home, i woke up in the morning and could not get out of bed. i really don’t know how to explain this except to say i couldn’t. i had no more push in me. it’s like a switch flipped and i could not go on.

i spent the month in bed.

there were many other things going on, obviously, and i still am trying to make sense of things in my heart and in my head before i start talking about it. i may never talk about it publicly, but am sure i have a lot of good material for new songs or perhaps a memoir (tehe!).

as far as playing music again, i hope i do someday. but for now, my heart is broken and i just don’t have it in me. france was amazing but it was also very hard. so, i don’t know if i have the strength for it, touring, playing locally, any of it, i’m still feeling a bit fragile.

i guess that’s it for now.

xxx b

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