Dan Mayfield • Albuquerque Journal

Singer Goes from Stage Fright to Stage Finesse

She just couldn’t do it. No matter how hard Bernadette Seacrest tried, she couldn’t get over her paralyzing stage fright to sing.

“I always wanted to sing, and I always wanted to try,” she said. “I’m really bold in a lot of ways. . . I just have had stage fright.”

No way. Seacrest?

She’s the woman covered with tattoos from her shoulders to her thighs. She’s the woman with the voice so strong it carries into the next galaxy. She’s the woman who isn’t afraid to look like Uma Thurman on her CD cover or share the stage with Hank Williams III.

She’s come out of her shell, and she’ll be hosting her first CD release party for her new album, “No More Music by the Suckers,” on Sunday.

After dreaming about singing for the better part of 30 years, with a little help from her buddy Pat Bova, Seacrest finally overcame her paralyzing stage fright and jumped into singing with both feet.

Bova’s popular rockabilly band Bovine had broken up and he invited her to sing with his new band.

“Pat, jokingly, was like, ‘You should sing in the band,'” she said.

At first she had trepidations. But she got up her nerve and took Bova up on the offer.

“He’s totally responsible for that. We had this intense relationship that really made for good chemistry. He really pushed me,” she said.

Though Seacrest has a very confident nature, on her first night with the band, she almost didn’t go on stage.

“I made myself sick,” she said.

Too many late nights and too many smoky bars were taking their toll on her, she said, and she quit the band a year later to form her own group, Bernadette Seacrest and her Yes Men, a four-piece jazz outfit.

And just now, she said, she’s feeling comfortable behind a microphone.

Part of it is due to friends like David Parlato and Michael Grimes, and the other part is due to what she’s singing and her new band.

“I wanted to see what it is that really moved me. . . . Initially, it was rootsy Americana,” she said. “Nothing was fitting. Nothing was rocking.”

Parlato helped her find jazz, and her voice-which has gone from sounding like Patsy Cline to more like Billie Holiday.

It fits well with her Yes Men backing her up coolly.

But it was only by luck she met the band.

“In Nob Hill one night, I saw the Yes Men, who weren’t called the Yes Men, and I was floored. I thought, ‘if I was good enough to play with these guys, it would be great.'”

Her confident nature again took over, she introduced herself, and next thing she knew, she was fronting the new outfit.

Commercially, the band is also taking off. Local record stores have sold out of the new CD, and it’s already one of the most popular files downloaded from www.download.com.

Ironically, she said, 20 or even 10 years ago, she never would have imagined herself as a jazz singer.

“It’s not like I listen to jazz 24-7,” she said.

She’s a punk rocker, with an L7 poster on her oven who experienced some of punk’s raw power first-hand in the mid-1980’s Los Angeles.

Of the 11 tracks on her new CD four were written by Grimes, and two were written by Bova, the rest are standards.

Of the standards, however, “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynchings in the South, originally popularized by Billie Holiday, stands out.

“That’s the hardest. . . song to sing. It’s an important song to sing, especially now,” Seacrest said. “It’s a metaphor for oppressed people. It’s a very powerful song. I would always cry when I sang it.”

Though most of the songs are dark jazz, there are some upbeat tracks, like “Dream a Little Dream” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

“Personally, I would only sing dark sad music if I could,” Seacrest said. “But we had to put some happier tunes (on the CD) to keep people from slitting their wrists.