Everything Changed

Photo By Todd V. Wolfson

On the top shelf of a bookcase in Abra Moore's front room is an amber-hued photograph nearly 20 years old. In it, Moore stoops into a guitar, playing in the moment, unaware of vendors and shopkeepers behind her. Her hair is long and light, tied back in a loose ponytail, a few strands straying out at the sides. She looks confident, earthy, young. Frank Orrall stands next to her, small hand-bongos clenched between his knees, his arms caught in mid-flail.

"That's in Honolulu," Moore smiles nostalgically. "That was the very beginning of Poi Dog Pondering. I was 19."

Fast forward to 1998. Moore is riding the wave of her Grammy-nominated breakout hit "Four Leaf Clover" from her 1997 Arista Austin solo debut Strangest Places, opening for Big Head Todd & the Monsters at Numbers nightclub in Houston. Moore stalks the stage, skinny in a wife beater and black pants, sexing it up Janis J.-style, purring and growling as she delivers the goods from underneath a battered black fedora.

Now it's 2004, smack-dab in the middle of another Austin summer. A modest crowd has gathered at Shady Grove for this week's unplugged performance. Wandering through the sparse clots of people, Moore looks little-girl lost in a black tank top and black shorts, her long dark hair drawn into two curling ponytails. Up close, she looks like a painted doll, a small child who went berserk in Mommy's make-up bag.

She takes the stage, settling timidly behind a giant keyboard, commencing her set with "I Do," the opening track to her new album, Everything Changed (KOCH). Her voice is shy, all traces of the late-Nineties sexpot erased.

And through the darkest night, when you're black and blue, who's gonna shine a light? Who still believes in you?

"I Do" is a breezy reassurance that there's always someone there who'll prop you up when you're sagging, who still believes in you even after life has kicked the living shit out of you. Given the events of the past six years, Moore is probably singing the song to herself.

After the gloss on her shiny solo career dimmed somewhat following Strangest Places, Moore found herself in a tug-of-war between labels. Arista Austin had gone belly-up, and the singer was absorbed by Arista New York. Clive Davis left Arista to found J Records and insisted on bringing Moore with him.

"It's amazing how much time it took. It took a couple of years, that transition with the lawyers, guns, and money," Moore recalls.

Once she was firmly ensconced in J Records, Davis encouraged Moore to engage in more collaborative projects.

"I wanted to explore that side of making records, you know, collaborating and writing with people. I spent a lot of time writing in England, L.A., Nashville," she nods. "That was a really interesting experience, opening myself to that type of work."

It seemed like a mutually beneficial arrangement all around.

I followed you just the way you wanted me to. You reached out your hand and took hold and you let go. But I wanted you and I thought that you wanted me too. But sometimes signals get crossed. Sometimes feelings get lost.

There's a lot of closure on Everything Changed (austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-03-19/music_phases2.html ), documenting not the histrionics of relationships gone bad, but a mature acceptance that sometimes, despite your best intentions, shit happens. "If You Want Me To" and a handful of other songs on the album describe an experience that could easily lead to bitterness in the hands of another person. It could be the end of a relationship or, in Moore's case, the disintegration of what had been a very positive business experience.

The follow-up to Strangest Places was initially titled No Fear and was a result of the collaborative, team-based approach to writing and recording Davis had pushed so energetically. Everything looked to be copacetic until it came time to start marketing the release.

"Right when we were in promo mode, I was feeling that we were going, marketwise, in a direction ...," Moore trails off, choosing her words carefully. "It wasn't feeling right for me. So I pulled out, just realizing that we weren't on the same page, marketingwise."

More clearly put, the marketing department at J Records was trying to market Abra Moore to the edgier 'tween crowd, alongside acts like Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton, a wildly inappropriate choice given Moore's age and experience, not to mention her style.

"The good thing is that we had such a great relationship that they were really sorry they tried to put me in a box. They realized I deserved to be on a boutique label, a place where I could do what I do," she reveals.

So, you wanted to be less of a product and more of an artist.

"Yes," she smiles, "and no harm, no foul."

Indeed, the split was amicable: J Records released the No Fear masters into Moore's custody, and she was free to go.

Paint on your wings, it's time to fly. Red, gold, and green, daddy, the colors you like. You're finally gonna know what's on the other side.

Most notable about Everything Changed is its lack of fear. In addition to a healthy chunk of the 13 songs being devoted to love's slow demise, there are also two tracks, "Paint on Your Wings" and "Family Affair," that deal directly with the death of Moore's father, who passed away three years ago. It's a club most of us have to join at least twice in our lives, and Moore's pain, anger, and ultimate acceptance of her loss are gritty and palpable on these two tracks. Her voice is childish and raw, breaking often while she sings, "Where do we begin after this unhappy ending?"

So it's no small amount of cognitive dissonance to spend time with Moore, quite possibly the most upbeat singer-songwriter working these days. A newlywed, she shares a tiny house in South Austin with her husband, Matthew Ray, the landscaper responsible for the gorgeous, immaculately kept garden in their front yard. The living room is crammed with a comfy couch loaded with smooshy pillows, a piano, many photographs, dried flowers, strings of lights, and a wheezing Chihuahua distrustful of visitors.

"Something came out in Hawaii [Moore's home state] that said, 'She was clinically depressed,' and I was like, 'What?!'" she shrieks indignantly. "Yes, my father died. I went through transition, but they just painted it as this morose drama. And everyone in Hawaii was calling: 'Are you OK?' It's a chapter of my life; that's how I make records. That's where I was then; I'm over here now."

Moore is a picture of ease puttering around her house, answering the demands of drying clothes, shuffling through stacks of paper, and chastising the dog for being unfriendly.

"My job right now is to write Abra songs," she says. "If I keep the rest of the areas of my life healthy and clear, it just passes through me."

What if I never leave this place? What if I drop out of the race? What if I travel around the world?

The album's closing track, "Shining Star," finds Moore considering her newfound freedom at the tail end of all those goodbyes. In real life, she's faced with many of the same options. On one hand, she has the benefit of experience on her side and is now a seasoned pro at being a performing musician, mastering the different aspects of the job from recording and building tracks in the studio to performing live and all the ups and downs that entails.

"I love to tour. It just grows me," she waves. "I've gotten more experienced, so I'm able to move within whatever environment I'm in. That's why the road is healthy that way."

Suffice it to say that the near future holds much touring for Moore, including the summertime Modern Day Troubadours jaunt across the country with playful acoustic rocker Ben Arthur, former software engineer Vienna Teng, and the iconoclastic Dane Teitur. From there, only the universe knows.

"I see another record, definitely. Some people build houses, write books. I happen to express myself musically. I'll always do that, but how I do it ... we'll see. I don't know if I will do it professionally," she smiles cagily. "We'll see. I look forward to making my next record, and the one after that, just watching the evolution of my artistic exploration, growth, change."

She pauses and smiles.

"I'm just beginning."

Beginnings and endings, everything changes.