Jessica Fogle: Home
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Jessica Fogle is a Chicago-based songwriter/pianist/singer (in that order). You can find her playing her songs fairly regularly around Chicago, most frequently at Gallery Cabaret or The Orphanage. She has also been seen at Schubas, Uncommon Ground, the Grafton, Kitty Moon, Bill's Blues, Silvie's, Cat Mafia, Old Town School of Folk (with the First Friday songwriters and mainstage open mic), and other cool-sounding places. Although she's been a songwriter/musician since she was 2 years old (via her 15-key plastic keyboard, featuring "Mary Had a Yittle Yam" and "Shaboopiedoo"), she only came out publicly as a songwriter a few years ago.
She's taken many different tangents before getting here--including a career in music directing for musical theatre in NYC and Chicago, studying classical piano, writing musicals (grad school-NYU), and composing for film**.
Armed with the influence of all these genres (plus heros like Joni Mitchell, Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, etc), she now writes quirky and melancholy songs that blend a variety of styles and genres.
She has been known to describe her music as such: "blending folk-rock-pop with jazz/cabaret piano with experimental/absurdist/satiric/confessional lyric influences...sort of like if Norah Jones ate Kurt Vonnegut and washed it down with some Tom Waits or Fiona Apple, and then, bloated, went swimming in a mellow moody film score." Or something like that. +++
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**(this tangent of years ago has led to involvement in an amazing film "Were the World Mine"--the brainchild of the incredible Tom Gustafson and Cory Krueckeberg...I wrote music for a song in their short film "Fairies" back in 2004, which won awards and was encouraged to be made into a feature...years later, that dream is a reality, and I was just in Miami for the screening in early May 08. Check out the website- http://www.weretheworldminefilm.com or visit my "links" page...you can also watch the trailer here: http://speakproductions.com/Coming_Soon.html).
+++UPDATE-Oct 2008: by the way, that self-description was written while immersed in my first album, Melancholy Frog (and while working on Du Hast Einen Fogle, the 2nd). I've now written 3 more, since July, and my style is changing...some high floaty vocals, bizarre influences, some top-40 sounds, and much use of an old casio--lots of tinkly and twinkly sounds, and other new agey and stringy ones too. It's like going back to childhood:-) (albums are: 3: Time is a bottle of dreams that you store in a bag of hope, 4: Turtle Window, and 5: We're Not Dead) (6 and 7 are in the works, and I really wanna tell you the titles, but i'll hold back:-)