Cassendre Complex

Cassendre Xavier has had enough of codependent love songs.

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Dec 6, 2006

"I wanna write songs that aren't like the propaganda that we've been given in our love songs," Cassendre Xavier says over tea at Cosi. It'll take a lot of work to counteract dysfunctional classics like The Supremes' "My World Is Empty Without You," but she's trying.

"What the fuck is this shit? 'My life is empty without you.' Not like, 'improved with you.' Empty. Why would you even want to get involved with someone whose life is empty without you? That's a recipe for codependence and borderline stalking behavior when you break up. But we're reared on that kind of stuff. ... So no wonder we then get involved with people that don't treat us well."

Growing up in Willingboro, N.J., Xavier sometimes felt caught between two worlds: that of her Haitian family and American suburbia. But if her immigrant parents weren't supportive of her musical ambitions, neither was the dominant culture. "When I was in my teens, I started watching VH1 and MTV, watching videos and stuff, and I just started falling in love with the guitar," says Xavier, now 37. "But I didn't think I could play the guitar because I was black and female and chubby, and I didn't have long, skinny fingers. And everyone on TV was, like, tall and white and male and had long-ass skinny fingers."

Thanks to a public school that valued music education, Xavier enrolled in a guitar class at 16 and soon found unlikely inspiration in Tracy Chapman. "This is gonna sound really terrible, but it's so true," she says. "Like, a huge percentage of why I thought I could do what she was doing was because I was really not that impressed with what she was doing musically."

Before she started making albums, Xavier visualized her success by making tons of mock-ups out of blank cassettes. Then she found a role model who pushed out real records almost as often. "Oh, my God, Ani Di-fuckin'-Franco. She was a huge, huge influence," Xavier says. "I would collect her CDs, put them spine by spine. Look at all of them, look at the art, look at how different everything was. ... Like, every CD of hers, I've kinda only ever liked two of the tunes. But if you put out three-ass CDs a year, I'm not gonna fault you."

Now that she's a working musician, Xavier has journals full of ideas for projects, like an album of humorous songs and another of affirmations. So far, she's self-released seven CDs of acoustic yearnings: two studio recordings, two collections and three live albums, including the new Live at Tin Angel. For No. 8, she's going electric, with production by her brother, Giscard "Jee Eye Zee" Xavier. She lives by her own rules: No more than 10 songs per album — otherwise you're giving away too much — with a ratio of seven originals to three covers.

Having honed her craft in the subway, Xavier touts the benefits of hooking listeners with songs they already know. Her last studio album, 2004's Beautiful, included the Ewan MacColl standard "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," Sheryl Crow's "Strong Enough" and Julie Miller's "All My Tears." More recently, she grappled with the idea of covering one of her peers for her upcoming show at The Rotunda. She toyed with Amos Lee's "Arms of a Woman," futzing with the key and the tempo, but found that the song was perfect as it was. Since she wasn't bringing anything new to it musically, she was reluctant to take it on. Then she had a brainstorm: "Oh, I got it, I'm a chick!" she recalls thinking. "I'm a chick singing 'I am at ease in the arms of a woman.' That's the thing that makes it different, that's what makes it OK to cover it."

Xavier, who founded Philly's annual Black Women's Arts Festival in 2003, doesn't just sing of women supporting one another — she lives it. And she's ready to lift others, whether through her music, her spirit or her example. "I just didn't think it was possible to get my songs out unless I weighed 50 pounds less and straightened my nose and my hair," she says. "[But] I wouldn't be me. And then the people who were supposed to be touched and helped and healed and inspired and made to laugh by my work, they wouldn't get that."

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Tue., Dec. 12, 7 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., www.cassendrexavier.com.

 

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