Music for the Masses

Singer-songwriter Spencer Day takes five to chat with A&U’s Chael Needle about taking aids awareness on tour

Spencer Day postponed our interview so he could visit a doctor and get well before his debut at Joe’s Pub in New York City but also to prep for a trip to Australia he would soon take to headline at a World AIDS Day concert. For the second year in a row, and as a representative of Artists Against AIDS USA (A3USA), he was set to play to the thousands that would fill Melbourne’s Federation Square to enjoy the slate of acts hosted by the Burnet Institute, the country’s largest communicable diseases research site. As a San Francisco-based singer, songwriter, and pianist who has performed in venues from Ipanema to Chicago, he is conscious of the effects that a touring schedule can have on his vocal chords. But clearly he is protecting another voice, as well—one of awareness.

AIDS advocacy is threaded into his touring schedule, having performed in support of the HIV Services Division of Catholic Charities CYO and the AIDS Research Institute at UCSF, among others. “I’ve been doing AIDS advocacy my whole career. I plan on doing it throughout my career,” he says, his enthusiasm a counterweight to his matter-of-factness.

His dedication doesn’t seem so unusual to him, however: “So many of my friends are HIV-positive,” he says, later mentioning that he has lost some friends to the disease. “It’s something I’m forced to think about. Especially [concerning] my friends who are older, I have willed myself into a position where I am going to be taking care of them. They’re doing fine, fortunately. All of their medications are working great for them.”

He was excited to return to Australia, taken by its “last frontier kind of vibe” and liberal attitudes, and talked at length about the work of the Burnet Institute. His visit in 2004 included a surgical-glove tour (with his guitarist) of the Institute’s labs: “They’re one of the frontrunners in AIDS research in all of the world and their staff is so damn nice. The sweetest people. And it was so encouraging to see how much they cared about what they’re doing....I’ve done so many AIDS benefits and stuff like that and sometimes it seems like the people there have forgotten why they’re doing it. A lot of big corporate parties—they’ll do it for their tax write-off.”

Day continued on, updating me about a spermicidal jelly that was being tested at the Institute at the time: “For women, mostly. [Important, as] women are the highest group of people being infected with HIV right now, especially between the ages of fifteen and twenty. They’ve been working, hands-on, with a lot of sex workers in Thailand, which has one of the major sex industries in the world. Which is more than a little sad to me,” he adds, lamenting the fact that the country is a sex tourism destination for Americans, among others.

It makes sense that he would travel halfway around the world for a cause that is close to home, finding the connective tissue that binds all of us as part of the problem but also part of the solution. He seems adept at finding the bridges in life as easily as he does between verse and chorus. “To me the world is still kind of like a 1940s Broadway MGM musical. I see the world in beautiful Technicolor and want to bring my aesthetic to younger people who maybe don’t listen to that music and to introduce to older people who listen to standards some of the [contemporary] influences I have now.” (That explains the Depeche Mode cover with which he closed his sold-out gig at Joe’s Pub.) “I don’t think in terms of genres, and that’s one of my missions: to get out of these rigid boxes we’ve confined music [and audiences] into.” On that note, he would welcome major-label support, but is loath to let go of an indie spirit that resists dividing music into clear-cut genres or marketing categories.

While his first album, Introducing Spencer Day, a one-take demo of jazz standards and original tunes, showcased his talent and dreamboat voice, and garnered raves, he thinks his second offering, Movie of Your Life, is a better representation of his style, which generously embraces influences ranging from Kurt Weill to Gershwin, the sardonic humor of Nellie McKay to the optimism of Gene Kelly. The EP, which features accompaniment by the Turtle Island String Quartet, is a mix of pop and musical theater influences. If he looks familiar, you might recognize him from his career-path stopover as a finalist on CBS’s Star Search in 2003, an experience that hardly endeared him to image-conscious L.A. Appearing on the show proved “valuable and wonderful experience. But the dynamic was more of a sporting match than a supportive atmosphere. It showed me what I really wanted to do.” And that’s making and writing music. Currently he’s finetuning two musicals of his own. One, he says, is a twenties burlesque set in Los Angeles, complete with a deejay and flapper music with hip hop beats underneath. “Hoochie-koochie, shake your ass kind of music,” he says with a sly smile.

“My energy is [about] bringing a really simple message of peace and love,” he says when asked to reflect on what he wants his art to express. “I want people to feel good, happy, and to make people think hopefully....There can be something so much more subversive about a pretty jazz song than [a protest song].” Jazz is the new punk rock; quiet is the new loud, he quips.

While his music may take an oblique approach to consciousness-raising, he is resists the rigid separation between art and politics that’s been favored by some in this post-Saddam cultural haze of blind patriotism. “An artist by definition is marginalized. They stand outside of the world and see the perspective [from there]—that’s why so many artists have been gay or lesbian or from the black community, especially when the Jazz Age was thriving. It takes everyone: the worker bees who make the world run and the people who stand outside and comment about what’s right and wrong with the picture. You don’t have to be political, but I don’t like hearing [that] your job is just to sing.

“A few things, politically, I won’t shut my big mouth about. I’m San Franciscan—now, anyway,” he says about the city he fell in love with. Concerned about AIDS apathy and American penchant for quick fixes of complex problems, fundraisers competing for attention, the rise of unprotected sex in an age where anti-HIV medications seem to provide a way out, and the crystal meth epidemic, his aim is to keep the help break what seems to be a stalemate and keep the momentum of awareness and activism going. “I hope I can be down with the cause for as long as possible. We need to search for a cure until we find one.”

Makeup by Natasha Smee.

For more information about Australia’s Burnet Institute, log on to www.burnet.edu.au; and for A3USA, log on to www.a3usa.org. Sample Spencer Day’s music, new video, and much more at www.spencerday.com.

Chael Needle is Managing Editor of A&U.