Page 46 - Sonoma County Gazette April 2020

Beth Hart is an open book, exposing an incredible depth of feelings and vulnerability to listeners. “I’ve always been open to being myself. My music and writing are about trying to get everything off my chest,” she says in our early March phone interview. “When I’m sad or scared or lost or freakin’ the frick out, that’s when I write. I would rather people not like me for who I am, than like me for what I’m not.”
Healing is a major theme in
“Music was a way to try to feel better.” Hart began playing classical music on piano and cello, and writing songs at age four. Her mother turned her on to jazz, her dad to mariachi, her brother to punk and reggae. Friends exposed her to Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and Robert Johnson.
by Diane McCurdy
It is always impressive when a book lands on The New York Times Best
Heart & Soul
The Silent Patient
Seller List. The Silent Patient is on that roster and many others. It is worth noting that although the author, Alex Michaelides, studied at Cambridge, his M.A. is from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. His book
is intense and twisty and very cinematic in nature. It will fare better as interpreted in a movie than as a written psychological thriller, the inevitable film version will make it that much more thrilling.
PHOTO Greg Watermann
her music.
Then one day, out of the blue, after Gabriel returns late from a photography session, Alicia shoots him in the face five times and becomes silent.
“I’ve been incredibly blessed, too,” she says. In her song Thankful, from her new release War in My Mind, she sings – “Oh my oh my, this is paradise.”
The incident creates much notoriety because of the social status of the couple. Alicia’s artwork becomes a hot item. The tabloids have a field day.
Pop artists as well, including Carole King, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen. “When I discovered Leonard Cohen it was over,” she says, calling him “the greatest lyricist ever.”
Michaelides’ book unravels what
really happened that night and
why she has refused to speak. The
author is Greek and there is a barely
acknowledged nod to the Greek myth
of Alcestis who exchanged her husband’s death for her own.
In her performances, including London’s Royal Albert Hall with Joe Bonamassa and the Kennedy Center with Jeff Beck, Hart overpowers the stage with brassy sexuality, but she’s most concerned with relaying her issues and emotions “as honestly and vulnerably as possible.” “It’s not party music,” she says, though “I’m not the kind of girl who should run for mayor.”
Enter Theo Faber who is a criminal psychotherapist who is inordinately determined to get Alicia to verbalize, so that he can determine what kind
of trauma precipitated her heinous act. He is so obsessed that when Alicia
is sent to psychiatric hospital, he obtains a position there just so that he can treat her. He interviews anyone even remotely connected to his non-speaking patient, her neighbors, her relatives, and her business associates.
The title War in My Mind, completely self or co-written, refers to her mental illness. In the first song, Bad Woman Blues, Hart sings, “Got the lips, got the legs, I was born to drive a man insane.” But, she doesn’t want to be pegged with that, or any other label.
He finds that Alicia apparently had a dysfunctional childhood, as did he, and the therapist’s personal problems soon become interwoven with those of his patient. He seems to have deep personality disorders that mirror those of his client and lead to his fixation with her.
Only two songs emphasize that aspect of her persona.
Hart, 48, portrayed Janis Joplin in stage productions of “Love, Janis,” 20 years ago, but she has never sung Joplin songs onstage. “I loved her when I was young,” Hart says, but Joplin’s fragility and humanity, her themes of drug addiction, the sadness of her early death, hit Hart “too close to home.”
Is his motivation to get Alicia to speak merely for self-gratification? Was it for job advancement?
Does he have romantic inclinations toward her?
He breaks rules and risks censuring by his peers to sit opposite her in
Hart connected with Bonamassa in 2011 for three albums and a Grammy nomination in 2013. That collaboration is ongoing, she says, but “I don’t consider myself a blues artist. It’s blues, jazz, soul, gospel, singer/songwriter, and rockin’- heavy-roll.”
endless silence.
Some say they saw the”twist” coming. I didn’t. I found it shocking,
Her songs are so revealing, sensitive, sensual, emotional, overpowering, that I can feel her joy and tears, and my own.
stunning and well worth some of the slower subplots that set it up.
The Silent Patient presents an intelligent and complex story with lots of
Hart’s April 15 show at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center has been cancelled. Find Beth Hart music online @ www.bethhart.com.
suspense and tension. It is easy to imagine the characters with your mind’s eye so the reader is easily drawn into the intrigue.
Hart’s upbringing in Los Angeles was tumultuous. Her parents separated, her dad went to prison, her sister died from AIDS, her grandmother killed herself. Hart inherited a devastating bipolar disorder. She got into drugs at age eleven and was the victim of a lot
of sexual abuse. She landed in nine psych wards and four rehab facilities.
Alicia Berensen is an painter, attractive, well-known and respected as a artist. Her husband, Gabriel, is
a top fashion photographer. They live in a lovely section of London
in a grand house. They are part of the clique of beautiful people with a seemingly idyllic life.
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