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Inara George
Singer, songwriter

The Los Angeles-based singer and songwriter Inara George has made music in various styles, from orchestral pop to bossa nova-flavored jazz to alternative rock. The list has not included the free-spirited blues-rock of George's father, Lowell George, of the 1970s rock band Little Feat. That isn't surprising, as George knew her famous father only slightly and has tried to avoid trading on his name. Family connections did, however, bring George an unusual collaborator, arranger Van Dyke Parks, whose experience as a pop arranger stretched back to his pioneering work with the Byrds and the Beach Boys in the 1960s.

Inara George was born in 1974 in Baltimore, Maryland, where her father was recording the Little Feat album Feats Don't Fail Me Now. She grew up in the glamorous Topanga Canyon area of Los Angeles County. George has mentioned memories of being taken to concerts when she was little and, once, of leading the riders of a tour bus in a chorus of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." But Lowell George died of a heart attack on June 29, 1979, at age 34. Inara's fifth birthday took place on the day of his wake. Her early musical influences came not from her father but from family friends: Parks, rock singer-songwriter Jackson Browne (who became her godfather), and the early gothic-country band the Violent Femmes, who sometimes stayed in the family home at the invitation of Inara's mother.

George vacillated between the natural attraction of a music career and a desire to try other things. She tried ballet and then studied acting, appearing when she was young in stage productions at the outdoor Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga. But in 1993 she joined with a group of high school friends to form a band that played at a benefit for the theater, and the group, called Lode, turned into an ongoing effort. With its mixture of grunge sounds and blues, the band toured California and Colorado, playing such important venues as the House of Blues in West Hollywood and winning a contract with the Geffen label. Lode's album Legs & Arms was released in 1996.

Lode made no impact on pop sales charts, however, and George spent three semesters as a theater student at Emerson College in Boston, with the ambition of becoming a Shakespearean actress. Eastern winters did not appeal to the L.A.-raised George, and soon she was writing songs and thinking about a return to the music scene. In folk songwriter Bryony Atkinson she found a collaborator and formed the duo Merrick, which released four albums on small labels (including Atkinson's own) between 1998 and 2001. Merrick disbanded the following year, but by that time George had begun to assemble the team that would propel her to solo success.

That team included producer and composer Michael Andrews, who had scored the hit film Donnie Darko. Andrews produced and co-wrote much of the material on George's solo debut, All Rise, which appeared on the Everloving label in 2005. The ethereal, synthesizer-heavy album was a success with critics like Ryan Dombal of Entertainment Weekly, who wrote that "George's soothing, girlish vocals float above her sometimes-downcast, sometimes-poppy songs like a waft of warm air." The album also gained attention in Britain, where Robert Sandall of the London Daily Telegraph wrote that "All Rise is a great update on the classic Californian soft-rock formula. Its stand-out track, the opener, ‘Mistress,’ has a dreamy, gorgeously melodic lilt that the young Joni Mitchell would have been proud of."

The Mitchell comparison was made more than once, and George followed that 1970s folk-pop chanteuse into jazz-inspired music for her next project. That project arose after George and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin, who had played keyboards on All Rise, discovered that they both enjoyed classic jazz. Kurstin joined George's live band, and they would often end her shows by performing pop standards such as "All of Me." Naming themselves the Bird and the Bee, the pair released an album with that title in 2006 and followed it up with several EP releases. They had an unexpected U.S. dance club hit with "F***ing Boyfriend" and toured Britain as well, where Ed Potton of the Times of London offered a critical rave: "With its burnished harmonies, lilting bossa nova, fluttering electronica and sun-dappled psychedelia, their self-titled debut album is an exquisite musical fantasy." George herself (according to Potton) described the album as "the sound of a 1960s futuristic musical set in Brazil."

With growing popularity and a reputation for originality, George faced the problem of coming up with something truly fresh for her sophomore solo release. She had introduced Andrews to her old friend Van Dyke Parks in 2002, and the three later discussed having Parks produce a track on one of her albums. At one point, according to George's Web site bio, she asked, "What if we have him do the entire thing?" The result was George's album An Invitation, recorded at the Sunset Sound studio in Los Angeles, released in 2008, and distinctly different from her earlier work. Parks's arrangements called for an orchestra consisting of a string section, clarinet, bass clarinet, oboe, French and English horns, and flutes—an expensive proposition for a small independent release, but Parks managed to plan the scoring carefully enough to reduce it to nine hours of recording time. George recorded the songs as demos initially, using the GarageBand program on an Apple computer.

Parks, noted Jon Pareles of the New York Times, backed George's tunes "with a nonstop counterpoint of melodies and of allusions: parlor songs, tangos, fanfares, chamber music, show tunes." The orchestral arrangements lacked the usual regular beat of popular music, posing a problem for George, who had little classical training. "I was listening to the orchestra recording their parts and thinking, ‘I don't know how I'm going to sing to this’ because it was sometimes hard to find the beat," George told the Daily Telegraph's Adam Sweeting. "But he'd orchestrated it with such precision that it was as if he was anticipating every breath and nuance." The album's stylistic diversity drew mostly positive notices, although Aidin Vaziri of the San Francisco Chronicle complained that George's vocals "easily get lost in [Parks's] hallucinogenic score of strings, horns and banjos."

George continued to challenge herself in 2008, working in the new duo George Is Jones with Scottish rocker Rod Jones, and planning a new Bird and the Bee album, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future, for release the following year. In 2008 she also married her long-time boyfriend, film director Jake Kasdan. The diversity of her music was continuing to set her apart from Southern California's large crowd of singer-songwriters.

Selected discography

Solo
All Rise, Everloving, 2005.
An Invitation, Everloving, 2008.

With others
(with Lode) Legs & Arms, Geffen, 1996.
(with Merrick) Traum von Freiheit, Tyrolis, 1998.
(with Merrick) An Album for Raymond, Deafinit, 2001.
(with Merrick) Drive Around A Lot: Hard And Fast Driving Club, Orchard, 2001.
Merrick, Bryony, 2001.
(with the Bird and the Bee) The Bird and the Bee, Metro Blue, 2007.
(with the Bird and the Bee) Please Clap Your Hands, Blue Note, 2008 (EP).
(with the Bird and the Bee) Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future, Blue Note, 2009 (projected).

Sources
Periodicals
Daily News (Los Angeles), May 3, 1996, p. L18.
Daily Telegraph (London, England), July 27, 2006; September 11, 2006, p. 29; November 20, 2008.
Entertainment Weekly, January 28, 2005, p. 84; August 15, 2008, p. 67.
Fresno Bee, June 21, 1996, p. E4.
Interview, February 2007, p. 78.
New York Times, March 1, 2007, p. E4; August 10, 2008, p. 21.
San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 2008, p. N38.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 27, 2008, p. E1.
Times (London, England), June 25, 2006, p. 8; March 31, 2007, p. 24.
Washington Times, February 1, 2005, p. B5.
WWD, May 21, 2007, p. 48.


Online
"About Inara George," Inara George Official Web site, http://www.inarageorge.com (November 28, 2008).
"The Accidental Songwriter," Boston Globe, June 9, 2005, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/calendar/articles/2005/06/09/the_accidental_songwriter (November 28, 2008).
"Inara George," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (November 28, 2008).

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