Rebecca Loebe and the art of creating the upbeat folk pop radio hit

Rebecca Loebe is a singer and songwriter based in Austin. Rebecca Loebe is a singer and songwriter based in Austin. Photo: Velvet Cartel Photo: Velvet Cartel Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Rebecca Loebe and the art of creating the upbeat folk pop radio hit 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

A guitar, a keyboard and a tambourine. Flower pots, pitchers and lamps. A boot and an ice skate. And a ceramic monkey. Rebecca painstakingly spray painted these items and numerous others a radiant white to provide a bright backdrop for the promotional photos for her new album "Give Up Your Ghosts."

"Every person you meet has this lifetime of experiences that are invisible to the naked eye," she says. "All these small decisions and large decisions that build up. To me those items represent that idea that our history stacks up silently. And you can't outrun it. But you can learn to control your relationship with it."

Those thoughts also flowed into the title of Loebe's album. The songs on "Give Up Your Ghosts" are full of evolutions and changes, and movements, both emotional and physical. Almost all of the song titles speak to that transitional theme: "Everything Changes," "Flying," "Ghosts," "Got Away," "On Your Mark." Even those that don't imply movement – like "Popular" and "Tattoo" – well, popularity wanes and tattoos fade.

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Austin-based Loebe wasn't really planning to make a new record. She released "Blink" in 2017. Typically after an album's release and a cycle of touring she takes some down time. But an offer came from Houston's Blue Corn Music to release a new album, and the songs arrived more swiftly than usual. And Loebe found herself in a reflective state, as many songwriters have over the past couple of years. But hers wasn't driven by outrage. Her songs were a different sort of protest music, urging change in herself.

"We're constantly inundated with political information, even 30 seconds after you wake up," she says. "Thirty years ago you'd write a protest song TO some other listener ABOUT someone else. But now those voices are all around us. It has moved me to consider self-care a little more. So a lot of these songs are about unburdening myself. Not giving weight to feeding fears and creating false barriers."

Which isn't to say the songs are without their sharp edges. "Growing Up" opens the record by addressing challenges women face in a culture tilted against them for generations. But even then, Loebe frames the song in a progressive way.

"I'm just an optimist, almost pathologically trained to look at the bright side of everything," she says. "So I see it as positive that there's more awareness about the experiences women have. That men finally know that women teach women to hold keys in their hand when they're walking down the street. That's one of thousands of tiny examples of things you learn and internalize when you're growing up in our society as a young woman. And all of it can be brutal. So that song is about the importance of trying to continue to move forward."

Two of the album's songs came about through TV, a medium with which Loebe is familiar. A Virginia native, who grew up in Georgia, Loebe moved to Boston as a teen to attend the Berklee College of Music. There she started recording her songs, putting out her first album, "Hey, It's a Lonely World" in 2004. She recorded a second album, all the while drawing notice with appearances at the Kerrville Folk Festival. In 2011 relocated to Austin, which has been her base of operations since. There she auditioned for "The Voice" in 2011. Her take on Nirvana's "Come As You Are" was well circulated.

So she found that run on television interesting and not soul-crushing. So when a friend of Loebe's who works as a TV music supervisor asked her to submit two songs for a forthcoming show, she altered her writing process.

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"I read the email and thought, 'Nope, can't do that,'" she says. "It's not my process. I need more organic inspiration. But then I got to the bottom of the email and it said the chosen songs would earn $7,000 each. And I thought, 'Can't hurt to try.'

"They wanted an introspective folk ballad and an upbeat folk pop radio hit."

She laughs. "As though I always knew how to write a folk pop radio hit, I'd just been keeping it a secret all these years."

But she dug in, writing the ballad first, mixing familiar emotions with a fictional character and coming out of it with "Tattoo." Then she tried the upbeat folk pop radio hit, "just as an exercise."

And she came away with "Got Away."

"I think it gave me permission to be more brazen than I usually am with my songwriting," she says. "I mean, even though I was a contestant on a singing show, I never really wrote big melodies into songs. So I thought it would be fun to write a big melismatic melody."

On an album full of strong songs, "Got Away" is a standout. But, alas, neither song made it to the small screen.

"No, I'm not $14,000 richer," Loebe says. "But the experience taught me something that fits the theme of the album. It taught me about self-limiting what you believe you can do. I used to believe I could only write under a certain set of circumstances. And now I know I can do much more than that."

Rebecca Loebe

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Where: McGonigel's Mucky Duck, 2425 Norfolk

Details: $22; 713-528-5999, mcgonigels.com

When: 4 p.m. Friday

Where: Cactus Music, 2110 Portsmouth

Free

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