MP3 Song
Sister Smile

THE SONG
A song about the loss of Jeff Buckley and the Singing Nun (Soeur Sourie). A very inspired song that kicks in at just the right time with the drums a kickin'. Sister Smile has a really cool groove and one can only imagine how rockin' it is live.

THE CD
This is a very interesting collection of tunes. There's definitely a lot of soul on this disc. Eddie has a style very much like Chris Whitley, but Mr. Skuller is also very much his own man. The cd is produced and mixed with much attention to detail, not being overproduced. A fine independent release.
BandRadio

Contact Info
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Eddie Skuller

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Whether you are new to the music of Eddie Skuller or a longtime fan, you are already eminently aware of one of the qualities that makes him shine. The man has chutzpah.* It takes chutzpah to call your first full-length album a Greatest Hits.

Then again, perhaps Skuller conserves his nerve for his music because, in his everyday life, he's already living the classic rock and roll fantasy. It would be safe to say that most red-blooded heterosexual rockers dream of being surrounded by models in their skivvies. Eddie Skuller does it and gets paid; he&

In fact, rather than his musical career leading to a life surrounded by decolletage, it was, if anything, the other way around. In 1989, a stylist on one of his bra photo shoots introduced him to her husband, musician/songwriter Ralph Trimarchi. Skuller, who had previously led the downtown no-wave band Moot, was then beginning to assert himself as a solo artist. Trimarchi was just the kind of kindred spirit/partner in crime that he needed, sharing both his love of pop music and his desire to stretch its boundaries.

Indeed, one thing that The Soul of Eddie Skuller (Greatest Hits) shows is that Skuller has been unusually fortunate in finding producers--Trimarchi, Dean Bailin, and James Mastro among them--who appreciate his music on its own terms, rather than trying to make it fit into a prescribed genre.

A scan of his voluminous press kit (the man truly inspires raves) reveals that, while scads of journos agree on his talent, few can agree on how to describe it: "Like John Lennon in a lousy mood"... "sounds like Bowie doing Leonard Cohen"...."Recalls Chris Isaak's Silvertone".... "Sweet, dark pop that immediately brings to mind the last Joe Henry album."

Then there's Skuller's favorite, from the hardcore punk fanzine Flipside, of all places; "gothic coffeehouse rock."

Skuller knows he's hard to categorize. He attributes it to his range of influences, which is pretty wide, to say the least. "I may not sound anything like these people, but they're all swimming around me, they're in my spirit. Influences anywhere from Marvin Gaye to Yoko Ono, and the Slits to Roseanne Cash. They're all a part of me."

That diversity arises most strikingly when Skuller discusses "Sister Smile" one of the three songs on The Soul of Eddie Skuller produced by James Mastro (Health and Happiness Show, the Bongos). As he explains in the album's liner noters, "The lyric is about two of rock's tragic losses, the deaths of Jeff Buckley and the Singing Nun." The Singing Nun's nickname was Soeur Sourire, or Sister Smile, hence the title. The utter lack of irony with which Skuller links the two artists is reflected in the song. It connects the drowning of the young bohemian and the suicide of the middle-aged ex-nun with a seamlessness that has to be heard to be believed.

On "Sister Smile" and other tracks, Skuller credits Mastro with bringing out the best in his voice and his compositions. "James Mastro created the space for me to feel uninhibited vocally," Skuller observes. "Those sessions were different than any other previously in that I really felt we were free to create, experiment and build the songs while we were recording them. It was a different process. In the past, I believe the recordings were more likely put down as rehearsed."

Skuller pauses as he recalls one major exception: the recording of "Don't Tell Me," the dark, alluring title track of his 1997 EP, which he co-produced with Trimarchi. "The legendary Robert Quine, of Mathew Sweet and Richard Hell fame, came in and made up the lead guitar lines by simply following my lyric ­ not the melody! Instinctively, engineer Jon Marshall Smith hit the red 'record' button and captured Quine's magical interpretive playing.&

The Soul of Eddie Skuller: Greatest Hits is full of moments like that, those unexpected dollops of ear candy that raise a song above the level of Standard Rock Tune and into the stratosphere of what was once called a Turntable Hit. By album&

&motivated to keep writing and performing. And what makes it all worthwhile has been those few times where someone would actually come up after a gig and tell me that they were really moved. There's nothing cooler than knowing your music has touched someone.& - Dawn Eden Dawn Eden is a rock historian and liner note writer whose work has appeared in Mojo, Billboard, the Village Voice, and New York Press. *Chutzpah - Yiddish for nerve, arrogance. A man who kills his parents and then pleads the court for mercy on account of his being an orphan has chutzpah.