Reviews
Bobbi Carrey’s Career Path Leads To Music
By Ed Symkus
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Bobbi Carrey seems to have made a career out of making careers.
She eventually arrived at music – she performs her show “Mostly Mercer” at Scullers Jazz Club on May 2 – but it’s been a twisting path that led her there.
After graduating from Tufts, she moved to Cambridge, and settled down as a photographer and photography teacher at Harvard. When other teaching positions opened up, she left town, instructing students at University of Michigan and University of Iowa.
“But I always came back to Cambridge,” she says, then laughs and adds, “I’ve had the same phone number since the 1970s.”
Her positions were freelance, though, and Carrey recalls a time when one side of her brain had a discussion with the other. It went something like: “It’s great that you’re creative, but you forgot about me,” signifying that some stability was needed in her life.
“I thought I should get a job,” she recalls. “But I kept coming in second to men who had MBAs. So I decided to go to business school at Simmons. That took me into business at Bank of Boston and Harvard Business School, and then I was at Fidelity for 10 years.”
Yet all through those first two careers, Carrey kept flashing back to the fact that she had been singing all of her life – strumming along on guitar as a folk singer, as part of a female vocal trio called the Mood Elevators, as a soloist for the Mystic Chorale.
“I was always saying, ‘Someday I really have to do my music, or it’ll be the only thing I regret at the end of my life,’” she says.
So it was time for career number three.
“I just up and quit,” she says. “I continued to do some business consulting, but felt that if I was going to do music, I had to give it my all. Everybody thinks I’m such a risk-taker, that I’m always leaping off cliffs. But it never feels that way to me. My friends had seen me go from photography to business. That was the first surprise. But by the time I did this, I think they were less shocked. The people who’d never heard me sing were a little skeptical – as I would be. But I knew it was the right thing to do.”
Her first move was to make a self-produced CD titled “Between the Wars,” with popular songs spanning the years 1918 to 1941. One of those songs was “P.S. I Love You” by Johnny Mercer and Gordon Jenkins.
“I’m prone to ballads, to those sad, anguished, tortured ballads,” she says. “It’s such a beautiful song with such a simple message and story, I found myself drawn to it.”
And she found herself drawn to Johnny Mercer, the songwriter at the center of her new show.
“The Mercer songs are fabulous,” she gushes, “and I thought, how could I miss? Then I started to learn more about his life, and I was completely fascinated. He founded Capitol records and was quite a good businessman. And here I am, coming from a career in business. I kind of fell in love with him, just as a character, and as a lyricist and a songwriter. Eventually this show just began to fall together.”
Carrey is pretty sure that most people know many of Mercer’s songs. Among the tunes she’s picked that she thinks everyone will know are “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Moon River,” “That Old Black Magic” and “Days of Wine and Roses.” Songs she believes some audience members might not know but should be introduced to are “Spring Spring Spring,” “Midnight Sun” and the WWII booster “I’m Doin’ It for Defense.”
“People have said, ‘Wow, you’ve had these three separate, very different lives,’” she says. “But I feel that everything I did in business has done me in really good stead in the music. I know how to market and how to manage projects. I even taught a course called ‘Business Boot Camp for Musicians’ at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. And now here I am!”
Bobbi Carrey presents “Mostly Mercer,” backed by Doug Hammer, Billy Novick and Andy Blickenderfer; at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston on May 2 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $18. A dinner/show package is $58. Call 617-562-4111.