Colin Shields

Who is Breedlove? I guess I'm a weirdo with a song in my heart.

Where are you from originally? Northern California. My parents are both performers, so I spent a lot of time traveling with them, and also living for six months at a time in cities where they would be hired to perform. I spent time in New York, Houston, Dallas, Key West, and Vancouver. When I was kindergarten age we were in Texas and I wasn't in school, and a truancy officer came and told my parents that they had to put me in. So we ended up moving to the San Juaquin valley where my grandparents owned a 13 acre orange ranch. My parents opened a country store on the orange grove, and then another in Marin County in a town called Larkspur and that's where I lived until I was 18 and moved here.

What kind of performers were your parents? My mom's a cabaret singer and my dad is a singer as well. They sang in a musical group with a pianist and my Dad and Mom would sing duets. Now my Dad does a lot of theater in the Bay area as well as his own show. My Mom lives here with me on the Upper East Side. She does concerts periodically and regional acting gigs.

What's it like having cabaret-singing parents? It was really normal at a young age. In fact, it was something that felt so comfortable that there was a period where I was in preschool when the nights where they weren't performing—and there were few—I would miss the energy and excitement so much I would make them dress up in their performing clothes. My Dad wore a tuxedo and my Mom would wear ball gowns, and I would make them stand in my room and shine a flashlight on them and force them to sing acapella.

You've described your sound as "rock and roll cabaret." Can you explain that? Well it's not like the movie Cabaret, with Nazis and creepy emcees. Cabaret to me just means an intimate venue, and a person standing in the corner singing their heart out all night. The most important thing about it is the fact that it's so pared down that it relies fully on the performer to make the songs come to life since there's no production value. So it's basically just cabaret with a beat. That's why I call it that. I listen to mostly rock music, classic rock, but the way I know to perform is not in a style that is normally associated with rock and roll.

Your sound is undeniably 70s. What's so inspiring about 70s music? It just feels right to me. My parents on the other hand, performed lots of Jacques Brel music when I was growing up. When Brel died, before I was born, my parents were brought by Brel's widow to perform the English translations of his music for a month at the Belgian National Opera House. David Bowie at the time, was also obsessed with Jacques Brel—they may have known who he was—so they were both simultaneously performing the same material. "My Death" is a famous Bowie cover of a Jacques Brel song, and that's definitely one of my Mom's most powerful songs. "Amsterdam" is another one.

I was kind of sheltered—not purposefully—by my parents from classic rock, So when I got into Bowie late in life, finding out his obsession with Brel and hearing his versions of the same songs that I heard when I was literally in my mothers womb, was hugely titillating. It felt like a piece of the puzzle of my life was put in place.

A huge part of our generation's culture, be it music, TV or whatever boils down to nostalgia and mining old culture. Do you see yourself as part of that trend and is there a danger in that? If I hear "Jesse's Girl" one more time... I see myself awkwardly before the trend, and that is the story of my life. I was a fashion "don't" in an issue of Glamour and now it's framed on my wall. My motto is "Dress to Depress," and that's the idea that you do something so early that no one understands that you're in on the joke, so you look like a complete clueless asshole but the reality is that you know something before everyone else does. I have friends who love and accept me, who say, "I love you and what you do but I hate your style... it makes me sick." And I'm really OK with that.

Speaking of friends, you just toured with Semi-Precious Weapons. Their lead singer said that you were part of the "Filthy Glamour" school, along with Lady Gaga. Is this fair? I consider your songs to be almost anti-contemporary pop music. I have a lot of friends that are musicians, and our music is all completely different. I'd say what makes our community of friends unique is that it's not about having one look, or one sound, it's about actually being friends. I'm friends with Justin because I love him, he wouldn't necessarily performs the songs that I do or wanna look the way I do, but we love hanging out together so much.

It just plays out in the press as: all of this is derivative of Lady Gaga because you're all friends. First off I'm not anti-Lady Gaga. No one at her shows is more enthusiastic than me. She works harder than anyone else in pop music, without question. She puts on better shows without question. She puts on better shows than Broadway. Her shows pretty much raise the bar in popular music. She uses a remix by Chew Fu during the "Love Game" portion—he's this crazy genius, used to be a jazz musician, he got to the top of his game and totally ditched it and got into electronic music, now he's this a huge superstar remixer, producer. In fact I'm working on a song with him right now. Obviously I'm so excited. It's so different from anything I've ever done before.

Do people relate to your music because you sing as the underdog? I don't know a whole lot of people who write songs about being alone, and that being okay. It's always kind of "woe as me, I'm so sad, I'm so alone." There's a song by Rupert Holmes, where he articulates it well, the sort of feeling that I want to evoke with my music. One of the lines is like "Isn't it nice you like to be alone? / Take a shower for an hour." When I heard that I was like, "Oh okay I get this." He's a huge influence on me style wise and musically, he was a pop singer turned musical writer. A lot of people say my songs sound like musicals.

They're right. I kind of just wanted to make a hero out of the lonely everyman, and I think all of us have been lonely or are lonely at some point, especially in New York, it can be a really hard place to connect to people so it's music that I wanted to hear. Other than a few songs from the 70's I hadn't heard anyone sing those songs. I wrote songs I wanted to hear.

Humor plays a huge part of it too. The humor in my songs for the most part is pretty delicate. Depending on my mood, I can play up the humor or tone it down if I'm having a hard night. For instance, "Date With Myself." There's nothing overtly humorous, but it can definitely be read as a funny song.

How fast you pantomime throwing chocolates into your mouth onstage is usually a good indication. Exactly. Some nights I have performed that song I'd been feeling really lonely, and I'll start crying during it. Other times I'm just like "yeah this is hilarious, aren't I cheeky?"

You always end your show with that song and preface it by saying it's the first one you've ever written. Give us the VH1 Storytellers treatment of "Date with Myself." There was a girl that I spent every waking moment of my life with who got a job on a tour of a Broadway show and ended up leaving town for a year. I had fallen so much in love with her that I had stopped hanging out with anyone else. She found out she got the job on Friday and on Monday she had to be on a plane to St. Louis. I had no time to prepare, and all of a sudden Monday came and I was alone in my apartment. I didn't have anybody to call because I'd been so shady [laughs] only hanging out with her. It just came out of me. I was feeling the emotions of it so deeply it wasn't about the act of writing a song it was about getting the feelings out from start to finish.

Are there any songs that make you say, "Man, that could have been a Breedlove song?" "Escape," by Rupert Homes, "the Piña Colada song." That's actually what started me on this process. I met Rupert Holmes when I was in one of his shows in college. He wrote The Mystery of Edwin Drude, and he came to work with us. Then I ended up going with some friends in the show with to Scarsdale to see him speak in a library.

He started started telling all these stories like how Barbara Streisand called him to write all these songs for "A Star Is Born" and going out to LA and the way the Piña Colada song came out of another song when he was under a time crunch and this one song he was recording wasn't working out, so he had to cut and paste and loop this section he'd already recorded with the band to turn it into another song. So I started Googling him and looking up old pictures of him and got glasses like him, just became obsessed with him. Secretly. [Laughs]

That song is so hated. Yeah but like you said earlier, it's gonna be "Jesse's Girl" in a few years. There's a very thin line between love and hate.

That's the name of a Martin Lawrence movie. Lord knows he's due for a comeback.

Well he's got Big Momma's 10 or whatever. Yeah and College Road Trip with one of my favorite actresses of all time, Raven Simone.

Really? She and Miley Cyrus are hilarious. Every Saturday morning I wake up and watch "That's So Raven," it just puts me in the right direction for the day. It never gets old.

And Miley Cyrus? I think she's Lucille Ball for a new generation.

How did you get a Grammys after-party gig? Semi-Precious Weapons threw an after party at The Roxy. My friend called me.

You also said you met Jay-Z and Beyonce. Dish. Um. [Long pause]. I think that if I ever want to be put in those situations again, it's best that I keep my mouth shut [laughs]. That's just how it works. You lost your scoop!

So what's next for Breedlove? I'm really excited about the Chew Fu song. It's a love song. I don't have a song where I'm singing to a specific person, saying "I love you," and I do that in this song. It's thematically different, and I think it's appropriate that I'm working with a producer. He blows my mind every time he does one of his remixes. He says he's gonna "flip it," I don't even know what that means [laughs]. But yeah I hope he flips the hell out of it.

Do you think you could do what you do in any other town than New York? I don't think this is a very easy place to live if you're doing something different.

How so? Couldn't you argue that there are probably more artists here than-- If you're a quote unquote "hipster, " then you're pretty safe. if you're doing something aside from that, it's a difficult place to live. It infuriates me.

So if it's so tough, why'd you move here? I saw Muppets in Manhattan as a kid and knew it was the only place for me. I have a hard time living here sometimes, but when I go back to California I just dream about coming back here.