Eleisha Eagle

In today's slickly produced music, true musicianship is often pushed to the side for a pretty face or fast feet. Gone are the days of stepping off the street, walking through curtains of smoke, slipping down the side of a glass hallway and letting the swill of vices translate the impossible distance between you and an angelic voice. Today we only hear such vocals rising above the crackle of a needle across a dusty record.

Pianist/singer/songwriter Eleisha Eagle, it seems, is out to change this.

Eagle was on a scholarship in St. Louis, Missouri majoring in marketing and advertising graphic design in 2002 when she realized how much she missed performing. So Eagle persuaded her parents and Washington University's Dean of Students to allow her to take a year off in Nashville, to pursue her dream of a music career.

The Eagle's baby sister Alexandra came from Lake Charles to Nashville for an all-too-brief visit one not-so-special summer. When she left, Eagle channeled the ache of missing Alexandra into a poignant rock song, pouring her sorrow into straightforward big-sisterly promises and warnings set to hard-driving chords and a purring bass line. From that first song, Eagle says, she never looked back. Just three short years later, the former nanny and waitress has created a substantial body of better than good work, booked her own solo tours across the United States, and grown savvier about the business -- which she followed to Los Angeles.

Eagle's recording studio blurb describes her music as what you get when you let "Ben Folds [eat] a Fiona Apple and [give] birth to a show tune about a postmodern Catholic school girl." Now that's a colorful pronouncement, but I can assure you, between Folds and Apple is a nice spot to be in, out there among the alternative scene and rock herd. And it's a place in which Eagle and her artfully crafted lyrics will most surely thrive.