E-Mail This Article to a Friend Over there New Jersey’s A Girl Called Eddy heard London calling BY MIKAEL WOOD
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New Jersey native Erin Moran grew up listening to albums by Dusty Springfield and Chrissie Hynde, English (or practically English) women with a knack for singing about immense emotion without necessarily sounding like it. So when she signed a deal with a publishing company based in England a few years ago, Moran, who performs under the name A Girl Called Eddy, remembers thinking it was a great excuse to move to London, where she thought her own music might find a more receptive audience than in the US. "I’d always wanted to live here," she says on the phone from her London flat, "and I was a bit sick of New York at that point."

Unfortunately, though English music magazines like Mojo and Uncut have embraced her, Moran hasn’t quite found the home she was looking for. "It’s been a great base camp for me, but I’ve not become a part of a particular scene here at all. There’s quite a burgeoning female singer-songwriter scene here on the biggest radio station, Radio 2, and they actually won’t play me." She laughs. "I’m thrilled with the way things have gone, but somehow the one place that I was really hoping it would take off — London — it actually has not got off the ground."

It’s the BBC’s loss. A Girl Called Eddy, the album she released through Epitaph’s Anti- imprint, is an exquisite collection of elaborately arranged art-pop gems that occasionally reaches toward the white-soul beauty of early Moran faves like Springfield’s classic Dusty in Memphis. Like her heroes, Moran, who comes to the Middle East this Tuesday, sings about love and all the ways in which it can go wrong. But she does it in a voice that sounds slightly removed from the situations’ messy reality. "I’m scattered like newspapers all over the street," she sings coolly over a string section’s gentle murmur in opener "Tears All Over Town," "I see your face in everyone I meet." Even when the writing gets a little overheated — as in "Life Thru the Same Lens," in which she sings, "We see life through the same lens, that’s what you said to me/And I knew that it was true until you threw my heart in the sea" — she retains a bewitching sangfroid, as if singing about this emotional upheaval were her way of overcoming it.

Moran recorded the album with Richard Hawley, an English musician who’s done session work with Pulp and Beth Orton and released several solo albums on the London label Setanta. Signed briefly to Setanta herself before closing her deal with Anti-, Moran was on the prowl for a producer. "The head of the label said, ‘Have you heard of this guy?’ I said no. He said, ‘Let me send you some of his stuff.’ I was sort of at wit’s end there because I’d been trying to work with a lot of people in New York, so when I got one of his first solo albums, the first song into it, I thought, ‘Oh, this is beautiful.’ And I thought, ‘Christ, if his band can play my songs like this, maybe it’ll work.’ "

Hawley agreed to record three songs with Moran to see how they worked together, so she traveled to Sheffield, where the producer is based. "First song into it, I knew that it was right. It was kind of a dream-come-true moment, because it was everything I always wanted my demos to sound like but couldn’t do sitting at home on the computer by myself. It was big, it was beautiful, it took my songs from little Polaroid snapshots and turned them into Technicolor."

The music she and Hawley made together oozes the sort of plush luxury that gives depression a lovely gleam: "Kathleen" throbs with a slo-mo swing; "Life Thru the Same Lens" sports a wistful bounce and helium-voiced harmony vocals; "The Long Goodbye" even turns things up with a splash of churning fuzz guitar. "It’s such an English- or European-sounding record to me, even though Hawley’s massively influenced by that 1950s American Sun Studios sound — lots of reverb, lots of Fender amps."

But though she calls the singer/producer relationship an important one, Moran allows that it’s tricky. "Now I’ve gotta go make record two, probably without Hawley because he’s busy. You believe in yourself because you wrote the songs — you say, ‘When I compare the demos to the album, they’re extremely similar.’ But it still does push those artist-insecurity buttons: ‘Will the people who liked this one like the next one if I don’t use Hawley?’ " Indeed, in an adopted home that’s proved harder to crack than she thought, will they listen at all?

A Girl Called Eddy performs with Keren Ann this Tuesday, March 8, upstairs at the Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square; call (617) 864-EAST.