E-Mail This Article to a Friend California dreaming Kay Hanley and Paula Kelley start over out West BY JOHNNY ANGEL

The term "glass ceiling" usually describes a situation in the business world where there’s a limit on how high a given — usually female — person can rise. The term also applies to the Boston music scene: thanks to our city’s relative isolation from the mainstream music industry’s twin centers of power (NYC and LA), local artists often feel their aspirations are limited. The provincial nature of the Boston scene does allow some artists to become the proverbial big fish in a small pond. But that isn’t always a good thing.

The prospect of being a big deal in Central Square on a Saturday night or a respectable regional act elsewhere was enough to keep two local powerhouses, Paula Kelley and Kay Hanley, around for the better part of a decade. But both have relocated to Los Angeles, leaving their roots and a big part of their fan base behind. "It was not easy to just get up and leave, because I’m such a total townie at heart," explains Hanley when we meet up in LA. "I’m the first in my family to leave in generations."

We’re sitting in the living room of a modest but pricy Studio City home that Hanley, husband Michael Eisenstein (the former guitarist in Hanley’s band Letters to Cleo), and their two young children share. Kelley and her husband/band mate, Aaron Tap, are also on hand. Talk of the Sox, the Pats, John Kerry, and mutual acquaintances we all miss flows freely. Yet there’s a sense of liberation in the air. The sky and not Route 128 is now the limit for Hanley and Kelley, and they know it. "There’s only so much musical work you get outside of a band itself in Boston," Kelley says. "I do charts and arranging string parts for other people here. There’s scoring for films and the like that doesn’t exist in Boston. Plus, to be perfectly honest with you, we were never that comfortable trying to do what we do back there. Boston is a kind of harder-rocking, punk-rock scene, and we’re sort of wussy for them, with the strings and our gay falsetto harmonies, you know?"

That’s one way of putting it. The Paula Kelley Orchestra, at least to judge by 2004’s Trouble with Success (Polaris), isn’t rock at all but a mix of ’60s baroque/lounge and introspective ’90s grrrl pop. It’s Bacharach mated with the Left Banke and topped off by Kelley’s cooed vocals, which are not unlike the "gentle rock" her husband mentions in conversation. "We would come out to LA and the people here got it right away," Tap explains. "We’d do van tours like indie bands do, and it was kind of sucky." It’s easy to see why they might not have gone over too well on the "altie" circuit, why they’d get, say, a crappy response in a bar in San Antonio. Audiences expecting to have their eardrums blown out were instead offered a complex and unironic take on sophisticated music. "It was grinding, you know?"

"But in a romantic way," Kelley adds. She’s an energetic, demonstrative woman with a thrift-store sense of fashion. And it’s easy to see why she was "itching to leave Boston after 10 years on the scene." Ostentatious pop hasn’t always gone over well in Boston. LA, on the other hand, has a tradition of it. Boisterous and animated, Cambridge-native Kelley reminds you of a Broadway performer rather than the typical rock girl. Self-taught save for a pair of arranging classes at Berklee, she creates subtle string and horn arrangements that couldn’t be farther from the bare-bones minimalism you associate with Boston’s garage-rock scene.

From Kelley’s perspective, and Tap’s, playing bars in a band who are better suited to cabarets and recital halls is acceptable in LA, where standing out is a definite plus. But for now, the time-honored Boston tradition of "playing out and building a following" isn’t even on their agenda. "We’ve done a few shows here and are waiting to see if any more members of the Orchestra will be coming out here also," Tap says. "This summer, there may be enough of us to gig more frequently, but it is a different kind of situation — it is harder to get people to come out to see you play because you have to drive everywhere and there’s so much competition for things to do."

Hanley and Eisenstein nod in assent — they too have no interest in trying to conquer the LA music scene from the ground up, as they did in Boston in the early ’90s. Letters to Cleo were working the same side of the street as bands like Chicago’s Veruca Salt and LA’s Muffs at the time. "We’d done all the local stuff: an indie release on CherryDisc, losing the Rumble, filling the Middle East," Hanley says. "Then we headed to do a South by Southwest showcase and [the late] Timothy White gave our record this rave front-page review in Billboard that we xeroxed and put on windshields all over Austin. What we didn’t really know is that we were all over Prodigy, the pre-Internet, and all these computer geeks came out of the woodwork for us. They were singing along with us, this band from Boston they’d never seen or heard, which was great!"