Birmingham Post-Herald
Thursday, June 18, 1998
Heart of Dixie
Mountain Brook's Jill Carole pens songs of the South
By Darin Powell

"The phones are not working at the hotel, except at the front desk. Do you mind if I run out to a pay phone?"

Singer-songwriter Jill Carole was in London, taking a day off in the middle of a tour. Everything was going great – except that the phone system in her hotel had gone a little haywire.

"There might be a little traffic going by," she said before dashing to the pay phone. "You'll be able to hear the true sounds of London."

Carole, a native of the Magic City, was touring England last month, opening shows for Colin Blunstone, former lead singer of the '60s pop group The Zombies ("Time of the Season," "She's Not There.").

This weekend, she'll be at City Stages, performing at 2:15 p.m. on Sunday at the Blockbuster Cafe. She was touring England in support of her new CD, "The Easter Bunny, Sex & Santa Claus," released earlier this year on the Rebelle! Records label.

"I really love it," Carole said of being in England. "Some days I feel like I'm on another planet. But it's fun to tell the audience I'm from Birming-HAM rather than Birming-UM."

Vocally, Carole has been compared to Kate Bush and Tori Amos. But her own influences range more towards The Beatles and Elvis Costello. Her songs are guitar-driven confessional pop songs, delivered in a dramatic soprano voice.

Carole grew up in Mountain Brook as Jill Pizitz. Her family owned the now-defunct Pizitz department store chain, a Birmingham landmark for years before being sold in the mid-'80s. She said her interest in music actually started with her family.

"I got into music because of my mother," she said. "I come from a very musical family on my mother's side. When she was 19 she had a scholarship to Julliard, but she never followed up on it. But she was involved in a lot of local productions at Town and Gown."

Carole was also a young fan of the Beatles. "I was madly in love with Paul McCartney," she said. "I remember crying when I was six, thinking 'I can never marry Paul McCartney because he's too old!'"

She enjoyed writing songs from an early age. But growing up in Mountain Brook, she says she often felt like an awkward outsider.

"One of the songs on my record is sort of about growing up in Mountain Brook and that school system," she said. "I was pretty shy, and it was pretty clique-ish at the time. Then when I went to Indian Springs, it was like a breath of fresh air."

She was a teenager when she began thinking about music as a career and seriously learning how to play guitar. "I was really into Joni Mitchell, although my stuff now is a lot more electric," she said. "I liked her finger picking. She tuned her guitar to alternative tunings, so I did that, too."

After Indian Springs, Carole attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston. "I didn't like Boston that much. It's a gray, harsh sort of place compared to Alabama. People move a lot more quickly and a lot more stridently, but I liked the community of the school ... you had to be self-motivated."

She left Berklee before graduating, moving to Los Angeles and then later to San Francisco. For the next few years, she said, she drifted "in and out" of music while she tried her hand at other things, including writing a novel.

But as it turned out, she found she preferred performing to writing. "It (writing) was just so solitary and long. You can get in and out of a song much more quickly, if you're lucky. And I like to perform. I'm a real ham. I like the whole physical, passionate part of the expression. It's a place to put all the parts of myself I can't express in everyday life."

She credits her husband, guitarist Paul C. Robinson, with helping her get back into music. He produced her CD and plays guitar in her band.

"I'm the kind of person who it's hard to get out of the living room with my music," she said. "My husband's helped me a great deal with that. I had all these songs that I'd shyly show him ... and he'd say, 'you need to be out doing this.' "

The CD piqued the interest of the British label Mystic Records, which signed Carole in April and put her on the road with Blunstone. "I think he's one of the best English rock singers ever. He just has this golden, ethereal voice," she said. "It's so cool to be traveling in a bus with him and hearing all his stories."

And although she's lived in California for a number of years, there's still a lot of the South in Carole's songs. One track on the CD, "Heart of Dixie," even in-cludes a reference to Vulcan. "'Heart of Dixie' has a lot of Southern imagery," she said. "I know what it's about, but I'm not going to say. "

She said the feelings of not fitting in that she had while growing up in Birmingham are themes that crop up often in her songwriting.

"It was a hard place for me to stay," she said.

"I still feel a little bit censored in Birmingham. It's self-censorship. Everybody knows you and knows all your business. You have to be a good girl. That makes me want to be a bad girl."

Still, she said was looking forward to performing at City Stages. "I was there three years ago, when my husband was playing with Dan Hicks, who also did the art for my CD," she said. "It was great. They had a huge crowd, and they followed Joan Osborne, who hadn't hit it big yet ... I was really impressed."

She's also looking forward to the possibility of some reunions.

"It would be really neat if people I hadn't seen in a while showed up," she said. "It'd be cool if I saw people I haven't seen since elementary school, because I think those people are always sort of carried around with you."

In the meantime, she's just happy to be out playing her music. "I like to move people," she said. "I like for people to get what I'm doing ... I think it would be great if people could hear songs and be touched by them, and appreciate that the lyrics are doing something – I think – something that's somewhat poetic."