“While I’m only a drop in the ocean of history
My song will live on in whoever is listening”
– Lo Steele, “Freedom Song”
Three years is a long time in the career of an artist. In this post-Covid world, time has seemed unruly: Amid second-by-second headlines, hot takes and rage-bait, it can start to lose any sense of meaning altogether. In three years careers can be made or broken, relationships deepened or discarded, skills honed and discoveries made. When the sands of reality are constantly shifting beneath our feet, it can be more difficult and more necessary than ever for an artist to fiercely hold on to their sense of self and purpose.
It has been three years since born-and-raised Portlander Lo Steele released her debut album Happy Girl, a liquid, joyous rumination and celebration of being young, gifted and Black in 21st century America. Now, three years later — still young, still gifted and still Black — Steele is releasing her second album, Only a Drop, on March 13. It’s an elegant, precise expression of the evolution of an artist, and a potent harbinger of what is yet to come.
Only a Drop is a natural next step for Steele, who since 2023 has found herself in a whirlwind of change, learning and discovery. In that time she’s moved to the Big City (Chicago), fallen in love, toured in Brazil and Spain, and found kindred spirits in artists both nationally and internationally renowned.
You can see her perform this week with the Charlie Hunter Trio at the Biamp Portland Jazz Festival, which began March 5 and continues through March 14. She’ll also give an in-store performance of songs from her new album at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 12, at Music Millennium, 3158 E. Burnside St., Portland. And she has a prominent role in Portland Center Stage’s current musical Lizard Boy.
Standing in the eye of this creative storm, Steele, always an ardent and clear-eyed definer of her own self, has nevertheless maintained an openness to altering her own trajectory, to change the shape of her own life, based on what new input she is receiving from the world around her.
In three years, of course, evolution in a talented artist is inevitable, provided that the necessary passion and work ethic are there. Without those you will have change, but not evolution. Steele has passion and work ethic to spare. Like Happy Girl before it, Only a Drop is as deeply personal as a diary, and although the person of Lo Steele has held on to the essential truths that define her, experience has added an edge that was not as readily apparent in her first album.
“[With] Happy Girl,” says Steele, “I was very much in a place of trying to channel joy and humor. There’s a little bit of that in Only a Drop, but it asks a few more questions. I’m in a space of – I don’t know, maybe the laughter has worn off a little bit. I’m more like, (laughs) what the fuck? What is going on? And how do I process this?”
“Must I always lay
With my rage like my love
Are we capable of another way?”
— Lo Steele, “Will We Ever Know How It Feels to Be Free”
Though in America any work of art by any Black artist – and a woman, at that – is inherently political, Steele doesn’t adhere to any specific political dogma. She manifests the change she wants to see in the world through her art. Only a Drop has an edge to it. Steele is angry, but anger is never the first emotion, and not necessarily the one she leads with. Disappointment, hurt, maybe even betrayal, are there as well. For Steele, the overarching politics of the era are confronted on a personal level that has its roots in history, and reflect what she describes as her “disenchantment with the world of music and art”:
Hyper analyze my language
Overwhelm me with your rules
Strip me of my foundation
Take the music out the schools
Somehow I remain creative
Ain’t got the logic or the tools
But I still can sing the blues
And now you say you love the blues
— Lo Steele, “Greenz”
“One of the themes of the album is reclaiming our songs and our voices regardless of how it’s perceived from a measurable, capitalistic viewpoint,” says Steele. “Reclaiming our songs because it’s human and because we each have one.” Which, as always with Steele, is an action that she can accomplish. She is in control of who she is and how she approaches the challenges put in front of her. The feat of reclaiming one’s song, after all, is one that can only be accomplished by oneself.
But it hasn’t all been rage and reclaiming for Steele — although perhaps falling in love is in itself an act of reclamation. If so, well, that’s here, too. Love is always at the forefront of Steele’s work, an active and visceral force, honey-dipped and painstakingly earned, still primal without the recklessness of youth.
“There is no soliloquy
That could show the parts of me
That you learned so suddenly and well
I took my place and found my light, then fell”
— Lo Steele, “Made New”
Steele’s primary collaborators on this album are renowned hybrid guitarist Charlie Hunter and drummer Marcus Finnie. “Charlie Hunter,” says Steele, “is an incredible musician/guitarist who is the top of his field when it comes to the hybrid guitar.” Hunter is a musician’s musician, known all over the country for his work on the hybrid guitar, a combination of lead and bass, “on which he simultaneously plays bass lines, chords and melodies,” as Wikipedia notes.
“His resumé is crazy,” says Steele. And indeed, over the course of his long career Hunter has worked with such luminaries as Norah Jones, Mos Def and D’Angelo. “I didn’t realize who I was working with until we’d already spoken on the phone, and he was super-generous,” says Steele. “When I talk to other musicians, he’s everyone’s hero.”
Marcus Finnie, likewise pedigreed, has worked with such names as India Arie, Taj Mahal and Earl Klugh. How, one might be forgiven for wondering, did Portland’s own Lo Steele get to work with musicians with such a track record? The short answer is because, since she was a child, Steele has been laying down a bit of a track herself.
“I’ve done the Waterfront Blues Festival since I was a kid in many different capacities,” says Steele, “and I got in touch with my friends from Brazil, Igor Prado and Yuri Prado, who I’ve been doing tours with. They came back to Portland to do the Waterfront Blues Festival with me. We were trying to put a band together for my music, so a blues/soul/R&B set. They put me in touch with Jim Pugh, who’s a piano player and an organist, who’s worked with Robert Cray and Etta James, people like that. I called him with shaky hands, nervous and he’s like, ‘Well, send me your music first. I can’t agree until I hear what you got.”
She did, and Pugh was impressed enough that he had an idea. “He … proposed that we work on an album supported by his nonprofit label out of California called Little Village. They do a thing where they find artists with promise and set them up to make a record. Sometimes that means just giving them the resources to record, and sometimes that means both that and setting them up with a collaborator who can push their stuff forward.”
Pugh arranged a meeting with Hunter, and Steele flew out to North Carolina, where she stayed with Hunter and his wife, Tahi, who runs his label (“She’s the unsung hero,” says Steele). There, Steele did what she characterized as a working audition. “I proposed my songs,” she says, “he immediately clicked into them. Started playing stuff. Took my little four chords into something way — (gestures expansively) but still with so much appreciation for the story and the lyrics.”
Apparently the audition went well: A couple of months later Steele went back and she, Hunter and Finnie recorded the album in three days. “It’s mostly Charlie, playing the bass parts and the guitar parts at the same time, and then there’s the drummer,” says Steele.
“There is really only one chordal instrument other than when Elleon (Dobias — violinist, actor, Steele’s new romantic partner, and muse of several songs on the album) joins in on strings. It feels so full at times, but then it has that space, because it’s just three instruments and almost everything you hear was recorded live. Maybe two takes, three takes of everything, very minimal retracking of moments.”
Out of those sessions came Only a Drop, an album that is nothing like its predecessor but clearly made by the same artist: an expansion, an experiment, a step forward. And this week, at the Jazz Festival, when you go see the Charlie Hunter Trio on March 12 and 13 (Hunter, Finnie and saxophonist Nate Clark) you can also see and hear Lo Steele.
And, in case you didn’t know, you can also see Steele, who has an acting career as well as a musical one, in her new production at Portland Center Stage, Lizard Boy. And she’s having a performance and a signing at Music Millennium at 3 p.m. on March 12. Then, after Lizard Boy closes, she goes back to Brazil for a month for more touring.
That sounds like an insane schedule — but that’s good, because ironically, Steele will get a break when she heads back to Chicago. “I feel like the first year anywhere, you have to operate like an observer of a culture,” says Steele. “There’s really incredible art happening there. I’m hoping in this coming year to become a part of it.”
So the plan is, armed with a new community, new relationships, and a sparkling new album, Lo Steele will put a band together in Chicago that gets her particular brand of neo-soul/R&B/blues, and they can make things happen. “I have a lot of music inside of me,” she says, “and depending on who I’m collaborating with, certain things come out. I have a certain amount of tools by myself when I’m writing, and then when I present to another musician in hopes of collaborating, then things sort of shift.”
To that end, Steele is also educating herself – about music. As a person who grew up surrounded by music — her mother is the highly talented Portland vocalist LaRhonda Steele — it had always been an elemental force that she just understood. She was like a person who could speak a language fluently but had never learned to write it down.
“There was a lot of shame about that, honestly. But I don’t feel that shame anymore,” she says. “I’ve started to fill in the gaps of my musical education. I’ve taken classes and learned more vocabulary around what I want to express. I don’t feel bogged down by how much I don’t know. I feel excited to be learning.”
And that capacity for growth, that openness to input, is going to sustain Lo Steele for a good long while. She never considers herself a finished product; she stays true to herself without being set in her ways. Musically she contains both Happy Girl and Only a Drop, but neither completes her. “I think musically,” she says, “I was where I needed to be at that time and I’m proud of where I was, and I’m proud of where I am right now, and neither one fully encapsulates all that I have or all that I can do.”
To love you have to know
That to live you have to grow
If you are everything you say
Take a step, a step out on faith
— Lo Steele, “Step Out on Faith” from Only a Drop