MP3 Bee - Pillars

With soul-baring lyrics and a voice sultry and strong, a sonic blend of driving guitars, stirring pianos, and a rock solid rhythm section, Bee's music is provocative and mesmerizing; from the first note, you will want more.

13 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Modern Rock, POP: Pop/Rock



Details:
At age 19, Bee was released from 2 and a half years in a troubled girls institution with nothing but a guitar and a book full of her songs. That night, using a fake ID she'd bought that afternoon, she walked into a bar, took the stage, and silenced the place.

She performed her own music for the first time that night, but music and performing were nothing new to Bee. She has been stunning audiences with her singing since childhood, winning Grand Champion twice in several categories at the California State Talent Competition and winning the Little Miss California pageant by age 11. "I won for my talent, not my charm, to be certain," she muses, "I was a tomboy with short hair and scrapes on my knees." Her Little Miss California crown brought good things for Bee as she spent the next year touring, singing, and dancing with Miss California. It also marked the beginning of a tragic downward spiral of rebellion, addiction, and self-destruction that ultimately landed her in a Montana institution for troubled girls at age 16. The institution, which has since been shut down, was a nightmare of corruption and abuse. "In the solitude of that hell I picked up a guitar and found my song. I discovered a way to process the difficult and painful hand life can deal. I wrote a song every day in that place."

Bee has played her music continuously since that first night of freedom in the bar, both solo and in bands, from Spokane to Portland to San Francisco to Seattle, and released several independent albums along the way. Some of her formative groups include: Bee & Camille, a "very 'Indigo Girls' sounding duo" with a strong lesbian following; the short-lived new-wave dark pop band Young Lust; electronic soul-rock group C.S. Bee; and finally Henry Bee No One, which she describes as, "Sexy noir. Electro-lounge rock. Post-apocalyptic sex-in-a-can." Bee also wrote songs for San Francisco-based company Vocals Only, acted in and wrote the theme song for horror film, "The Choke," and worked as a television jockey for the WB network for two years. Life was brighter until 2005, her second year in Seattle. "Darkness has a way of finding me. Or maybe I seek it out. It was a time of desperation beyond any I thought I would ever experience. After 8 years clean, I got my hands dirty again, and it took me down further than any downer ever could."

To save her life, Bee fled halfway around the world to Bali for a month to escape, to get clean, and to write. She returned one year ago and immediately entered the studio to record the album of her dreams. The result of that effort is Pillars, the album that saved her life, a catharsis documenting her struggles with addiction and its many forms, her taste for love and its various shapes and sizes, and her perseverance. It is an ambitious album. From the sparse sweetness of "You" to the haunting, hard-hitting "Down," it encompasses the extremes of emotion that Bee knows so well and everything in-between. With her deep, sultry vocals, her driving guitars, dancing pianos, and a tight rhythm section at her beck and call, Bee can deliver anything and everything with a power and sincerity you won't soon forget, and people are taking notice. Even before the completion of Pillars, accomplished musicians were lining up to play with Bee. Now, with her album complete and her hand-picked band tight, Bee is poised to captivate audiences once again. Hard lessons are not over for Bee; they are, instead, fuel for this music--this fire--whose light serves to brighten the darkness within.