Phoebe Legere: A Ladybug Who’s Earned Her Spots

These days, for many musicians and other celebrities, activism is a lifestyle.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Awareness of causes in the digital age has led to some amazing cultural reforms in a short amount of time. Marriage equality (and LGBT rights, in general), civil rights, food disparity, human trafficking and many other causes have received attention in places never thought possible, leading to some amazing changes within our lifetimes.

For Phoebe Legere, activism is in her blood. The singer hails from Maine, but her heritage goes back further than the state itself, being of native Abenaki descent, as well as Acadian and Mi’kmaq ancestry. All three cultures were visited terrible atrocities in their time, experiencing the horrors of pestilence, decimation, ethnic cleansing and forced relocation. Those cruelties lived on in the memories and survive today as the motivation for Legere’s mission of social equality.

And it is through her efforts of empowering women in music that we get a glimpse of the heart and conscience that insists upon being an effective agent of change in this world.

“The last holdout of male chauvinism is music,” Legere states. “They tried to program us, but for some reason I didn’t get the programming right. I always felt like I was the equal—not better, but equal—of male artists. Since the Women’s March, people have been noticing female musicians,” she says “and a lot of the injustices that made us all so sad are changing, it seems almost overnight.”

Legere’s parents were both musicians, and the prodigy was playing piano as a toddler and model painting by kindergarten. As a teenager, she ran away from her roots to become a Big City songwriter for Epic Records and made her Carnegie Hall debut before most kids can drive a car.

Those accomplishments would seem like a career well done, but Phoebe’s ingenuity, drive and creativity would not allow her to stop there. However, the cesspool that was the music industry in the 1980’s would attempt to chew her up and spit her back out, a reimagined Madonna for the masses, complete with sex appeal and complete label control, told she should “do drugs” as a way to launch her career.

Legere would have none of it.

“Every single person I met in the industry was addicted to drugs. They don’t care about you,” she comments. “They’re only trying to make as much money as they can, then they root for you to die because they know your records will sell more once you’re dead. When they heard my feminist message, which is loud and clear, and saw my refusals to put out sexually again and again, when they realized I was demanding equality for all, they realized that I had to be suppressed.”

And right away they insisted on her becoming something she wasn’t, a symptom of a corrupt boys’ club that thought they didn’t even need real people anymore.

“Once they could do it with a machine, and someone with the ambition to be famous who would do anything, and with marketing and propaganda, they realized they didn’t need talent and musicians anymore,” Legere mused. “Everyone says the internet killed the music industry, but it happened because of greed.”

After the initial disenchantment, Legere went back to school, graduating with a fine art degree from Vassar, where she faced continuing low expectations of her artistic output (“‘You’ll never have your own gallery show’”, she remembers being told). She would go on to study at Julliard (“Women composers are treated like dirt and you’ll never have a chance!’”) and the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as with Modern Jazz Quartet’s John Lewis.

Undaunted, she would soon learn to arrange and compose for jazz, film scores and orchestra. She’s since mastered swing, punk, avant-garde classical, cabaret and rock, and to this day, she combines what she’s learned musically into a pop music soup, highlighted by her mastery of instrumentation and near perfect control of her versatile and commanding female voice.

Throughout this time, Phoebe would carve her own niche in the New York City music and art scene, leading some influential bands such as Monad and 4 Nurses of the Apocalypse, the latter a collaborative all-female project her label insist she drop in favor of studio trickery if she wanted to succeed. Of course, she decided against that.

“My joy in life is playing with other people,” she says. “Music is the glue that holds family together. It’s a kind of medicine for human beings.”

In 1991, she opened for David Bowie on his Sound + Vision tour, where she would enter the stage from behind an all white grand piano liften on stage by a giant forklift, the beginning of wonderful friendship.

“David saw me on English television and called me,” she reminisces about the call she got in her near-tenement NYC apartment. “And we got along like a house on fire from the moment we met. I was very lucky to be plucked from the underground by [him].”

Not even considering the celebrity that performing has brought her, in many ways Legere is the quintessential Ladybug artist. Her life’s work has been in pursuit of the very same cause that ignited the festival so many years ago. In fact, it’s through much of her unsung struggles and endeavors that women today have more freedom to express themselves without the pressure to compromise their values for the sake of their career.

“I’ve always insisted on being treated like I have value. I’m just so glad that I didn’t give up or die like so many did. I feel like I have become a role model for women and young girls,” she beams.

Her battles have transcended the music industry, and Legere has long stood on the frontlines of many battles for equality. Today, her activism has her placed as the executive director of the Foundation for New American Art, bringing music and art to underserved communities.

Musically, she continues her path, and her current live shows are a blessing of artistic ability and showmanship. She even incorporates her heritage into her performances, displaying how the music of her roots formed the basis of jazz.

“Not only is my music foundationally rooted in my DNA, but DNA is music,” she explains. “The code is a kind of math that unfolds in the creation of being, exactly the way that music unfurls from codes we call chords and scales and rhythms.

“We then fill them with the vibrations of our living beings and our blood. We fill the empty mass of possibility with the lifeblood of our experience and the experience of our ancestors. That’s why music is really a telescope beyond life and death. And if you listen closely, you can hear the music of our ancestors.”