liner notes by Matt Helm from la reserve

Nicole Zuraitis created siren songs volume 1 with a clear purpose in mind:

Celebrate women songwriters.

It’s a concept she’d been thinking about for years. Her own success as a songwriter made the project even more timely: in 2024, she became the first artist, man or woman, to win Best Jazz Vocal Album at the GRAMMYs for a project of entirely original music and arrangements — her LP How Love Begins.

“I was walking off the stage,” Zuraitis recalls, “and Joni Mitchell was standing right there. She goes, ‘Congratulations, honey!’ And I’m losing my mind. I was like, ‘Congratulations to you, too!’ 

“That moment reminded me of this idea, to dive into the passion project of siren songs.”

Siren songs honors a handful of the greatest women writers in American music history. Peggy Lee. Bobby Gentry. The aforementioned Joni Mitchell. Melanie Safka. Brenda Rusell. Patty Griffin. Billie Eilish. 

“I know a lot of these songwriters,” Zuraitis says. “Personally, I look up to them, and it's an honor to sing their music.”

Song after song, Zuraitis and her band allow you to hear iconic material with fresh ears.  Everything is improvised, with arrangements made on the spot and each track done in one take — a huge testament to the skill and brilliance of Zuraitis (piano, in addition to vocals) and her ensemble of Idan Morim (guitar), Sam Weber (bass), and Dan Pugach (drums).

“Especially after the Grammy win for How Love Begins, from a genre perspective, I’m kind of in the ‘good music is good music’ space,” she explains. “This record is acoustic. It’s not highly produced. It’s jazz. It just happens to be covering country, folk, and crossing boundaries that way.

By celebrating women songwriters, siren songs also makes a statement targeting unfair music industry practices, where far too often, women are neither compensated, nor even recognized for their work. 

“I toured with Melanie,” Zuraitis notes. “She sold 82 million records and did not see any of that money.

“Going back to the Tin Pan Alley days,” she continues, “there were women, especially women of color like Irene Higginbotham, who would use male pseudonyms as writers, because it’s always been a male-dominated industry.

“So when I think about women artists and issues of representation, I’m always excited to try and lift up their voices.”