Singer-Songwriter Performs Jazz-Infused Folk Cabaret

Tracy Drach still gets nervous before taking the stage at any gig as she prepares to sing heartbreaking songs of what she calls jazz-inspired folk cabaret.

But while the songs may be serious, the Regent Square singer-songwriter herself is laughing in between each melody.

“It’s the immediate response from the crowd – you know right away if they appreciated your song and a good audience makes me a better performer at times,” Drach said. “It’s really a give and take of energy. I’ll make you cry in my song but then we’ll laugh afterwards so it’s fine.”

Drach grew up the youngest in a military family in upstate New York “in the middle of nowhere,” she said. She left that small town to go to college at the University of North Carolina, where she earned a degree in psychology. It wasn’t until she spent her junior year in Seville, Spain that she started performing.

“My American friends and I had a party one night and we discovered that we could all sing together naturally in three-part harmony without even knowing what the other one was going to do,” Drach said. “These two Spanish guitar players came over and we were singing. They had been trying to get all of these gigs and they had us sing with them, so we started performing with them.”

Drach uses simple chords and jazz vocals to sing about relationships gone wrong, heartache and love – something everyone can relate to, she said.

“It’s just hot,” she said of the jazz genre. “It’s reminiscent of this era of just incredible music and the fashion and just being one of those sirens, if you will. The songs for the most part are all about having a heartbreak and a lot of them just not being enough and about your love. I kind of steered away from that for awhile, but they are really great songs and they speak to everybody.”

Music was always a part of her life and she said she has always been a member of a choir. Before moving to Pittsburgh in 1997, Drach spent eight years working at Ladyslipper Music, an all-women music company focused on music by female singer-songwriters.

“It was an amazing thing to find all of these amazing women artists that you never hear about and we focused only on recordings by women musicians,” Drach said. “It was music that wasn’t necessarily mainstream – some of it could be, but the women’s music was a reflection of the women’s movement.”

Today, she works at the in billing and reception.

Drach’s next show is with local singer-songwriter Eve Goodman from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. March 19 at the