Ain't love grand? Teressa Wilcox gets raked over the coals romantically a lot for such a pretty thing. This young Rochester singer-songwriter seems to be in a perpetual state of heartache. It's her music's primary source of inspiration. Wilcox pays the price to sing so nice.
"I really write a lot of heartbreak songs," Wilcox says. "That's just what I write about. That's what I get out of those relationships."
Wilcox claims it isn't on purpose. She's single now, but the old pain still surfaces from time to time.
"I just finished a song about someone who broke my heart two years ago," she says. The whole relationship was more or less chronicled musically from its happily-ever-after outlook in the beginning to what now seems like another inevitable break in the end. Wilcox doesn't care if the ex is wise to his lyrical immortality either. The song was for her.
"I'm sure he has an idea, though" she says.
Wilcox's music isn't at all weepy or sappy; it isn't the blues. She stands out in a genre crowded by wronged women armed with guitars. She sings brightly, gently, and in earnest above her fluidly percussive guitar playing. Her acoustically rooted music has legs enough to keep up in an amped-up, full-band situation as well, where it takes on a less rural, less twangy Lucinda Williams-type tack. Her music is a sigh backed with power, resolve, and relief.
And the gal's got guts - guts enough to move it all down to New York City in July.
Performing around Rochester since her late teens, Wilcox is relatively well known here on her own and within the whole "Chicks With Picks" explosion of new female artists. But this 24-year-old talent wants to leave the safety and security of home and give it the big-city push. This is a bold move for Wilcox, who doesn't usually exhibit the shuck, jive, and hustle of a self-employed artist looking for a break. It's admirable, yet perhaps even a little worrisome; that downstate star-making machine has some pretty sharp teeth. It can be more than a little daunting. Wilcox is a little scared.
"Really scared," she says. "This is something I think I should have done when I was 21. A lot of it is not knowing anyone, not having enough money. But the things I've done here have given me more confidence to go do it there."
Wilcox recently had a management deal with MBK Entertainment - the company that handles r&b diva Alicia Keys - go south. The deal seemed swell on the surface, but Wilcox saw change and compromise on the horizon.
"In a way," she says, "it was one of those things that wasn't meant to be. Although everything seemed really great, the opportunity was great, in the end I think they were a more r&b-type company. And I'm not very r&b. I realized I really needed to stick to the kind of music I was doing if I was going to be working with somebody like that."
Even if changing meant a shot at the big time.
"I know that sometimes you have to do some things you don't want to do, but that could've changed my music as a whole, and it might have been harder to get back to the person I really am."
Wilcox has dialed back some of her self-professed stubbornness on several songwriting collaborations she's done via a publishing deal with Don Black, a songwriter who has worked with the likes of Elton John. Some tunes got pitched to other artists, one wound up being recorded by another artist. It was as if Wilcox was giving them up for adoption. She didn't like it.
"In a way, I wish I could've still had that song as my own," she says.
Wilcox is looking forward to the inspiration new surroundings will bring. She still has her publishing deal with Black, is tightening up new material for album No. 2, working on the live show with her band (which will remain here while she gets her name out working the Gotham open mic scene), and pushing the whole affair with new manager and local music impresario Carl Labate.
And there's probably another heartache around the corner as well. Perhaps these heartaches happen because all these would-be Romeos aren't her first love.
"I love my music," she says. "And I want the whole world to hear it."
Teressa Wilcox
Lilac Festival, Highland Park
Sunday, May 18
2:30 p.m. | free | myspace.com/teressawilcox