NYLON - November 2007 - (Page 96)

SMOKE AND MIRRORS Sally Shapiro’s debut, Disco Romance, is auditory bliss. By Eviana Hartman. Photographed by Frida Klingberg ether. Shapiro [or whatever her real name might be] and Agebjörn, friends who once worked together at an administrative ofﬁce, had gotten together to play Christmas songs at a piano when Agebjörn told her that she had an “Italo Disco voice.” Duly inspired, Agebjörn wrote “I’ll be By Your Side” and asked her to sing on it. The two were so pleased with the results that they recorded an entire album, with the singer suggesting lyrical themes and offering musical feedback. Although she had performed in choirs before, she didn’t want to lend her name to “something so personal”—hence the nom de voix. “Johan likes names that end with Y, and we liked Shapiro because it sounds Italian,” she says. (It’s a well-known Ashkenazi Jewish surname, but nevermind.) As beﬁts its title, Disco Romance is a collection of “soft, deep, and gentle” songs, as Agebjörn puts it, the subject matter of which is matters of the heart. In tracks such as the Rhodes piano-punctuated “I Know” and the icyEvery once in a blue moon there comes a dance woman we have no choice but to call “Shapiro,” cool, French-whisper-laced breakup anthem “Time to Let Go,” Shapiro’s coo dissolves into song so dreamy that even the most curmudgeonly in fact, that she conducts her interview over spaced-out synth melodies so gorgeous they iChat, in an appropriately cat-and-mouse style. of rock purists are moved to move. Cher’s seem to have been concocted by a team of A typical exchange: “Believe.” Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out endorphin researchers. It’s a sound that could NYLON: “So you won’t tell me your real of My Head.” Annie’s “Heartbeat.” The newest appeal simultaneously to lovesick seventhinductee to that illustrious canon is Sally Shapiro, name?” graders, persnickety record-store clerks, and Shapiro: “Your IM name isn’t your real whose debut album, Disco Romance, based on the Butabi brothers. the renascent genre of Italo Disco, has had asses name either, is it?” “The type of Italo Disco that I like the most NYLON: “What’s your day job?” shaking—and critics swooning—for months is the melancholic style of artists such as Valerie Shapiro: “As Sally Shapiro I’m only a disco leading up to its by-popular-demand arrival on Dore, Katy Gray, and Savage—it makes me princess. Hahaha.” U.S. shores. melt,” says Agebjörn. “Not many artists make The term Italo Disco was coined in 1983 to The cult of Sally Shapiro is fueled in part by refer to a type of European synth-based dance melancholic dance music today, and that’s one other important detail: There is no actual not strange because when you go to a club you music, usually sung in English, marked by a Sally Shapiro. Disco Romance is the brainchild cheap D.I.Y. quality brought about by the advent go there in order to party, not in order to cry, of Johan Agebjörn, a Gothenburg-based right?” That may be true, but it’s the way Disco of affordable synthesizers and drum machines electronic music producer. While the singer on the album insists that she is, in fact, the woman as well as an absence of Saturday Night Fever- Romance taps into the age-old tête-à-tête between those emotions that makes it a photographed on the cover (and for this article), style effects (horns, strings). Like many relics of its era, Italo Disco was long considered tacky masterpiece. “There is a feeling of melancholy,” she has never performed live and refuses to he says, “but also a feeling of hope.” but has since drifted back into the cultural reveal her real name. So painfully shy is the

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of NYLON - November 2007

Contents Editor's Letter Par Avion Behind the Scenes Contributors Stars and Stripes Forever Mass Appeal: Los Angeles Mass Appeal: Austin Mass Appeal: New York Mass Appeal: Sneakers Haute Stuff Private Icon: Slums of Beverly Hills Cult Of: Ralph Lauren Blue Label Memory Lane Nesting: Top of the Block Factory Girl: Road Rules Fashion Road Trip Fashion News Mania: The Price is Right Canned Heat Counter Culture: Universal Picture Private Icon: Jane Fonda Beauty News The Future is Now Smoke And Mirrors King of the Jet Set Rock America Country Death Songs A Fond Farewell Personal Investment Stranger Than Fiction Film Strips Culture Club En Route: The Grapes of our Content Miller's Crossing I'm Too Sexy The Perks of Being a Wallflower Tourist Attraction Star Maps: Fair Isle Shopping List Bag Check: Roam If You Want To

NYLON - November 2007

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