Alumni Gazette

‘Staying’ a Songwriter

Allison Scola ’94 needed less than a year to realize that marketing diapers was not for her.

One day she noticed that her walk to work took her past the Brill Building—the famous location where in the ’60s songwriters gathered to produce hit music—and quit her job in advertising soon after to try to join that history of hit making.

With a six-song CD, Staying Right Here, recorded in 2001, and a new three-song demo CD being shopped to major record labels, as well as live performances at some legendary New York City hot spots like the Bitter End under her belt, she’s feeling good about her career switch.

“Writing a good song is like telling a good story, painting a picture of a situation, getting people to appreciate the story. So when I write, I concentrate on good hooks and wonder, ‘Is this a good story?’ I just try to write listenable, likable music that people can sing along to,” she says.

Scola’s music has been compared to Carole King, Burt Bacharach, and Ben Folds, but she identifies closest with King.

“It was a fluke that my music sounds similar to hers,” she says. “I wasn’t listening to her as an adult, but when I was little, my mom played her album Tapestry a lot, and that sound must have gotten under my skin—that was what sounded good to me. It’s funny that without even knowing it I was writing music in her style.”

Also influenced by her background in theater at Rochester, she finds herself listening to a lot of Cole Porter and other American standards from the first third of the 20th century, as well as the Beatles and early ’80s pop music. Her lyrics reflect what she’s experiencing in her own life and those of her friends, all of which she tracks in two journals.

Scola holds out hope that she’s in the “right place at the right time” for female singer-songwriters. With the apparent downward trend of manufactured teen pop music and the rise of adult contemporary singers like Norah Jones, she feels there’s a place for her in the music industry, even though it’s difficult to get radio airplay.

Instead, Scola says, “I’m getting fans one at a time through live performances and making songs available on my Web site (www.allisonscola.com). That’s the new way of getting the word out.”

In the meantime, she works as admissions director for the Mannes School of Music, part of the New School, and spends most of her free time performing in New York and Connecticut.

“I can’t afford to tour, so I go places where I can get to with a rental car and stay on someone’s couch,” she says.