Biography
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Born In
London, England, United Kingdom
Frances Livings ~
is an grant winning writer, lyricist and singer-songwriter. Born in London and currently residing in Los Angeles, she holds a PhD in Art History and an MA in English Literature and Media Studies. She studied jazz (voice and piano) in Hamburg Germany, Frances is also the founder of her own label, Moontraxx.
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Frances has always been passionately independent-minded. Her imagination and curiosity, combined with a wide range of life experiences, deliver the substance from which she draws creatively. This year Frances will be releasing her first solo album with original material.
Prior to this work, Frances recorded the EP ‘During the Hours’ with a few of her poems in collaboration with some of Los Angeles’ finest jazz musicians. Each piece resulted in a soulful dialogue between the artist’s narrative and the musician’s improvisational talents. For her other poems – some you can read on this website – she is currently seeking a publisher.
As a singer Frances has been featured on a noteworthy arrangement of Cole Porter’s jazz standard “In The Still Of The Night” for Daddy Deep’s album Professorship. She has worked with the guitarist and composer Greg Porée as a guest vocalist on his most recent albums, ’Inventions‘ and ‘Phoenix‘ and was a co-writer of the song “In Time For Spring”. Her engaging voice may remind you of Sade, it is soulful like Peggy Lee’s, interesting and expressive like Annie Lennox’ and yet natural like Dido’s.
Born in London and raised in the hilly countryside of East Anglia, Frances grew up in both metropolitain and suburban surroundings. As a teenager, her family moved to Germany where she was exposed to a foreign environment in which she had learn another language. Later, she spent many months writing a dissertation in South-West France. Her surroundings, besides having a productive effect on her writing, reminded her of the English countryside. She currently lives in Los Angeles and would like to move to Berlin sometime in the future.
Frances vividly remembers as a child, lying on her bed and listening to Cat Steven’s interpretation of ‘Morning Has Broken‘ on her red, foldable Philips record player, wishing she could someday write a moving song like that. Ever since she was small she loved drawing, reading, singing and improvising melodies. Luckily, her love of words and music was supported at a very early age. Her musical talent was discovered and supported with piano lessons and later cello lessons, training her to be a member of the school orchestra. She immediately fell in love with the cello and it broke her heart that she had to leave it behind when they moved to Germany.
In Germany she only very briefly received piano lessons. But it has become her instrument of choice and her musical typewriter. Her musical interests and influences were broad: During the 1980’s the selection of international music played on German radio stations was very limited. But she lived with her family close to an American army base so she was able to listen to the American billboard charts every Sunday evening on the radio, recording her favourites on a tape recorder. In addition, every week she would buy the small lyrics booklet with the charts. She still knows the lyrics to hundreds of pop songs by heart. Frances discovered R&B, funk and jazz and admired many artists who were also writers, like Laurie Anderson, Ricky Lee Jones, Stevie Wonder and their ability to construct interesting lyrics, sounds and stories that enveloped her. But it wasn’t until she was in her twenties that she became serious about singing and songwriting.
She wrote her first song at 19. At the same time she joined her first band and has since then worked on a growing number of musical projects. Parallel to her musical career, she studied art history, English literature and media studies and was awarded with a grant for a dissertation, earning her a PhD in art history in 2003. Besides that she has worked as a waitress, handyman, antiques dealer, teacher and tour guide but it was mainly freelance theatre work (as a stage manager, tour manager, dresser and costume designer) over a period of almost ten years that made her love of inventing stories resurface and coined her interest in creating atmosphere.
Improvisation was also an essential component of the electronica collaboration 4UrbanArtists she co-founded in 2000. The three members, often including guest artists, experimented with trip-hop loops, grooves and sounds they recorded and performed live in various clubs in Germany until 2003.
In 2005 after meeting her husband in Hamburg she moved to Los Angeles. They spent a short period of time in Pasadena, but she still travelled to and fro, after having received a writer’s grant for a book publication. At that time she also worked mainly on her poetry and songs. Her entrepreneurial spirit led to the foundation of the music production company Moontraxx in 2009, under whose name she released the 4UrbanArtists’ long overdue six-track CD ‘Sticky Traxx‘. The 4UrbanArtists has now become a side project for songs she writes and records in that style, like the track ‘Urban Survival‘ (2010).
Her theatre background, mingled with the circumstance of often having had to adapt to new and unpredictable situations and her experience in the field of experimentation and electronica, when writing and performing with the 4UrbanArtists, has determined her style as a writer and performer. She loves and writes songs with strong lyrics, interesting chords and memorable melodies. But one of the main things for her is, how the imagery touches people and which story it tells.
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