Biography
“Only sing songs you really love.”
A vocalist since high school, Shepley was lead singer from 1990 to 1995 in Cabaret Enchanté (with Catherine Coleman). The duo performed Coleman’s original music, standards, and French chansons at Scullers Jazz Club, The French Library and Cultural Center, Danny’s Sky Bar (New York City), and live on Ron Della Chiesa’s WGBH radio show, “Music America.” Shepley put her vocal career on the back burner while she was director of communications at Pine Street Inn, New England’s largest homeless shelter, from 1998 to 2007, but she has come back to it with purpose and passion.
Shepley re-entered the world of music by studying with teacher and pianist Henry Schniewind.
Attending The Tuscany Project, a 10-day intensive vocal workshop held in Italy, also helped launch her return. It was there she met pianist Ron Roy, a workshop faculty member; they began working together and building their repertoire. In 2010 they became the first U.S. musicians to perform and record a new songbook by lyricist Fran Landesman. The album has received kudos and radio play here and abroad, including on the Jonathan Schwartz Show on WNYC and BBC Radio 2. Metcalf and Roy are now working on a second album of lesser-known American Songbook gems.
With a repertoire keyed to her emotional depth and sophisticated wit, Shepley’s delivery is charismatic, self-assured, captivating, and illuminated by her love of the material she sings. Great lyrics are especially important to her. “They should hold up independent of the music, like good poems,” she says. Along with selecting standards that she makes her own, she searches out lesser-known gems, great songs that may have been recorded by only one or two singers: “There are lost songs that deserve to be found, like great books that have gone out of print.”
No matter if she sings a discovery found on an old Kay Starr LP or if she chooses a song as familiar and wonderful as Gershwin’s “I Can’t Get Started,” she always has her finger right on the emotional pulse of a song—and she can make that song swing!