Siobhan Magnus gears up for big homecoming show

Siobhan Magnus doesn’t expect it to be spelled correctly, but wants America to know her name. The 21-year-old singer first made waves as one of the finalists on Season 9 of American Idol  last year, covering songs by a wide variety of artists including Aretha Franklin and The Rolling Stones. A Barnstable native, she’ll take center stage on Saturday when she headlines a homecoming show at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis.

Magnus has big plans for the show, which will include plenty of friends and family. For the first part of the show, she’ll perform with her high school band Lunar Valve. She’ll then deliver a solo set with a variety of covers of her own material off her forthcoming debut album. For the second half of the show, she’ll team up with the Ultrasonic Rock Opera, which features her uncle on drums.

Between prepping for Saturday’s show and working on her album, Magnus is going a million miles an hour in more than a few of directions. Earlier this week, Boston Music Spotlight caught up with the singer to talk about life after Idol, the big Melody Tent show and what’s next for Siobhan Magnus.

Boston Music Spotlight (BMS): How is post-Idol life treating you?

Siobhan Magnus (SM): It’s pretty good, I can’t complain. It’s been very strange adjusting back to real life. Honestly, that was the hardest part. When you’re done with everything Idol you’re kinda like “Woah, okay, what now?” And there are, of course, crazy huge expectations of what you should be doing. Everybody has their opinion and two cents about what you should be doing now because they feel that they’re a part of getting you as far as you did because it’s something like Idol where the audience has so much of a say in it. So they all own a little bit of your success and they say, “Well now you need to do Broadway,” “Now you need to do this,” and you’re like “I don’t know! I don’t know!” The transition was very difficult and intense but now I definitely feel I’ve reached a much better place where I have my footing again and I know what I’m doing and I feel a million times better.

BMS: Your album is set for an October release. What can fans expect in terms of the direction you took your sound in?

SM: I think that it’s safe to say the album will cover different grounds; not every song will be in the same exact direction. As far as style, there are different influences that pull in different directions but it still has a common thread I feel… My favorite comparison was probably someone said “Oh this reminds me of Aimee Mann”, which was a huge compliment. I love Aimee Mann and I definitely had that in mind, that kind of very thoughtful, intelligent female adult contemporary, bordering alternative rock but like adult pop where it’s thoughtful and a little provocative but in a tasteful way.

I don’t know, I’m working on kind of melting together my ideas and my influences in this direction that lends itself towards the October release. It’s going to be a big Halloween to do and then doing the show. To release the album, we’re doing a show on Halloween in Boston. For the show, I’m leaning towards a very theatrical kind of glam-rock spectacle, very influenced by Alice Cooper and Welcome to My Nightmare but that meets Kate Bush meets Nightmare Before Christmas but meets like No Doubt. I don’t know, it’s really hard when you get into comparing yourself to other things because you don’t wanna set up this expectation [of] “Yes, I’m going to sound like No Doubt” and then people buy the CD and they don’t think that it sounds like that and then they’re like “what are you talking about, what are you on?” But I think what I’m most excited about is just sharing these honest perspectives because this is the first time people have heard music that I’ve wrote, that these are my stories and they’re real experiences from my life. I hope in a way it kind of satiates people’s need to ask, “Define yourself exactly” and instead they’ll begin to understand or create their own idea of who I am and what I’m doing as an artist so that it starts to make a little more sense. I think it’s hard to tell that completely when you watch somebody sing cover songs for a long time. They can be really good at the cover songs that they do, but until you see the person perform something that they wrote that is their own story, then that’s when you understand them as an artist, and that’s the really exciting part for me.

BMS: What have you been up to since completing the album?

SM: Well we’re still working on it. It’s almost done, it’ll be done in August. The process of recording the album: we’ve been going back and forth to Nashville to do it. It’s a funny – kind of full circle – story because I ended up back in Nashville anyway. I met my manager I think back in December, and we started working together. The first thing we did was establish a plan for a whole year, and goals that we had in a year and deadlines that we needed to do things by. We made our first trip to Nashville in January and we met his team of friends who he had known down there when he lived down there. We met my producer, Mike Flanders, he’s from Australia actually, and his team. We hit it off right away. The first trip we went down there we came back with four songs. It’s just been an amazing experience so far. I’ve been four times this year and I’m going back probably in August if not July.

So we‘ve been doing that and I’ve been working on the show on the Melody Tent that’s on Saturday. We’ve been rehearsing pretty wildly and whipping my band into shape to start the show. I have been doing gigs with my band Lunar Valve here and there and we just got a new drummer. So this show on Saturday is the first time people will get to hear our new drummer, which I’m really excited about. Since we got him we’ve been practicing at least three times a week for a while now, just drilling the set, drilling everything, and tightening things up because we want people to go “Wow, check out this kid.” So we’ve been working on that. We put out some recordings in February with Lunar Valve on iTunes and we’re gonna be reworking those and some other recordings over the summer as well. I’m kind of doing this duel personalities thing of Siobhan solo album alongside Siobhan-Lunar Valve album.

I’m working on a book with my brothers that you can keep an eye out for in the fall along with the album. And the coolest thing probably is that I was able to take my little sisters to Disney for February vacation. That’s my favorite thing that I’ve been up to.

BMS: You are about to do this big headlining show at the Cape Cod Melody Tent. Are you excited to perform so close to home?

SM: I am, I’m so excited because what people might not realize is that the Melody Tent is in my hometown. The town of Barnstable is divided into villages – the Tent is in Hyannis but that’s like the hub of Barnstable. I grew up 15 minutes from the Melody Tent and I’ve been seeing shows there since I was a kid. Just to be performing on that stage, I can’t wait. I got to practice there and the stage spins, it’s in the round and I’ve never done a show in the round before, and so yesterday we turned the stage on to see what it feels like when it’s spinning; it’s kind of weird. But then I went to the dressing room and I used the bathroom and I came out and I said to my manager “I’m sorry, but you can’t help but think about who else’s bum has been on that toilet, it’s pretty crazy.”

It’s so exciting because when you’re on that stage, all the seats are so close, you can fit – there’s over 2,000 seats under the tent that are so close to the stage. Every seat in the back row is closer to the stage than any first row in an arena. I know that I’ll be able to see everybody’s face and make contact with as many people as I can and make them feel like they’re involved in the show. It’s such an exciting thing to think about because so much of performing is what you get back from the audience and the energy that is created in their excitement and anticipation. I’ve never done a show like this, in this setting, so I’m most excited just to try doing a show in the round. I’ve heard great things about it. Some people are like “I don’t know, it’s weird, it’s weird to be spinning,” but it really doesn’t spin that fast.

BMS: You’ll be performing with the Ultrasonic Rock Orchestra – what’s your relationship with them and what do you have planned?

SM: Well, the Ultrasonic Rock Orchestra was started by my uncle, Alan Ware, and his best friend, Sal Clemente. They’ve been friends since my uncle moved here in 1990 from England when he met my aunt. They used to have a band, just a regular band, but then they got into this bigger endeavor of putting on a show that was like a rock opera. They started out trying to get permission from Andrew Lloyd Weber to rerecord “Jesus Christ Superstar” and to perform it. It was a long process; he ended up saying no, but they wrote that into the story of their own rock opera. They wrote a song about how he said no and they asked for permission but he still said no, it’s pretty funny. They started doing this show about five or six years ago called “A Night at the Rock Opera” in Arlington, and what they set out to do was create a band with enough vocalists that they could perform live the songs that the bands who really did them could not perform live without other vocal tracks added into it, like “Bohemian Rhapsody.” So they kind of put together this monster band of 6+ musicians and then, at times, I’ve seen them with 12 or 13 singers at one time up on stage. They do the rock that is so universal: they do Queen, Bowie, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac. They interchange their set with changes almost every single night and they just have this bank of songs that they all know. One of my favorites is the Flash Gordon theme song that they do. They turn it into, because it’s “A Night at the Rock Opera,” very big theatrics and glam rock, they all have these alternate identity stage names and they are from the planet Ultrasonic. Sal, the lead singer, he’s Doctor Defiance and they are on this mission to save the Earth with the power of rock. It just takes you to outer space for two hours and you just kind of enjoy the show because it’s like they’re having a party on stage. I first saw the show when I was probably 12 and I was like oh my god I wanna do that. They’re big, the KISS boots and the eyeliner and studded everything and leather pants and just bombastic in-your-face glam rock. I was just like oh my god I wanna do that.

When I came back from [American Idol], my uncle – he’s still in the band, he’s the drummer – asked if I’d like to join them in December for a guest spot in one of their performances and I was like, “yes, are you kidding?” That was about the same time that I met my manager so I invited him to come watch that performance and he was like that was great, why don’t we put a show together that combines all of this because we’ve already got a whole show here, there’s no reason to not use any of it, and it’s great and people will have a great time. We thought well why don’t we put together the show at the Melody Tent, because my manager Tony Raine, has been managing the Melody Tent for a long time now, and people had been asking him  ven before we met “What are you gonna do with Siobhan? When’s Siobhan playing at the Melody Tent?” and he’s like “Well does she have a show?” It’s a very good point, because when I came home it’s not like I got to bring the Idol band home with me. I don’t have a show anymore; I can’t just go sing acapella all those songs.

It took a while to kind of create the whole idea that we were going to base the show on, but once we figured it out it made a lot of sense. Why don’t we do a show that showcase every direction that Siobhan could possibly go in musically, all the different kinds of music that she loves to perform, but carefully put it together in one night so that the whole audience experiences all sides of this artist musically and kind of leaves with their own chunk of it. Maybe they’ll leave saying, “You know, I don’t care so much for Lunar Valve because I’m a grandma and they’re loud, but I really like it when she sang that song that she sang on Idol that I bought on iTunes. I just want there to be something for everybody to show see. It’s okay to dip your feet in all different puddles, just meet in the middle and pull it together with class, [that’s] really the goal. I’m opening the show with Lunar Valve, and I’m doing my own 50 minute to an hour long set of some of my new songs that’ll be on my album along with a couple songs I did on Idol and then a few more cover songs that I’ve always wanted to do or songs that are very special to me. And then we’ll have an intermission and come back with the whole URO and just rock everybody’s faces off and send them home happy with “Bohemian Rhapsody” stuck in the head. It’ll be good night.

BMS: What else is on tap for you in 2011?

SM: Just working really, really hard to claim my space and my credit as an artist and just as “Siobhan Magnus, Recording Artist” and not “Siobhan Magnus, wasn’t she that girl from American Idol?” or sometimes you don’t even get your name with it, it’s just “That girl from American Idol. And like, don’t get me wrong, God bless American Idol; I am in a significantly better position than I was in a year ago or a year and a half ago. But you lose your identity to an extent where you just become “Oh isn’t that that girl from that show, from American Idol?” You lose your name most of the time and it’s like “No! I’m not ‘that girl’.” Sometimes you just hear people whispering and you just wanna be like “I have a name! My name is Siobhan. I’m not asking you to know how to spell it, just stop calling me ‘that girl’!” It’s really a mission and that’s what our plan for the year is based around mostly, establishing my own identity…

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Siobhan Magnus will perform with the Ultrasonic Rock Orchestra at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis on Saturday, June 18. Tickets for the show are still available through Ticketmaster for $32.75 and $50.75.