Today we’d like to introduce you to Marcella Detroit.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I’d developed a love for music as a child and started singing at around age five and playing an instrument age seven. My first instrument was violin, then I went on to accordion, ukulele, guitar, harmonica and piano. Music was always a comfort to me especially going through my troubled teen years. I’d sit in my room and play my guitar and sing for an hour and always come out feeling much better. Even though I went to college for one semester in the Detroit area [where I’m from] my major was art, my minor was music, I decided music was much more rewarding and fulfilling for me.
So I quit college and made a conscious decision one day while I was playing guitar and singing in a park in the suburbs of Detroit; I remember looking up at the sky and saying out loud, “this is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life” and I’ve never stopped. I put an ad on a local radio station in the Detroit area called WABX, “girl singer looking for blues band” and that was the beginning. I played in a lot of local bands in Detroit, one called Julia; we ended up opening for David Bowie in 1972. Then Bob Seger’s manager heard about us and had us audition for Bob’s band, so we were all hired, and that is what I’d consider my first big break, aside from opening for David Bowie! We toured the US with that band. Bob decided to fire the rhythm section and kept the guitarist (Bill Mueller) and me in the band, hiring these hotshot musicians from Tulsa, Oklahoma [drummer Jamie Oldaker and keyboard player, Dick Sims] which was at that time one of the music centers of the country famous for the location of Shelter Records, owned and run by one of my idols Leon Russell, of Wrecking Crew fame and being an artist and great songwriter in his own right. We all toured with Bob but when the band ended, I was invited to move to Tulsa. So I joined my friends and our band was the big fish in the little pond.
We had notables like JJ Cale, The Gap Band, Leon Russell himself and many others coming to see us play and sitting in with us. This included the well-lauded bass player Carl Radle who worked with Eric Clapton in Derek and the Dominoes. Clapton was looking for a new band and Carl told him about us. He wanted to hire us all but I had already committed to working with Leon Russell and joined my friends a year later in Jamaica to work on and join Eric Clapton’s band. I did a lot of writing with Clapton during that first time in his band including his song “Lay Down Sally”, “The Core” and several others. I moved to Los Angeles around that time, November 1977 and ended up doing lots of session work for many artists including Aretha Franklin, Bette Midler, Leo Sayer, Jeffrey Osborne, Alice Cooper, Daryl Hall working with iconic producers like Arif Mardin, David Foster and Leiber and Stoller, George Duke and Stanley Clarke. In 1984, I was invited to join Clapton’s band again for a year after cowriting a song called “Tangled in Love” with a songwriter friend of mine, Richard Feldman, from Tulsa, OK. That second time I was in Eric’s band we toured the world and also did Live Aid in 1985. Richard [Feldman] had also transplanted to LA shortly after I did and in ’87 he got some new neighbors: Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and Siobhan Fahey of Bananrama. Siobhan was looking to leave Bananarama and do something more adventurous. Richard introduced us and we worked together as Shakespears Sister for five years until 1992. We had a huge hit in the UK that was a record-breaking #1 for eight weeks, longest for a female band in the UK which I was vocally featured on called “Stay”.
Unfortunately, the band split up due to our personality differences. I did my own album in ’94 called Jewel on London Records and had a hit with it on a song that I wrote solely called “I Believe”; the album also had a duet on it by Elton John and I, the Motown classic, “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”. This song was also on his “Duets for One” cd. After that, I did several solo albums, some tv series including a reality tv show in England in 2010 called Pop Star to Opera Star where I was trained to sing Opera and compete with others. I made it to the semi-finals, it was very rewarding. In 2018 I was invited to join my old boss Eric Clapton for one of his concerts called the Hyde Park Summer Festival to a crowd of over 75,000 people. He was very gracious and invited me up to perform two of the songs we had written together and introduced me as “And here is the Lady that wrote this song, Marcy Levy”. Simultaneously I was talking with Shakespears Sister management and had a few meetings with Siobhan to talk about possibly doing a reunion tour which we did in 2019 ending just before the pandemic started. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been writing like crazy and have written over 60 songs. I did about nine live streams during lockdown, two of them with my friend the immensely talented musician Chihsuan Yang. My plan is to release an album this summer.
I’ve already released 1 single from my upcoming album “Gold” celebrating my 50 years in music, and another single will be released on August 2nd.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Smooth road? Um no. Being in this profession, you have to have very thick skin, which I don’t. I’m way too sensitive, but then again, that’s an attribute that helps me write and create. There are also many egos involved in this business and lots of managers that were actually ripping me off, one in particular who probably kept hundreds of thousands of dollars from me that I was unable to recover. There have been many misunderstandings along the way, many expectations. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety; the music business although it’s been very good to me, is not really for the faint of heart. I don’t recommend it unless you are completely passionate about what you do.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I specialize in songwriting and I’m also a recording artist, producer and musician. I’m currently signed to a publishing company out of the UK called PeerMusic UK where I’m writing songs for other people and well as songs and compositions for film and tv. I create my own music that is, I am also a sound designer and producer and play many instruments as well as sing.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
My favorite childhood memory is going to the lakes in Michigan during the summer and spending the days swimming, having barbecues, going horseback riding with my father.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.marcelladetroit.com | www.marcelladetroit.rocks
- Instagram: instagram.com/marcelladetroit
- Facebook: Facebook.com/mdetroit, Facebook.com/marcelladetroitofficial
- Twitter: @marcelladetroit
- Youtube: YouTube.com/marcelladetroit
