Music has always been a presence in Elissa Margolin’s life, and many times, it’s influenced the direction she’s taken — or, sometimes, the direction she didn’t take. “I go about all things music trying to listen to myself internally,” she says.
Margolin’s style as a guitarist and songwriter has been evolving since her first album came out in 2010. This fall, she released her newest album, “Pivot,” one that marks a new direction for the Portsmouth musician. She’ll celebrate with an album release party at Portsmouth Book & Bar on Friday, Dec. 11.
Margolin grew up in a musical family. Both her parents were musicians and her sister is a stuntwoman (which isn’t a musical profession but requires a lot of the same performance skills, Margolin says.)
“I grew up with a lot of music in our house. I played piano … and was in bands in high school and was in every play,” she says.
When she went to college, though, Margolin found that her interest in music waned. She became immersed in studying literature and learning about social justice issues. She built a career working with nonprofits, but when she moved to Portsmouth 11 years ago, Margolin was stirred to take up music again.
“I had a lot of things I wanted to make more time for, and one of them was music,” she says. That led to guitar lessons at Portsmouth Music and Arts Center (PMAC) with Chris Weisman. Margolin was a quick study, and soon enough, she was “looking at things through the eyes of a storyteller and composer.”
“I got hooked, and I didn’t stop,” she says.
Margolin dove into songwriting during the 2008 RPM Challenge. Over the next two years, she worked on her first album, “Love AnyWay,” with musician and producer Mike Effenberger. That album was the first stage in Margolin’s evolution as a musician and songwriter — unlike the stripped-down sounds of “Pivot,” “Love AnyWay” sounds like “Sarah McLachlan meets Radiohead,” Margolin says.
Her first show was an album release party at The Red Door that year, and Effenberger, bassist Nick Phaneuf, and saxophonist Russ Grazier (all of whom are part of PMAC’s faculty) helped Margolin bring the album to life on stage. Soon enough, she was playing throughout the Seacoast and started writing songs for a band shortly after that. That led to the creation of the band Fine Line Forming, which released albums in 2011 and 2013.
Those earlier albums and collaborations all paved the way for “Pivot,” which Margolin says is something of a departure from those recordings.
“It’s a little bit of a pendulum-swinging story,” she says. “(Fine Line Forming was) a very big band with a very big sound. I’d just started to get into Gillian Welch’s ‘The Harrow and the Harvest,’ and it was calling me back to some sort of stripped-down, authentic sound, a space that I’d never gotten the chance to explore.”
Margolin started playing music with guitarist Tom Brown, and “Pivot” slowly developed out of those sessions. Brown’s guitar playing is “a little bit reckless, in the nicest way,” she says, and it juxtaposes nicely with Nate Therrien on the double bass and Joe Harding on bass guitar.
The sound developed organically, she says. “You can’t even say you planned it, because so much of this stuff is serendipitous.”
She tapped Fine Line Forming collaborator Nick Phaneuf to produce the album. It took two years to record. “Sometimes you make a record from soup to nuts in the course of a month and then you spend the next few years wondering what if you’d done something different,” Phaneuf says. “Vocally, (Margolin) is capable of inhabiting the character in a song. She was easy to direct as a producer because I could ask her to sing the song three very different ways, and then we could reflect on which approach fit the song best.”
That approach is reflective of Margolin’s interest in literature and art and her public policy work. She gleans inspiration from books, dance, and poetry, as well as her daily life. During a conversation, a colleague used the phrase “cultivated cruelty,” about the results of a recent election, and the idea stayed with Margolin until she wrote a song about it.
Margolin is playing shows in support of “Pivot,” but she’s already looking ahead to her next project — River Sister, a mostly instrumental group driven by female harmonies and reminiscent of Rising Appalachia. That’s what Margolin loves about music, she says — she can go wherever inspiration and interest take her.
“It’s rare in life you can listen to that voice, but in music, you have that freedom,” she says.
Elissa Margolin and friends host an album release party for “Pivot” on Friday, Dec. 11 at 9 p.m. at Portsmouth Book & Bar, 40 Pleasant St., Portsmouth, 603-427-9197.