Evan Uhlmann - Tea Lady (2020)

Singer-songwriter Evan Uhlmann explores metaphysical realms and
the growing pains of getting older on “Tea Lady”. Blending
deadpan vocals of the likes of Lou Reed and Kurt Vile with the
exploratory production of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Recorded with his brother, Gregory Uhlmann and co-producer Tim
Carr, Tea Lady was made in studios, homes, and garages over the
course of 3 years. It’s an album of searching and seeking.
Looking around for answers and realizing that they can only be
found inside oneself. This searching led Uhlmann to move from
Chicago to New York to Los Angeles and back to Chicago to
realize the beauty of his home city. The songs are more
questions than answers. Meditations on past lives, other realms
of existence, and coming of age.

Despite the deeply personal nature of the songs on Tea Lady, the
album was a truly collaborative process. Not only with
producers, Gregory Uhlmann and Tim Carr, but also with the
talents of Matt Carroll (Ohmme), Dan Pierson (VV Lightbody) and
Myra Hinrichs (Whitney). Bringing in some of Chicago’s finest
musicians and their unique identities as improvisers and
arrangers on their instruments.

“The writing and recording of Tea Lady was a very organic
process,” producer Gregory Uhlmann explains. “It was special to
work with my brother collaboratively again. It’s something we
did naturally as kids and it felt like we were tapping into
some of that spirit of childlike discovery once again with this
album. Sometimes we would all be in the same room working out an
arrangement together and other times Evan would send us a
simple voice memo and Tim and I would try to imagine a new sonic
world for it.” The songs on Tea Lady were written at various
stages of Uhlmann’s life. From “Bless You Babe”, a love song
written in Uhlmann’s high school years to “Tea Lady”, a vignette
about rebirth. On “Prime” Uhlmann reflects on how it felt to be
a wide-eyed kid coming of age and “Hallelujah” tells the story
of a devoutly religious person relapsing on drugs.

Growing up in Chicago, Uhlmann would learn every Beatles song
he could. An early love that he still sites as a big influence
on his writing. When he graduated high school he continued his
studies as a vocal performance major at Bard College where he
formed his first band of his own. They would often go into NYC
on the weekends to play shows as well as playing house parties
at Bard. After graduating, Uhlmann took a break from live
performance and started to focus more on writing. It’s in this
period that Uhlmann composed the songs for Tea Lady. He now
resides in Chicago and plays around the city with his new band
of some of Chicago’s best musicians.