Belle Plaine is beginning her career in full stride. CBC Radio 3’s Grant Lawrence named her his discovery of the 2010 Regina Folk Festival. She was voted Regina’s Best Singer in 2010 and 2011 by Prairie Dog magazine and was awarded the additional title of Best Solo Act in 2011. Her uncommonly beautiful voice causes audiences to sit-up and take notice wherever she performs. Kelley Jo Burke of CBC’s SoundXchange recently said: If Patsy Cline and Blossom Dearie had a love child she would sing like Belle Plaine. Belle’s voice is old timey and jazzy. It has twang, crystal bells and swing. You listen to this voice, and all of a sudden your cheatin’ heart has a very dry martini in hand, and you’re hearing something both timeless and brand new. Belle Plaine’s first full-length album, Notes from a Waitress, is a throwback to the vocal jazz of the 1960s. Think Peggy Lee. Julie London. Smart lyrics paired with a smokin’ band. The theme for Notes from a Waitress originated while Belle Plaine was overseas. Each song reads as a travelogue from different locales, and the listener pockets them one by one, like souvenirs from a globetrotting journey. The title track was written while working as a waitress in Sydney, Australia. It was a dodgy restaurant with cockroaches, overly friendly cooks and the nocturnal visits of rodents. “It’s a mystery anyone ate there, let alone why it was so busy,” she says. The song is a memento of her time in the service industry, and the tempo reflects the hectic pace of the popular haunt. Midway through the album is the atmospheric “Vegas”. After she found an abandoned page of handwritten poetry in the street, Belle worked the few legible lines into a fictitious tour of the famous desert city. The ghostly mood of the song is set by the eerie tones of a vintage Premier vibraphone. The album’s opener “Sweet Tart” is about as catchy they come. “It was supposed to be cheeky. A snarky response to unwanted advances. The irritating irony is that it’s really who I am as a girlfriend: a tarted up version of a 1950s housewife,” she explains. A number of the tracks were brought to life by collaborations with pianist Jeremy Sauer. The co-writing process often found them both at the piano: Belle singing lyrics and melodies from ragged notebooks, and Jeremy composing the complex chord changes that support the tunes. Belle chose producer/engineer Doug Organ (Colleen Brown, Ann Vriend) of Edmontone Studio to produce the album. She recruited a band of fellow Grant MacEwan alumni for the studio recording. The result of their combined efforts is nine original songs that add to the tradition of the classic jazz standards.