Inara George remembers it now with as much nostalgia as someone remembers a love story or a semester abroad.
“It was at this little theater on Pico, near LaBrea, next to a barbecue place,” he says. “Our backstage was behind the theater, so we'd sit there in these extravagant corseted outfits while the guy next door smoked brisket.”
George, a fixture on the Los Angeles music scene known for her solo albums and as one half of Bird and the Bee, remembers the summer she spent working as a twenty-something actress in “The Wandering Whore,” a musical set in 18th-century London by composer Eliot Douglass and lyricist Philip Littell that played at the Playwrights' Arena in Los Angeles in August 1997.
“There was a scene where I die,” George adds, “and then a ghost revives me and someone pays (I don't know if I need to include this in the article), someone pays to have sex with me.” She sighs.
“It was a very rich time.”
Three decades later, George's warm feelings for that era (and especially for the duo who provided the soundtrack) have led to an exquisite new album, “Songs of Douglass & Littell,” in which she puts aside her own songwriting to perform nine songs by these under-the-radar veterans of West Coast musical theater: probing, funny and vividly moving songs like “Tired Butterfly,” about a busy insect in search of “a little nap,” and “The Extra Nipple”, which reflects on a “tough”. encounter with another heart.”
Think of the record as George's version of one of Ella Fitzgerald's classic “Song Book” LPs from the late '50s and early '60s, when the jazz star consistently enshrined the work of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and other Great American Songbook authors.
“These men deserve some attention,” George says of Douglass and Littell, whom she has known since she was a child performing in plays at the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon. “I want to give them their flowers.”
However, if the album has its roots in the creative awakenings of George's youth, it is also the 51-year-old's way of embracing middle age.
Inspired by singers like Helen Merrill and Chet Baker – “Elis & Tom,” a 1974 duet album by Brazilians Elis Regina and Antônio Carlos Jobim, was another touchstone – George turns “Songs” from the breathy electronica of Bird and the Bee and the folky pop of her solo work with a jazzier sound that places her fresh, breathy voice amid piano, strings and woodwinds.
“This is an album for adults,” says George, who shares three teenage children with her husband, film director Jake Kasdan. “I don't want to make music that makes me feel like I'm trying to be younger; I wanted to make something that makes me feel my age.”
Inara George at home this month.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The singer is at his home near Griffith Park on a recent afternoon; With her children at school and Kasdan on a movie shoot, the house is quiet, although there are signs of music everywhere: a drum set, a grand piano, a guitar that once belonged to George's late father, Lowell George, who founded the cult Los Angeles rock band Little Feat and who died of a heart attack when Inara was just 4 years old.
“As a woman, it's a strange time in life; there's something in between about it,” she says. “Even the question of what do you wear. When you're younger, you think, I'm going to wear a dress: is it sexy, is it cute? Now, suddenly, all I want to do is wear suits.” She laughs.
Douglass, who plays piano on the new album, finds a “steadiness” in George's singing all the more remarkable given that the arrangements represent “a new kind of school for her,” he says. “I was wondering how he would approach it, and he has done it with such poise and wisdom.”
On Friday night, Douglass will join George, along with more than a dozen other musicians, at an album release concert at Largo at the Coronet, with proceeds going to the nonprofit LA Voice, which seeks to organize voters on issues related to immigration and affordable housing.
George happily describes “Songs of Douglass & Littell” as a passion project. “I think you get to a certain point where selling a million records is not your intention,” he says. “Obviously, I wouldn't make a record like this if I had that intention.” (Counterpoint: Laufey's great success.)
“I'm just talking about the experience,” he adds, “and this has been an incredible experience.”
The experience began one night a few years ago, when George hosted a wine-soaked gathering of artists who had worked with Douglass and Littell in the '90s on shows like “The Wandering Whore” and “No Miracle: A Consolation,” the latter a song cycle rooted in the losses of the AIDS epidemic.
Philip Littell, from left, Eliot Douglass and Inara George.
(Thomas Heegard)
After his years of children's theater at the Theatricum (Littell remembers meeting “this bird girl with these huge eyes”), George had gone to Emerson College in Boston to study acting, but dropped out and returned to Los Angeles, where he eventually made a name for himself as a musician. (In addition to Bird and the Bee, his duo with Grammy-winning producer Greg Kurstin, he also played with the Living Sisters and sang with Foo Fighters.)
However, her post-university time in the experimental theater scene always marked her, she says. Reconnecting with Littell, whose other work includes the libretto for André Previn's operatic adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and Douglass, who played piano for years with Cirque du Soleil, got George thinking about how he could help preserve their music and bring it to a modern audience.
In 2024, he formed a trio for an intimate concert at Pasadena's Healing Force of the Universe record store; His old friend Mike Andrews, who produced his solo albums, was there and told him they should record the material. Given the number of ballads he had crafted, George asked Douglass and Littell to write a couple of dynamic new tunes; among those they came up with was the playful “La Lune S'en Va.”
Does George speak French?
“Not at all,” he says, smiling. “But Philip does. He's a lot of fun. I thought, 'Yeah, I'll take it.'” I think the pronunciation is fine.”
She and a small group of musicians recorded the album live in the studio over three days, partly an attempt to capture some energy, partly an acknowledgment of an economic reality.
“Is music just a hobby for me now? Yes, it is,” says George, who is releasing “Songs” through his own label, Release Me Records. “I mean, I'm spending money to do it.” She worries about the disappearance of music's middle class, even as she joyfully notes that Bird and the Bee's “Again & Again” “recently had a little moment on TikTok,” as she puts it. (With 86 million streams, it's the duo's most popular song on Spotify, followed by an ethereal cover of the Bee Gees' “How Deep Is Your Love.”)
Yet all of that seems less important to George than taking the opportunity to honor “these incredibly talented, very sensitive people” who she believes shaped the artist she became.
“Their songs mean a lot to me,” he says of Douglass and Littell. “More than ever, this is the music I want to hear.”
