BORN IN TIME: RACHELLE GARNIEZ and the Art of Musical Reanimation

Somewhere between the smoky cabaret, the downtown street corner and the ghosts of Tin Pan Alley lives the wonderfully enigmatic musical world of Rachelle Garniez. The emphatically genre-defiant New York singer, songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist brings a remarkable range of influences to Born in Time, rescuing tunes from the musical past and giving them fresh life in the present.

The album’s ten eclectic tracks reach backward through nearly a century of musical history, moving from French cabaret and Tin Pan Alley to Irish poetry, American jazz standards and a relatively obscure Bob Dylan composition. Yet rather than feeling like an exercise in nostalgia, the collection seems to exist somewhere outside conventional time, where old melodies, half-forgotten characters and emotional memories drift into the present and acquire new identities.

"I just feel like these songs are important to keep alive, and I relate to them,” she says. “I’m kind of an old-fashioned person. Keeping a traditional form alive doesn’t mean fossilizing it. Reharmonizing it is a way of bringing it into the present moment or mixing things together. In a way, jazz has that element. American music is a new world—you’re going to meet a whole bunch of time intersections and cultural intersections, and to me that’s what’s interesting when I’m looking at traditions.”

That sense of temporal fluidity is fitting for an artist whose musical life has never respected boundaries. Rachelle grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a household where her mother, an American classical pianist, filled the apartment with music and her father, a European professor of French existentialist literature, filled it with books and heavy conversations. French was her first spoken and sung language. As a teenager she traveled through Europe, played guitar on the streets of Venice and Avignon and became immersed in flamenco culture in southern Spain before returning to New York and eventually being “hijacked by an accordion.”

That accordion would become a passport into the city’s wildly eclectic East Village creative scene of the 1980s, but Rachelle had already developed an unusually broad palette of influences. She remembers hearing early recordings of Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville songs on late-night radio, along with Fanny Brice and other performers from an era when music, theater and popular culture were inseparable. She loved the Sex Pistols and the Andrews Sisters with equal enthusiasm. That apparent contradiction is one of the keys to understanding Born in Time: The singer has never experienced, recorded or performed musical history as a series of sealed-off eras.

Listening to Born in Time, it’s clear that Rachelle means something more than simply preserving forgotten melodies. She wants to reanimate them—to discover what happens when songs that have traveled through decades of cultural memory are filtered through her own restless imagination, intimate vocal style and delightfully unruly musical vocabulary. The past isn’t something she stands outside and observes; she climbs inside it and makes herself at home.

The album opens with “Je Cherche Un Homme,” the cheeky French song famously associated with Eartha Kitt, and immediately establishes Rachelle’s ability to inhabit an older musical personality without becoming trapped inside it. Her breathy, soulful French vocal glides over plucky piano, harmonica and a gradually emerging swing groove before muted trumpet adds another splash of cabaret color. Even for listeners who don’t understand her native language, the romantic mischief is unmistakable. Rachelle describes the song as embodying the bon vivant spirit of “Gay Paree,” and her performance has exactly that combination of sophistication, sensuality and playful wink.

That flirtatious spirit gives way to something considerably darker on “Lilac Wine,” where Rachelle turns James Shelton’s haunting song into an intimate meditation on altered perception, self-medication, euphoria and regret. Her voice begins soft and almost secretive, floating over sparse piano as she sings of making wine from a lilac tree and seeing what she wants to see. Gradually the performance becomes more unsettled, her vocal intensity rising as the song’s dreamlike imagery gives way to the frightening question of whether what she is experiencing is real.

For Rachelle, who lives with and manages bipolar disorder, the song carries deeply personal resonance. She speaks openly about wanting to challenge the stigma surrounding mental illness while making a distinction between the heightened emotional sensitivity often romanticized in artists and the reality of living with mental illness. On Born in Time, that distinction is felt rather than preached. “Lilac Wine” becomes a performance of both enchantment and danger, its sensuality inseparable from its unease.

If melancholy is one of the album’s dominant colors, Rachelle wears it beautifully. “Harbor Lights” unfolds as a spacious, bittersweet ballad, with hypnotic piano, brushed drums, gentle accordion and trumpet surrounding her intimate, lived-in vocal. The imagery of a departing lover and glowing harbor lights feels almost cinematic, as though the listener is watching a ship disappear into the distance.

“I’ll Never Be the Same” deepens that atmosphere. Rachelle first encountered the song as a teenager through a Billie Holiday compilation and became obsessed with Holiday’s recordings and the American Songbook. Her version deliberately returns to an earlier interpretation by Ruth Etting, following the original melody and verse more closely. The result is elegant and restrained, with piano and softly wafting trumpet creating a landscape of romantic devastation. That song acquired an additional meaning during the COVID lockdown, when its declaration of permanent emotional change became a private soundtrack to a collective catastrophe. Rachelle has experienced the loss and disruption of other defining moments, including the AIDS epidemic and 9/11, and hears those events as reminders that history doesn’t simply pass through. It changes us.

Then comes “Lucky Day,” the album’s lone original and, in some ways, its emotional counterweight. Rachelle wrote it in 2003 for a musician friend she secretly loved while the two spent late nights talking through his heartbreak in coffee shops. What began as an intensely personal song eventually became something more universal: a mantra about surviving nightmare circumstances, waiting for the clouds to lift and recognizing that life can turn. he song fits surprisingly naturally among the older material. Its gentle piano-centered arrangement, subtle rhythm section and understated mystical quality make it sound as though it could have been discovered rather than newly written. That may be part of Rachelle’s particular gift: she writes contemporary songs with an instinctive understanding of the emotional architecture of older ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cANNsqqwceE

“C’est Si Bon” brings back the French playfulness, with jaunty piano, muted trumpet and Rachelle’s elegant vocal giving the song a breezy, sensual swing. Then “Down Among the Sheltering Palms,” published in 1914 and first popularized by Al Jolson, explodes with an entirely different energy. Vibrant accordion, punchy piano, bass, drums and trumpet create a lively New Orleans-inflected romp. Rachelle’s playful phrasing and wordless vocal flourishes reveal the performer beneath the melancholy chanteuse.

“Rose of Washington Square” returns to the album’s darker theatrical world, conjuring the bohemian mythology of Greenwich Village through a slow, brooding arrangement of accordion, piano, bass, drums and trumpet. The song’s tale of a young woman caught between romance, poverty, art and survival seems particularly appropriate for Rachelle, whose own history is intertwined with the downtown creative community she encountered as a young artist.

“Raglan Road” then reaches even further backward, transforming Patrick Kavanagh’s mournful Irish poem into something airy, spacious and almost dreamlike. Rachelle first encountered it through Luke Kelly and The Dubliners, and her subtle reharmonization sends the traditional melody “off road into the ether.” As an accordion player steeped in klezmer, Cajun and folk traditions, she sees reinterpretation not as an act of disrespect but as a way of preventing tradition from becoming fossilized. She hears musical history as a series of intersections—cultures, languages and generations continually meeting one another.

That philosophy reaches its fullest expression in the title track, Bob Dylan’s “Born in Time.” Producer Andrew Morse brought the relatively obscure song to Rachelle, who initially resisted the idea of recording Dylan at all. Yet the song’s multiple versions and alternate lyrics fascinated her. To Rachelle, that fluidity makes it an “active breathing organism,” rather than a fixed artifact. Their creative disagreement over her desire to introduce a New Orleans lilt ultimately became productive. Jon Cowherd’s soulful organ, Paul Nowinski’s lyrical bass and Charley Drayton’s tasteful groove give the song a sweet, swampy jazz-blues character far removed from Dylan’s usual sonic universe. Rachelle’s whispery vocal preserves the song’s wistful mystery while the accordion and rhythm section periodically loosen its structure into something playful and unexpected.

That is essentially what Born in Time does from beginning to end. It honors the past without behaving reverently toward it. It finds heartbreak in songs of romance, humor in forgotten standards, theatricality in old ballads and contemporary relevance in melodies that have survived generations. Rachelle’s voice—sometimes breathy and sensual, sometimes playful, sometimes quietly devastating—becomes the connective tissue.

And perhaps the title ultimately describes Rachelle herself. After a lifetime spent moving among languages, cities, genres, instruments and artistic communities, she has reached a point where looking backward and moving forward no longer seem like opposites. The songs on Born in Time carry memories, but they are not museum pieces. They are still moving. Born then, perhaps – but very much alive now.