“I ain’t looking for no part-time lover, I ain’t looking for no boy who want to play games,” New Haven songwrriter, producer, and singer Denise Renee, aka Stout, declares on her new single. “I’m a queen. Step back, let me do my thing.”
And do her thing Renee does, unleashing a voice of breathtaking dynamic range, from a sharp whisper to a hall-filling shout, stacking harmonies and textures while that band drives on.
Stout and the Revolution‘s single “Queen” starts with a beat as spare as it is funky; it makes feet move from the first bar. A four-note riff is all that’s needed to give the song its propulsive harmonic structure. And the rest is Renee’s voice telling you what she doesn’t want, and what she does.
“I’m inspired by so much. I’ve been a music connoisseur since I was born,” the New Haven-based Renee said in interview on WNHH’s “Northern Remedy.” The interview covered her rise from childhood church singer in the Hill neighborhood to nationally touring musician with top stars, drawing on both gospel and secular traditions. After a hiatus spent raising young children, she is back onstage and in the studio.
Renee started by playing the drums as a child — “that’s a huge part of me as an artist,” she added — at Apostolic Love and Faith Tabernacle. Her great-grandmother was the pastor of that church; it congregated in the basement of her house on Hallock Avenue in the Hill. Renee was singing by the age of 5 in the church’s choir.
“We were called the Busy Bees,” Renee said. She was one of 15 to 20 kids, and was “kind of boisterous.” The choir director noticed and brought her to the front. “She jump-started my love for singing,” Renee said.
Renee kept singing and playing drums in church throughout her childhood. As a teenager, she started singing in churches in Hartford and Bridgeport. “Gospel music is filled with the holy spirit, so it brings about a different sound and a different passion that comes from so much joy and anguish. For me, looking back on the history of slaves and other different oppressions … they used their own music and their own imaginations and their own sounds and colors to carry them through, which birthed that gospel sound.”
She kept standing out. She went to Truman elementary, to Roberto Clemente, and graduated Hillhouse High. She sang in every choir in school. She spent a little time at Gateway.
But “at the age of 20 is when I really knew that I wanted to pursue music,” Renee said.
It was 2001. Renee was then working for the phone company, then called SNET. “I was a customer service rep and the single mother of my first child,” she said. She knew “this isn’t for me” and made a deal with her mother, Mary — to take care of her daughter while she made an honest try of making a living in music. “If it doesn’t work out in this amount of time, I’ll go back to working,” Renee told her mom.
Her mom agreed to help her out. Renee headed off to New York City. She started at the open mic at the now-closed Village Underground. “That was a big part of me figuring out who I was as a performer,” Renee said.
Lord Remains In Picture
Part of that work lay in Renee stepping into secular music while still keeping one foot in gospel.
“I was raised in a church, raised to only sing gospel music, and pretty much had that set in my mind,” she said. “And then life happened, and I started to change, and started to see the world and my perception of music differently… and I felt like my expression should not and cannot only be limited to gospel music. As a matter of fact, I feel like anything that I sing is the Gospel. Because I’m coming from my heart. I can’t speak for anyone else. I can only speak for me. Everything that I sing, I sing with intention. Everything that I sing, I want to convey a message … whether you’re talking about love, whether you’re talking about love lost, whether you’re talking about wanting love, whether you’re talking about struggles or happiness — that’s the Gospel, that’s what gospel music is. It’s good news.”
In New York, she crossed paths with R&B singer and songwriter Jessica Wilson. They had mutual friends, and met at a diner in Queens. She asked Renee to sing background for her. She “took me along for the ride. It really showed me that this is my destiny, too.”
Renee’s first gig with Wilson was at B.B. King’s. Wilson happened to share management with singer, songwriter, and producer Alicia Keys, who broke big in 1998 with her album Songs in A Minor. Wilson was one of Keys’s touring backup singers. When Keys put out her second album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, Wilson connected Renee to her. “It just happened like that,” Renee said. “It was the will of God.”
Renee toured with Alicia Keys from 2003 to 2006. “It was a whirlwind, a whole new life, a whole new perception, a whole new level of inspiration,” Renee said. The tour kept her on the road for months at a stretch, with a break for a couple days. “We were never home,” Renee said. She called her daughter every day, and missed her every day. “There would be tears — at the time I would shed my tears, but then I would wipe my tears, because I was setting up a legacy for my daughter … the tears were worth it because I was able to show her and teach her” about the need to pursue what fulfills. “And now she’s walking in those footsteps.”
“I think some people look at what we do … and you think it’s so glamorous — some of it is, don’t get me wrong — but it is hard work that that goes into it,” Renee said. “You have to be built for it. And I am.”
And there were high points to touring, of course. “The magic and the energy and the chemistry that you feel between you and the band members, and then the exchange with the audience — that is so beautiful, you can’t pay anybody to get that. It’s a natural feeling that is so addicting.”
Renee stopped touring with Keys when she “got married and things changed. I started having children. So I took a step back … for 10 years while I was married and raising my babies.”
She parted with her husband and moved back to New Haven, where her family still is. But she still sang and worked on music. “I slowly but surely got back to me. I found my voice and what I wanted to say in music, and here we are.”
Back In The Game
She returned to singing with J.J. Hairston and Youthful Praise, a gospel choir based in Bridgeport that now tours nationally; she had sung with them as a child and began traveling with them. In 2016, she began working with Childish Gambino as a choir coordinator. In 2017 she joined Cory Henry and the Funk Apostles, another nationally touring act.
And she started her solo career. In 2015 she put out a gospel record, Awakened, which hit #11 on Billboard’s gospel chart. Five years ago, she also came across a loop pedal. “It’s an extension of my musicality,” she said. It lets her play percussion and sing at the same time. She was introduced to the looper when she, a friend named Woody Vereen, and another acquaintance had gotten together to write some music in a studio at the University of Bridgeport. When she arrived, Vereen had a looper pedal he was “playing around with,” Renee said. She asked him to show it to her. He encouraged her to try it. “I got it right then and there,” she said. Vereen told her to take the pedal, as he wasn’t using it.
“That was a big part of me becoming free and totally open to experimenting with sounds and textures, which opened so much more in my artistry,” she said.
She began to develop her sound at home. “It happened through really focusing and really practicing and finding my own voice and my own approach in it,” she said. Creating her own sound was a goal that she had pursued since her 20s. “That is what truly makes an artist,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I put my own stamp on it.”
This meant planning out some of her pieces, but leaving plenty of room for improvisation. Sometimes it meant improvising everything, on the spot, in front of an audience — as she did on her most recent tour, which found her traveling down the East Coast, to L.A., to Texas. When she improvises a song, she said, “I am literally feeding off the people and their energy.”
For Renee, finding her name also meant finding an alter ego in Stout, a nickname given her in the Funk Apostles that she realized she could build an identity around. As Stout, “I lose control. I get lost” on stage, Renee said, when she slips into the Stout identity. “Stout gives me that freedom to be on stage and be something different,” she added. “Anything that I’m going through, good or bad, when I get on stage, I’m not even thinking about. It’s just in the moment, totally submerged, totally free.”
“I feel like Stout always existed in me, and it took that alignment with the Funk Apostles to start that revolution.”
New Haveners will get a chance to hear what the revolution is all about at the State House on May 25, sharing a bill with Iman Omari, Cavalier, and Paul Bryant Hudson.
“Just get ready to be empowered,” Renee said. “Get ready to dance. And come with your minds open.”
To listen to the full interview with Stout, click on the file below.
Great stuff!!