April 2014

One day, about a year and a half ago, Beth Thornley found herself sobbing while watching an Eva Mendes movie. The film, Girl in Progress, stars Mendes as a single mom to a troubled 14-year-old girl who plots a shortcut to adulthood by losing her virginity at a party (though things don’t go as the teenager planned). “There’s No Way,” a song from Thornley’s album Wash U Clean, plays over the intense scene, and when Thornley saw it in the film, she burst into tears. “I originally wrote the song about a friend who was self-destructing to hurt his family,” Thornley says. “And since it wasn’t the usual straightforward subject matter for a pop song, I wasn’t sure anyone would really hear it or care about it. So when the music supervisor made the effort to truly listen and put it in the perfect place, it made me cry. It was like, ‘Yes. I’ve been understood.’”

Careful listening to Thornley’s music definitely pays off. The Birmingham, Alabama-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter writes contemplative Beatle-esque pop with an engaging warmth and winsome sense of melody that recalls such master craftspeople as Aimee Mann, Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, Elvis Costello, and Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame. With her airy, plaintive voice as the through-line, Thornley manages to shape-shift over the course of her three independently released albums — her 2003 self-titled debut, 2006’s My Glass Eye, 2010’s Wash U Clean, and now her latest EP, Septagon — with music that spans ’60s-inspired psychedelic rock, to groove-minded dance tunes, to indie singer-songwriter pop.

Her range is so vast that music supervisors have been able to use her songs to underscore everything from the above-mentioned emotionally charged scene to deploying “Wash U Clean” in a playful sequence of Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer grinding up on some sorority girls in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike. Her songs have also been featured in the movies Ass Backwards, The Perfect Man, Between, and Play The Game, as well as the TV shows Friday Night Lights, Hung, Royal Pains, Vanderpump Rules, The Client List, Save Me, Ringer, Suburgatory, Jersey Shore, In Plain Sight, The Hills, Newport Harbor, Making the Band, Life, Jack and Bobby, Everwood, and Scrubs.

“I feel like all my songs fit under the umbrella of pop, but I do like to push the envelope,” Thornley says. “I’m afraid that if I don’t, I will get repetitive, and I’m terrified of that. So if I write a melodic song, the next one is bound to be a dance song. I just write whatever’s next.”

What’s next for Thornley is the four-song EP Septagon, which opens with the yearning, upbeat single “Say That You Will.” Thornley wrote the song after experiencing a crisis of confidence that came, in part, from completing but not releasing a 2011 EP of songs because she didn’t feel they were strong enough. In 2012 and 2013, she began to get her mojo back when she and her husband, the composer Rob Cairns (who has played guitar, bass, and drums on and supplied savvy production for all of her albums and three tracks on Septagon) co-wrote an original rock musical called Bad Apples, which earned the pair nominations for “Best Original Score” by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, LA Weekly, and L.A. Stage Alliance, winning awards from the latter two.

“I felt like I needed to reevaluate what I wanted to do, because after three albums and a still-born EP, I wasn’t sure if maybe it was time for me to plant a garden in my backyard and start pickling onions and selling them in fancy jars. Because that would be really awesome and something new,” she says with a laugh. “Then I realized, ‘I’m just scared. It’s not time to stop writing music and lie under a blanket on the sofa. ‘Say That You Will’ came out of that. It’s like a pep talk to myself.”

The desire to shift her perspective inspired the songs on Septagon, whose title and skewed cover image of a ship on the horizon also amplify this theme. “The songs are connected by the idea of trying to see things at a different angle and reframing what I thought something looked like,” she says. “I knew my usual thoughts and patterns were crushing me.” Once she realized that, the songs began pouring out, like the epic “All These Things” (where she discovered that she hadn’t actually let go of her past and was, in fact, smack in the middle of it emotionally) and the swirling, ambient “It Could Be” (which finds her examining how far she’s come since leaving home and what she left behind).

Then there’s “Last To Fall,” which Thornley wrote with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Glen Phillips after meeting him at the Durango Songwriters Expo in Santa Barbara. “Charlie Sheen had just had his big public implosion and I remember thinking, ‘That lucky bastard. He can live right on the fucking edge and nothing bad ever happens to him,’” she says. “Glen and I were laughing about how we could never get away with that. And I realized I am a bit envious of those people and was annoyed about having to come to terms with it. So again, I was trying to see all the angles. I also wondered if I needed to be that close to the edge to really be an artist and have an exciting life in rock and roll, even though it didn’t suit me. I had to give myself freedom to release that idea, along with so many others.”

As the daughter of church musicians, Thornley wasn’t exactly pursuing a life in rock and roll while growing up in Alabama. She describes her childhood as “classic and quiet,” during which she played piano and sang in choirs throughout high school and college. Though she was classically trained, Thornley also loved the Top 40 sounds that emanated from her parents’ car radio. “I would bring in pop songs to my piano teacher and put the sheet music up on the rack, and she would very sweetly replace it with a hymn book and say, ‘This is what we’ll be playing today, followed by Bach and Debussy,’” she says.

After college, Thornley left Birmingham and spent time in Denver, where she taught music, played piano in musical theater pits, and directed choirs. She also played piano and sang in a band on a cruise ship, but found it so depressing that after four months, when the ship docked in Los Angeles, she decided to stay. She began writing songs upon the advice of a vocal coach (“the first time I sat down to write a song, I got completely lost in it”) and was eventually drawn to hanging out and performing at Hollywood’s creative musical haven The Hotel Café. Around this time, Thornley released her debut album, which contains the first songs she ever wrote.

Since then, Thornley has made music her life, a choice validated by something she heard the actor and writer Steve Martin once say in a radio interview. “He said, ‘Art is what makes our lives beautiful,’ and I was really struck by that,” she says. “I had been feeling guilty because I was not contributing to the world in a way that people value. But I don’t think they really understand how important art is in our lives. What would a building look like if an architect had not cared to build it out of something other than cinderblocks? How bleak that would be? Art is respectable. Art is hard. Art takes a lot of work and a lot of courage. I’ve started seeing what I’m doing as valid just in and of itself. That it might possibly make life more beautiful. And that is worthwhile.”