Ottawa Xpress

Love is her (real) middle name Vancouver's oddest-named musician embraces her Sugar-sweet eclecticism. The reason it feels so good to stand beside a waterfall is not the beauty of the clean, rushing water nor its refreshing spray, but actually the rush of negative ions that the waterfall emits. Negative ions create good vibes. For real. Being in the company of Coco Love Alcorn is a similar experience. It's not just because she's beautiful (which she is), and it's more than her gifted voice. It's the incredible rush of creative inspiration that she shares. Like negative ions, it feels good just to be around that buzz. In a phone interview from her home in Vancouver, only a day before leaving on tour, Alcorn gushed about her album, Sugar, and the new artistic ventures that are keeping her up at night. But first we clarified the first question on most writers' minds - her name, is it real? "Yup. There may have been a lag of an hour or so, between when I arrived and when they chose my name. Alice was an option, and Tico, a Hawaiian name. Maybe it was Coco Chanel that made them think of it? I guess I just seemed like a Coco. "Sugar was a long time in the making - a full eight years. This wasn't only because Alcorn was busy with several other projects (54-40, Paloma, Joystick) but also because there was concern over the eclecticism of Coco's material. "I felt pressure for years to pick a genre. I guess that's why there was so long between solo records. I always had this feeling from managers and people in the industry that they needed to know what to call it. Like if I put something out that was jazz and then put something out that was R&B, that they wouldn't know how to shelve me."An epiphany and a bit of luck resulted in the ballsy release that is Sugar. "I started to just kind of realize that I was always going to be eclectic. And I was always going to like improvising and playing in the jazz genre, but also always love R&B groove stuff like Stevie Wonder, Erykah Badu, Aretha Franklin, and also always love the songwriters like Joni Mitchell. I needed to blend those pieces and make it all cohesive." Described by Alcorn as "acoustic-jazz-folk-R&B-groove-pop," the end result is a bright burst of colour amidst the many shades of indie grey.

-Lara Purvis