Inara George

When not delving into jazz, Tropicalia, and indie pop as part of the Bird and the Bee, Inara George pursues her own path as a gifted vocalist and songwriter. Early on she absorbed sounds from her father, Little Feat's Lowell George, and from his celebrated circle that included Jackson Browne, Terry Allen, and Van Dyke Parks, yet she had no plan to pursue music professionally. Instead she gravitated toward theater, spending her childhood performing Shakespeare throughout her hometown of Topanga Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains. She later moved to Boston to train as an actor in the classical tradition.

During a summer visit home she and some high-school acquaintances started the band Lode, which unexpectedly secured a contract with Geffen Records and issued the EP Legs & Arms in 1996. By the close of the decade George had teamed with Bryon Atkinson to create the indie-rock duo Merrick, which put out two albums before splitting in 2002. Three years afterward she launched her solo work with the Everloving Records release All Rise, produced by Michael Andrews (Donnie Darko, Freaks and Geeks) and enriched by contributions from Greg Kurstin. Shared admiration for vintage jazz standards and 1960s tropicalia tunes led the pair to form the Bird and the Bee, whose self-titled album appeared in 2006 alongside several EPs. While readying the duo's next full-length project, George also collaborated with longtime producer and family friend Van Dyke Parks on the 2008 album An Invitation. She rejoined the Bird and the Bee for Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates in 2010 and Recreational Love in 2015, and she contributed vocals to Foo Fighters' "Dirty Water" as well as Superfruit's "Everything," a track she co-wrote for the album Future Friends. In October 2017 she unveiled the single "Young Adult," which captured her adolescent response to her father's death thirty-eight years earlier, and announced the forthcoming album Dearest Everybody on her own label of the same name, again produced by Mike Andrews. On January 10 of 2018 the single "Release Me" arrived with a Jeremy Cohen-directed video that employed visual metaphor to portray the weight of grief; the song recalled her mother's request for closure after Lowell George's passing and examined the ways heartbreak can reshape a life. Dearest Everybody reached listeners on January 19.