A sentimental concert with Becca Stevens and the Princeton Jazz Vocal Ensemble

On a day that started with freezing gusts of rain, I walked into a glowing Richardson Auditorium and was warmed by my first-ever jazz concert with the Princeton Jazz Vocal Ensemble and guest artist Becca Stevens, a twice Grammy-nominated jazz, pop, and indie singer/songwriter.

Starting off with a timeless classic, the whole Jazz Vocal Ensemble, consisting of nine Princeton student singers accompanied by five instrumentalists, performed “What the World Needs Now” by Burt Bacharach in cheery harmonies and riffs. Then the group split up into solo performances of more love songs, including “I’ve Got a Crush On You” by George & Ida Gershwin; “But Beautiful” by Jimmy Van Heusen & Johnny Burke; “All of Time,” composed by Paolo Montoya ’25; and “Never Break,” composed by Michelle Lordi, the ensemble’s director.

Afterward, Lordi introduced Stevens to the stage. The lights dimmed to a reddish spotlight as Stevens began her song “Queen Mab.” The first line floated in a haunting melody and echoed across the vocal ensemble. The lyrics were borrowed from a scene in “Romeo and Juliet,” where Mercutio warns Romeo of a female figure of beauty and terror, Queen Mab, who delivers sleeping men dreams of their innermost wishes. As Stevens sang about the “cover of the wings of grasshoppers,” “traces of the smallest spider’s web,” and “collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,” the music swelled with a cacophony of vocals and synths, epitomizing the terrifying beauty of Queen Mab’s dreams in the song.

Stevens has a conservatory background, having studied at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and it was there that she met the musicians who would eventually become a part of her band. In her Facebook post accompanying the song’s release, Stevens calls “Queen Mab” her “twisted nightmare rock anthem.”

Despite the lyrics about Queen Mab’s size — “no bigger than an agate stone” — the music is filled with deep, dissonant synthesizers that gripped me as shivers ran down my spine. Throughout the song, the overlapping background vocals and faint counter-melodies create a disorienting effect, blurring the lines between dream and reality much like Shakespeare’s speech itself.

My favorite piece of the concert was “Regina,” a song Stevens described as a “journey of the self,” fittingly accompanied by a winding charango melody and riffs throughout. “Regina” was increasingly rhythmic, constantly flitting and floating ahead to meet the upcoming verse. Stevens has said that the song began as pulling meaning out of the word “queen” until the idea of Regina became “a writing partner, a voice in my own head that I would call upon for guidance, confidence, a clue from a muse.”

As the chorus progresses, the piece flows into a powerful current of chords and clapping, while the lyrics speak of a lost childhood self: beginning from “a girl that lived out loud (she was something, always laughing)” to “Regina, won’t you come back home?,” followed by reverberations of “what happened to you?” The melody keeps wandering upward, as if pondering an unanswerable question, and then fades away abruptly with the last note.

During her solo set from her most recent album “Maple to Paper,” Stevens continued to fill the stage with her rich vocals, lyricism, and presence. Her first piece, “Now Feels Bigger than the Past,” opened with a verse about artists being underappreciated until their death, painting a vulnerable canvas of grief. Contrary to “Regina,” “Now Feels Bigger than the Past” has a bittersweet melody that swoops down into lower registers, with a more folk-like guitar wistfully strumming along. Stevens’ lyrics provide another poetic jab about how it’s easier to appreciate someone’s flaws after they’re gone; she softly sings “Imperfection is beautiful once the hands are gone / And the farther we are from failure, the more we see its charm.”

In “Wild Eyes Open,” Stevens dives into her mother’s death, which occurred only a month after the birth of her first daughter. The ballad’s intimate lyrics with poignant frames of her mother’s last moments with her granddaughter such as “She loved my baby girl / Just like the summer loves a storm” and “The best way to lose my hair, she said / Is watch it coming out in my granddaughter’s hands.” The ballad and intimate lyrics left a hushed silence in the auditorium, creating a feeling almost as if the audience was guilty of eavesdropping on Stevens’ private thoughts.

Immediately switching it up, Stevens then shared a completely opposite type of private thought. In “I’m Not Her,” Stevens introduces two women: one who films in outdoor exotic locations and is “sexhibitionistic for the voyeuristic” and another model “sponsored by bikinis that pair with pink martinis.” The self-evident title explores Stevens’ dark insecurities triggered by the pretentiousness of social media. It is an unabashed poke at her scorn towards the curated influencer persona and simultaneously addictive hate-scrolling. The outlier of the program, the song demonstrated another aspect of Stevens’ often brutally honest songwriting filled with something so relatable yet too controversial to normally say out loud.

Finishing the concert, Stevens was rejoined by the Jazz Vocal Ensemble, with a reprise of “What the World Needs Now,” where the audience was invited to sing along. Unexpectedly, Stevens’ yearning harmonies and heartfelt lyrics were exactly what I needed. I was glad to have attended the concert: Brilliant, poetic music and poetry was a combination that I could not wait to have stuck in my head, even after the songs were long gone.

Chloe Lau is a member of the Class of 2027 and a staff writer for Features and The Prospect at the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at cl2454[at]princeton.edu