by Max Newman
“As somebody who’s used to touring with a band, this was kind of a big move for me, but I was like, ‘No, it feels right,’” Becca Stevens said during a recent interview.
On Wednesday, November 12, at 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, the multi-genre singer-songwriter will meet the challenge of going solo in a concert that will feature songs from her recent release, Maple to Paper. Tickets are available online.
Stevens’ musical journey has been a long one. She grew up in a musical family, and was performing in her family’s band by the age of two. She said that her upbringing “definitely dealt me a full deck that I could choose whether or not I wanted to use, but it wasn’t until I was 16 or 17 that I really committed to going full throttle in the musical direction. But once I applied my focus there, it just felt very grounding. I was like, oh gosh, this feels like home to me. It really feels like a language that I’ve always known, and a language that has always been encouraged and accepted.”
After studying classical guitar at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts during her teenage years, Stevens took a year off before college, a time when she was “really craving the simplicity of the voice, which felt like her original instrument.” Stevens then moved to New York to study voice and jazz composition at The New School, which she said was a time of musical discovery and rebellion. “I was listening to indie pop, hip hop, West African music, and everything else, and it became this rebellion against the day-to-day world of jazz pedagogy. Instead of doing my homework, I would go back to my apartment and just layer instrumental lines and vocals on Garage Band.”
That experimentation proved to be fruitful: For the past two decades Stevens has embarked on a genre-bending career, she has led the Becca Stevens band since 2005, has been a member of The Lighthouse Band and the international ensemble Mirrors, and has worked with such artists as Jacob Collier, David Crosby, Taylor Eigsti, and Michael League of Snarky Puppy. She has also released nine albums as leader, and has twice been nominated for Grammy Awards.
These experiences, Stevens said, have taught her to serve the song. “As an artist, it’s easy to think that it’s all about yourself, because that’s kind of how we’re built as human beings. It’s good to remind yourself that, oh, it’s never been about me, I’m a conduit for this incredible endless sea of inspiration. It’s a really great thing to ask yourself, how am I serving the song right now? What does the song need? If I’m putting my energy toward that to my best ability, then I’ve done the best job that I can.”
Through the years, Stevens has also learned how to make the music that she wants to make. She said that this malleability of styles has had both drawbacks and benefits. “There are marketability challenges — it has made it hard for people whose job it is to categorize. It’s hard to know what venue to put someone in when they’re singing with a string quartet, with a Middle Eastern ensemble, and with an indie rock pop songwriter group.
“But the great part is what it does for my mental health, my artistry. I would recommend it to anyone — it keeps you fulfilled and authentic. I’ve had so many moments, even in the last year, where I’m playing for a room of maybe 200 people, and I can really see their faces, I can feel them. It could be like that for the rest of my life and I’d be happy. I’m making the art that I want to make.”
Stevens’s most recent album, Maple to Paper, represents an inward turn for the artist — she wrote and recorded the project by herself, in her own home. She said it was a “solitary but necessary process of moving through what was intense grief bookended by joy. I had my first daughter, lost my mother, and then had a second daughter two years later. So I decided early on that the best way to tell these stories was alone.”
This intimate feeling will carry over to the performance itself, in which the audience will be seated on the Gartner Auditorium stage. Stevens said “it feels like the end of the Maple to Paper touring chapter, so I’m relishing these last opportunities to play music that’s so honest and raw. Being on the other side of it all, it has an intimate but celebratory feeling. These opportunities to connect with people through my music are such a gift. It’s something that I don’t take lightly — it’s one of the biggest joys of my life.”
Published on ClevelandClassical.com November 11, 2025
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