Sunshiny Goodness

09/07/1999 9:00 PM, LAUNCH
Rob O'Connor

The website says it all: www.vitamincisgood4u.com. But unlike liver, asparagus, opera, etc., Vitamin C is designed to go down nice and easy. The hyperkinetic computer grooves, the shuffling sonic effects, the snappy female pop voice all point to an easily accessible package that can be taken in quick, painless doses. No labored grimacing here.

Colleen Fitzpatrick is Vitamin C, and if her name sounds vaguely familiar, you've probably taken to reading liner notes and realize that she was once the singer of Eve's Plum, the alternative group that kept people wondering what it had to do with The Brady Bunch. The jump to her new persona isn't really a jump to Fitzpatrick. "It's a lot less difficult than it looks, because in my opinion Eve's Plum was always a pop band and it was really a matter of"--she pauses--"I still write songs the same way, nothing's changed with that, maybe a little in the production, but times have changed, too. I was looking forward to putting more programmed drums and sampling into Eve's Plum because I think that's a really cool advancement in music in the past 12 or 15 years. For me it was a natural progression, because this project represents all of my interests rolled into one."

Using deductive reason, then, Vitamin C is the story of someone who grew up listening to early new wave (there's an interpolation of the Clash's "The Magnificent Seven" and a cover of Split Enz's hit "I Got You"), the aggressive yet sensual studio pop of Madonna, and a smattering of hip-hop.

Vitamin C's self-titled album was the result of collaborations between Fitzpatrick and her multiple producers and writers, who helped her realize her ideas. "I had collaborators on every song," she says. "But the way I generally write is to get an idea for a song and that for me is generally lyrical, because I primarily write lyrics and melody. It's so unpredictable when you work with collaborators because in some cases you know them well, but in many cases you're just meeting them for the first time and sitting down and seeing if it's going to lead to something good.

"Basically, for me, if I get a kinda cool idea for a song and I have some sort of a dummy lyric or a title, it sometimes implies a melody or a rhythm that we can use as a springboard or a foundation for the entire song, and of course it goes in different directions. For this record, I did rely heavily on help from my producers and my co-writers and the musicians on this record, that we took liberty to create the track as we heard it in our own head."

"Smile," the album's first single, is unusual in its appropriation of a reggae rhythm mixed upside a hip-hop groove. "As a song I think it's an interesting song, because it's a mixture of hip-hop, reggae, pop, with a message that seems often misconstrued as stupid," she laughs. "But actually in my opinion it's very meaningful because though a smile can't change the world, it's being used as a grin-and-bear-it kind of thing. As we all know, life isn't always easy, and so therefore that's where it came from."

Fitzpatrick finds most of her joy in creating the music, which she's been doing these past few months, and now looks to bring it on the road. "There are two great moments in what I do," she says. "And they're when you write the song and you're really proud of it and you think it's really great, and then when you get to do it before a live audience."