Peace, love, music

Chances are that you've never heard of SONiA and Disappear Fear, so here's a little primer.

SONiA (last name Rutstein) and her sister CiNDY formed the folk-pop duo back and signed with Rounder Records in 1994, as out-and-proud lesbians. They were immediately honored and embraced by the gay community and the independent music community, singing about love, tolerance, the evils of war and other social justice causes.

CiNDY has since dropped out of the group to raise children, while SONiA has stayed on the road. Despite her peaceful causes, SONiA is rather fearless herself, having played in Israeli bomb shelters as explosions go off all around.

On April 12 she'll perform at the Cape Club Complex for her second visit to Cape (she performed here and spoke at a university event before). In March SONiA called in to talk for a few minutes with OFF.

OFF: You're probably aware of Southeast Missouri's reputation for being a conservative bastion.

SONiA: Yeah, but it wasn't necessarily my experience. Maybe the people I was meeting were the 5 to 10 percent, not the majority, so I didn't find that really at all.

OFF: You're an out and proud lesbian activist. Do you think that ever overshadows your music?

SONiA: Yeah. I do ... and I think it's really unfortunate, actually, because probably if that's in the headline of something it might really turn some people off, especially people who think that being gay is an abomination, if they saw that they wouldn't come to my concert. And I would be very sad about that, because I feel like my music is from my heart, and I feel we all share that love, all human beings, regardless of how we choose to express ourselves in our lives, through our religion or our sexual preference or how we dress or whatever.

I just think people should be true to themselves. I'm not saying you should be this way or you shouldn't be that way, I'm just saying be true to yourself.

Nobody really wants to be gay. It's fine and it's great, and I do what I do. It's just that for me, that's who I fell in love with, and that's what seems to be right for me. My feeling on it is I'm just being a product of nature.

But my music is much bigger than that. My art is much bigger than that.

OFF: Your musical message really seems to reach beyond gay activist issues, though.

SONiA: Absolutely. In fact, most of my fans are not gay, they're straight, just because that's the way it is. I probably have a larger amount of gay fans than, let's say, maybe Toby Keith, I don't know (laughs). It's all good. I'm for love as being the common denominator.

OFF: You've been doing this a long time, haven't you?

SONiA: I have. The CD that's coming out in September will be my 12th CD, and my career with Disappear Fear started almost 20 years ago. I'm a million years old.

OFF: Is playing music for you different than what it used to be?

SONiA: Well, yes and no. There's always new markets for me, because I'm still very much an independent artist and I'm on an independent label. Really what that means is smaller budgets -- there's not zillions of ads being taken out, my face is not splashed across People Magazine and Time Magazine and VH1 and MTV, and I'm not on "The View."

Not that I wouldn't do any of that, because I would love to. That hasn't happened, it's more independent so you have to kind of seek it out, and there's not a big corporation flooding the market with those dollars so that my songs are on the air. It's really very much a person by person choice, so you're going to hear about me more through media, like this interview or from a friend.

OFF: It seems like independent music has gotten more attention in the past few years with the use of the Internet.

SONiA: Absolutely. It's really cool. The money's definitely shifting because, for instance, when people go to my Web site and they download my songs, the full 99 cents goes directly to me. I donate 18 percent to the United Nations World Food Program.

But if you buy my music through iTunes or Amazon, I get a percentage but not the full amount. My next thing is trying to get iTunes to donate a percentage of their intake to the United Nations World Food Program so that we could basically eradicate hunger and poverty in a year, because it's so much money that comes in and it would be so easy to make that happen.

OFF: Your CD "No Bomb is Smart" really seems to take on the bad things happening in the world right now. Seems like you're sort of plugged in to social causes.

SONiA: Yes, definitely. My next CD is going to be in Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish, and a little bit of English. And it's really a way of, I'm really hoping that it touches people on different levels. One, frankly to know how much we really don't know and two, to sort of get a window on other sounds and the challenge of communication and understanding.

Supposedly the diplomacy staff of the United States diplomatic corps that's worked in Iraq, there's like one thousand people on the staff, and out of that, only six actually speak Arabic. There are so many simple, excellent, diplomatic solutions that we could move toward as opposed to the approach of violence and death, you know. That would be just far more humanitarian and not that difficult to do.

We accept the word impossible. We accept as a nation that it's going to be the way it is, rather than to explore and discover the possibility of it being a different way. Part of that I think is, there's a female, uh, molecule, and it's in men and women, and it's the molecule of nurturing. I know it's gong to sound weird, but it's that I think is missing, that nurturing and caring part.

It's not about being right and powerful, it's about love and caring.

And that's really what my music's about, just that as human beings, we're more alike than different.

SONiA was interviewed by OFF editor Matt Sanders.