Artist Stephanie Dosen is a real ghostwriter -- she writes songs intended for wayward ghosts. She toldThe Age that she began writing songs for ghosts when her first album was recorded in a haunted abandoned dog-food factory.
"I recorded it at an old, abandoned dog-food factory," Dosen recounts. "It was terribly, terribly haunted; a bunch of people had been buried in the silos when they were building the place. There were ghosts in all the rooms, things flying off the walls, we heard weird voices and noises on some of the tracks. So everyone said: 'Why don't you start singing your songs to the ghosts and calm them down?'
Dosen admits it sounds strange - "I know it sounds completely wacky" - but, you get the feeling that strange is her way. "I'm kind of a random person: I follow little white rabbits down holes," she says. "I let the thing be what it is. I let things grow. I'm very much a gardener, I'm not a builder. I don't construct things, I just sow seeds and let things grow, out of my control."
Such strangeness befits someone who grew up on a peacock farm in rural Wisconsin. After "learning to sing by aping Olivia Newton-John," a six-year-old Dosen started writing songs, on a plastic Shaun Cassidy guitar, "for the swans in the pond".
Stephanie Dosen's MySpace page says she writes the songs for ghosts on a rusty tape player named Jean-pierre. Her MySpace page also says she writes music for "weary sailors and tangled mermaids" as well. She has also written lullabies for her "two favorite pets, a swan and a fox." The Age says that Dosen tries to avoid reading people's reactions to her records. Dosen says, "If anyone ever catches me putting my name in in Google, with quotes around it, I need to be shot." Although they are not her target audience, Dosen is gathering a following of human listeners. Dosen is currently on tour in Australia. She starts a UK tour in October. Her latest album is called A Lily for the Spectre.
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