Nyree Belleville has wanted to be a rock star since she was a little girl strutting in the front yard with a paper-towel tube for her microphone. And unlike most wannabes, she's actually on her way. In the last few years, Nyree (she uses only her first name professionally) has opened for Santana, Jewel, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Her music, a mixture of vocals, guitar and piano, has won critical acclaim and been compared to that of Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette.
A faculty brat who grew up on the Stanford campus (her father, Alvin Rabushka, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution), she learned guitar at 15 and discovered artists like Suzanne Vega and the Indigo Girls. "This was the most powerful music I'd ever heard," Nyree says. "It really solidified what I wanted to do."
Nyree confesses that she almost didn't go to college, since superstardom doesn't usually require a bachelor's degree. But once she did choose to continue her education, she knew it had to be Stanford. An economics major (she calls the music department "[too] classical"), she pursued her dream outside of class, as a member of a band called Faded Flower and in the all-female a cappella group Counterpoint. She also did solo concerts all around campus, garnering a fan base that later proved useful.
Like every musician who wants to give up her day job, Nyree struggled at first. Without a major record label willing to sign her, becoming a full-time performer was a daunting prospect. Bars and coffee shops paid only a pittance and were noisy with conversation and espresso machines. Then she hit upon an overlooked performance niche: "house concerts," in which hosts invite 20 to 50 people to pitch in $10 or $15 apiece for an evening of live music. Nyree e-mailed her list of 2,000 fans with the idea and, within hours, heard back from a dozen prospective hosts--many of them former Stanford students now scattered around the country.
Clearly, this econ major knows how to market herself as an independent musician, but her goal remains to sign with a major record label and play to a larger audience. House concerts have been good, she says, but "honestly, it's great to be up in front of thousands of people." She got a taste of that when she toured Brazil in April, playing for audiences of 500 to 1,500--a long, long way from her parents' front lawn.
—Jenny Miller, '03
