Rachel Flowers Takes Giant Leap with "Bigger on the Inside"

An extraordinary artist of immense talent, Flowers hits all the right notes on her new album.

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Rachel Flowers is an extraordinary artist. Born 15 weeks premature, Flowers spent three months in a children’s hospital to start her life and sustained permanent loss of sight as a newborn due to retinopathy of prematurity. Despite several eye surgeries, doctors couldn’t repair her vision.

But early in life, she displayed incredible musical aptitude, learning music like most people learn to speak. Flowers started classical piano training at the age of four, an age at which she was already able to play Bach fugues by ear. By age nine she had discovered jazz and became a fan, and soon after that she learned about the complex things Keith Emerson was doing in the progressive rock supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer when a friend played her ELP’s Trilogy album.

“It was ‘The Endless Enigma’ and I was hearing this and I was like, wow. They’re doing fugue type stuff, like the Bach thing, and it’s wilder, and they’ve got the bells,” she said. “The synthesizers are like horns or something.”

She became a YouTube sensation a decade ago as a teenager due to her ability to mimic Emerson’s keyboard wizardry as if she’d written the parts herself, Flowers’ life has been chronicled in the documentary Hearing is Believing. She has also been mentored by some of the outstanding musicians of our time. She met both Emerson and Greg Lake prior to their passing, has played live with Dweezil Zappa as part of his Zappa Plays Zappa tours (with minimal prior rehearsal), and has learned from Herbie Hancock.

Now 27, Flowers, a gifted pianist, flautist, and guitarist (she also plays bass, saxophone, and Chapman Stick), has emerged as an important artist in her own right. She has refined her songwriting and developed her beautiful three-and-a-half-octave voice. Entering 2021, she had released two albums — Listen (2016) and Going Somewhere (2018) — and has also collaborated with the likes of Saga lead vocalist Michael Sadler and fusion band Stratospheerius.

Rachel’s new album, Bigger on the Inside, fuses progressive rock, jazz, pop, and classical influences all together into a cohesive, cinematic, and enjoyable nine-song record that takes listeners on an hour-long journey on which she plays all the instruments — and does so brilliantly. Drums were added via keyboard using a sound library. She also recorded and mixed the album herself, with her mother, Jeanie, serving as executive producer. The album title comes from a recurring line from the television series Doctor Who, but it could easily also mean Flowers’ talent. Her unassuming physical form contains an entire universe of creativity, unrivaled musical prowess, and an enormous sense of musical adventure. Much of that comes to light in Bigger on the Inside.

When asked who influenced her, whether on a particular song or in general, she rattles off a long, eclectic list of artists across multiple genres. She assimilates bits and pieces (which she calls “this and that”) from disparate styles and approaches and is adept at fitting them together seamlessly.

The album opener is single “A B,” a funky instrumental that features jazzy electric piano over an infectious bass groove. Flowers said the song was inspired by hearing Adrian Belew’s band live during the (literally) floating progressive rock festival known as Cruise to the Edge.

 “After the show I was in a cabin and I immediately started singing this idea,” Flowers said. “I had my Victor Reader Stream (handheld media player) out and I sang it. I was just, out of nowhere, hearing the start of the song. And then when I got home, I got my Korg keyboard and started recording, finishing the song. I was thinking King Crimson meets Snarky Puppy. Snarky Puppy’s one of my favorite instrumental fusion type bands. They're very symphonic and they're pretty cool.”

“Take Me Away” follows “A B” and it’s the first of three epic tracks on the album, clocking at 11:47. It starts with a huge organ sound as if the listener is standing in a gothic cathedral. Although it seems like it came from a Rick Wakeman album, Flowers said her inspiration for the “Take Me Away” intro came from early Ambrosia.

“There’s that interlude in ‘Cowboy Star’ (from Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled) that’s (got) that pipe organ kind of section in it,” she said. “I was sort of thinking of that, actually.”

After the pipe organ intro, the song goes quiet, Flowers’ ethereal vocals take center stage, and then the song takes flight, going through twists and turns along the way. Flowers drew inspiration from multiple sources for the epic track.

“I was listening to Alan Parsons Project’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I was also listening to Focus, like their Hamburger Concerto album,” she said. “What else? Various musicals like Jesus Christ, Superstar. I think I was also listening to some Kelly Clarkson. And Yes, of course, with Close to the Edge.”

Flowers starts off “Too Much” softly with a delicate vocal over a muted electronic rhythm with some light piano and then slowly brings other elements into it. The song builds to a crescendo that includes a mantra-like repetition of the line “It’s too much for me to take.”

“I think I just liked the sound of a simple idea,” she said of the recurring line. “I wanted to challenge myself and see what I could do with just playing around with a simple idea, and just build on it — sort of like with jazz, taking a thought and just exploring it. And it can be very soft, it can be aggressive, it could be almost dark, it could be enthusiastic, or whatever.”

One of my favorite tracks on the album is “Love Today,” which is the most pop-sounding, accessible songs on the album. Flowers’ layered vocals are reminiscent of Wilson Phillips, which is ironically one of the few bands brought up in our conversation with which she wasn’t completely familiar. But below those vocal harmonies Flowers plays with intricate instrumentation. It rises in intensity with a guitar solo and then resolves into organ before the sound of waves arrives and brings back Flowers’ layered harmony vocals.

“For the really big sounds a lot of times I would probably do two sopranos on the left, two sopranos on the right. Same with the altos, the tenors,” she said of recording vocals for the album. “It was like 12 tracks (of vocals). A couple leads, because one of them is harmonized. And then all the background vocals. I like to bounce them in a single audio track so that way I can mix it better.”

Flowers’ ELP influences return in “This is the Way I Am,” which had lyrics supplied by her mom, Jeanie. The song is overtly progressive but doesn’t overstay its welcome at just over six minutes long. Jeanie wrote the lyrics based on a discussion with Rachel about how she had been bullied years earlier — not by other students, but by school staff.

“The story is Rachel’s,” Jeanie said. “First off, she had written the music.”

“This was around 2012, when I was really in my ELP phase,” Rachel chimed in. “A lot of my compositions back when I just started writing were really in sort of the Keith Emerson style because my brain was still processing a lot of his techniques, and so I wasn't ready for a lot of the other artists until later on.”

“She hadn’t started writing lyrics yet at that point, but she had a title for it,” Jeanie said of “This is the Way I Am.” “It took us a really long time to figure out what the song was really about, and she wasn't ready to put it on an album yet.

“So, we took a while, and finding the melody was tough. And we talked a lot, and it came out as we were talking that she had some issues in school that she had never told me about at the time. The terrible thing about it is it wasn’t other kids. It was aides and teachers who had shamed her and bullied her and just really kind of messed with her head. And here I was learning about it years later, when there was nothing I could do about it. We were both a little upset about that and we realized this is what the song needed to be about because it had an aggressive feel to it that was different than a lot of the other things that she was doing at the time. And we wanted to just express what she went through, but as I was writing the lyrics, I realized it can't just be about being angry and being upset, because that's not the way she is. It had to have a positive spin to it.”

During the lyric-writing process Jeanie would show Rachel what she’d written to ensure she was accurately capturing what her daughter had gone through and how she felt. Jeanie’s lyrics also form a wonderful response for anyone who has been bullied.

I don’t care what you say, you can’t hurt me
I have friends that will never desert me
I have joy and you can’t make me lose it
I have love, I have life, I have music

The second of the three epics is “The Darkness.” Clocking in at just over 10 minutes long, it is the album’s most cinematic piece.

“I was very little when Titanic was huge. What my brain was really into wasn't only the Celine Dion song (“My Heart Will Go On”), but it was the rest of the James Horner score,” Rachel said. “And the way that the different melodies are used and the orchestration.”

“The Darkness” gives the listener that feeling of watching a film at the theater for about four minutes before turning into more of a traditional song. If the second half of the song gives off a Dream Theater vibe, it’s because Rachel had been listening to that band’s iconic Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory and Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence albums. Both of those Dream Theater classics are cinematic musical masterpieces, so it’s no surprise how “The Darkness” turned out.

As with “Too Much,” Flowers plays with the repetition of lyrical lines in “The Darkness” before it returns to movie score mode in the final minute.

The final longform song, “Feel” is just shy of 12 minutes long. There are hints of older Ambrosia, ELP, Steely Dan, and more along the journey, and it has one of Flowers’ best guitar solos in it.

“I was thinking of John Petrucci from Dream Theater and Frank Zappa, so it's a little bit of just something that's like very jazzy and fusiony,” she said of the solo. “I was also thinking of Steely Dan, as well.”

The positioning of “Feel” on the album couldn’t be more perfect. Following “The Darkness,” this track gives off the vibe of physically coming out of the darkness, as Flowers sings:

I feel like I could fly
Reaching for the sky
I dream that I could sing
Almost anything

The song closes with two more uplifting numbers, “Beautiful Dream” and “With You.” The former is a ballad of support for someone going through a tough time and shares some themes found elsewhere in Flowers’ songs of music having the ability to make things better. The latter is a mid-tempo song of love or friendship (or possibly both). There are some light jazz influences in it but it has depth and space to it and should be listened to on a good set of headphones for maximum effect.

Like Flowers herself, Bigger on the Inside defies categorization. Fans of progressive rock and jazz will find plenty to like on the album while it isn’t strictly either kind of music — at least not exclusively. There are also elements of funk, pop, classic rock, and more.

“I like to see myself as like someone who loves all kinds of music,” she said.

With the album release, Flowers will turn her attention toward other projects already in the works, including a jazz vocal album and what she described as “sort of a hip hop/jazz fusiony mixture kind of an album.”

Find out more about Rachel Flowers at her website. You can purchase her music at her Bandcamp site.

For my entire interview with Rachel, including some help from Jeanie, please see the video below. Rachel provided more background on her history with music, her influences, her appearance with Zappa Plays Zappa, her recent experience at ProgStock, and much more in the interview.

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