about
Eve Decker, born and raised in Northern California, has led a musical life since she was a baby. Her parents sang and played music in the house constantly, and they took Eve along with them to hear Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and other legendary singer/songwriters of the sixties era. Eve's mom taught her to play guitar when she was six, and her dad helped her write her first song when she was twelve. Strongly influenced by the political milieu of the sixties and seventies, Eve wrote many songs in her teens. She toured Europe with the U.C. Berkeley Jazz Choir in 1983, and afterward formed a folk band with her post-college roommate, Patty Spiglanin, which played locally and stayed together for eight years.
In the early nineties, with her two good friends Lisa Zeiler and Andrea Prichett, Eve co-founded the outstanding feminist folk trio, Rebecca Riots, which enjoyed local and national acclaim for a decade. Known for their riveting harmonies, captivating melodies and arrangements, thoughtful and soul-searching lyrics, and an infectiously fun and charismatic stage presence, Rebecca Riots toured the country several times, sharing stages with Utah Phillips, Cheryl Wheeler, Rhiannaon, and many others. In 1999, the San Francisco Bay Guardian dubbed Rebecca Riots the "best Bay Area band with a conscience," and the Seattle Folklore Society described their music as "fresh radical folk."
During her years with Rebecca Riots, many of Eve's best-loved songs-such as "Gardener," "No Wings," "Faith," "Cemetery," and her gentle love song for children, "Cosmos" - reflected her spiritual concerns, and her deepening practice and involvement with Vipassana Buddhism. Other Eve compositions, such as the popular "Women's Bodies," were used around the country as supportive music in women's shelters and in college courses on women's history. All of Eve's songwriting has been characterized by a yearning to try and awaken compassion and ease suffering. In her long-held "day job" as a children's music teacher at two elementary schools in Oakland, CA, Eve has taken this same conscientious and loving attitude into the classroom, which has earned her commendations from parents and school administrators year after year.
On a three-month-long silent meditation retreat in 2003, Eve conceived the idea of a song cycle on the Buddhist paramis, or "ten perfections of the heart," which include generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, patience, energy, determination, truthfulness, lovingkindness, and equanimity. Eve's lifelong ambition to use music as a means to promote well-being and happiness is reflected in the paramis, which, taken together (or even separately) are a millennia-tested prescription for a balanced, meaningful, and contented life. Eve co-wrote each song with different musical friends, former band mates, and family members, giving the resulting collection a vibrant and diverse character. There has never before been a set of songs written about the paramis, and it is unlikely there will ever be one again that contains as much beauty, idiosyncrasy, liveliness, and sheer joy as Eve's remarkable new CD, Commentary on Perfections of the Heart.
Eve co-produced Commentary on Perfections of the Heart with her brother, Ben Decker.
Producer Ben Decker has been writing, recording, and performing music for over 20 years. After studying music and audio engineering at San Francisco State University in the mid-1980s, he spent the next 10 years recording and performing with several Bay Area bands, including The Brambles (with Eve Decker and Patty Spiglanin), Vicious Hippies, Dizzybam, and Good Life. Next, Ben relocated for a few years to Seattle, where he was a Media Producer for MSN Music and an Audio Producer for Microsoft Game Studios, producing voice-over, sound design, and music for Xbox games. During this interlude, Ben also produced and engineered two CDs of children's music with his mother, Eleanor Decker. Ben currently works in the Audio Department at LeapFrog Toys in Emeryville, and runs his own studio, Palomino Sound in Oakland. Ben has recently engineered CD tracks for singer-songwriters Eileen Hazel and Alex Pfeiffer-Rosenblum, composed original music for the documentaries "Pup" and "Tri-Cities Homeless Coalition," and created the sound design for several plays performed by San Francisco's Last Planet Theater.