Colette Marino fell in love with house music in 1988, after a fellow eighth grader played DJ at a dance at Pritzker Elementary in Wicker Park. By the time she was a sophomore at Lane Tech, she was a regular at local raves, and simply dancing at them was already old hat. She passed out flyers for party promoters, and at age 15 she even threw one of her own–at her parents’ house while they were out of town. She made flyers and charged five bucks at the door. “They knew about it because the house was too clean when they got back,” she says. Now 26 and a DJ in her own right, Marino has found a more unusual way to be part of the music: she sings over the records she spins.
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Marino’s been singing even longer than she’s been clubbing. “From the time I was four I had always told my mom that I wanted to be a singer,” she says, and when she was in fourth grade one of her teachers took notice of her voice: “I sang over everybody when we did our hour of music.” She began taking private lessons and joined choirs at school and at church, where she began giving lessons herself at age 14. Although she loved pop music, her focus was on classical. “When I was at home I would sing along to Madonna, but there wasn’t any kind of pop 101 or something like that I could take at school,” she says. At Lane Tech, where students get to pick a major, she chose painting, with music as a minor. “I wanted to do both, but I really hated music theory, and by choosing it as a minor I didn’t have to study it….My DJ friends would come to my concerts at school. They thought it was weird but they appreciated it.”
During the first five months of Superjane’s existence, Marino stuck strictly to spinning, but once she felt confident enough on the decks, she began to sing along. Although she sometimes has ideas worked out in advance, she often wings it. “I might buy a record, listen to it once, just kind of shuffling through it, and if I think that it’ll work I’ll mark it with an s,” she says. “When I play it later, I’ll just make something up. If something works out really well, I’ll just keep singing it over and over. I won’t remember it exactly, but it’s pretty close, and eventually it’ll turn itself into a song.” That’s the MO behind much of the material on her new mix CD, Our Day, released last month by Nettwerk, the Canadian label that gave the world Sarah McLachlan.
