Full Album show of August 6, 2021
Album: Fighting Words


Artist's Biography

Ellen Foley's passionate and commanding voice, combined with her acting talent and dance moves, has paved the way for a long and diverse career. The type of career she often dreamt about as a girl growing up in St. Louis. “I went to Catholic school and was shown lots of films about finding our vocation as a nun saving babies in Africa, but it never took,” she laughs.

In the early 1970s, Foley left her hometown the day after she turned 21 and moved to New York City to study acting. She went on cattle-call auditions and got a few parts on stage, but her first paying job was singing in a musical comedy revue in the Catskills. “It was corny with me in false eyelashes and the boys in glittery jumpsuits,” she says. “I was fired. I was too odd. Thank God.” Ellen started a band called Big Jive and performed in Atlantic City before the casinos arrived.

She then won a part doing more edgy comedy with the National Lampoon Show. “It was completely tasteless, sacrilegious,” she remembers, “and a lot of fun.” While touring with National Lampoon, she met fellow actors Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, the singer and songwriter behind the soon-to-be Top 40 hit “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”

An eight-minute ode to teenage sex and romance, “Paradise” featured Foley’s dramatic, bone-shivering voice assuming the female role to Meat Loaf’s lustful male lead. She also provided backing vocals on an additional trio of tracks — “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night),” “All Revved Up with No Place to Go,” and the title cut — on the resulting Bat Out of Hell (1977) album. Bat Out of Hell has gone on to sell over 50 million copies worldwide (14 million in the U.S.) and become a foundation stone in the Classic Rock genre.

Due to her commitments as a cast member in the Broadway production of Hair, Foley was unable to commit to the months of roadwork necessary to promote Bat Out of Hell. Instead, she accepted an offer to sign as a solo artist to Steve Popovich’s Cleveland International Records, the same label which had released Bat Out of Hell (through Epic Records). She was soon at work with producers Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson recording 1979’s Night Out, her debut album which featured “We Belong to the Night,” a #1 hit in the Netherlands and a song co-written by Foley and Fred Goodman.

While in London promoting Night Out, she began a turbulent but artistically fruitful relationship with Clash singer/songwriter/guitarist Mick Jones. For Foley’s second solo effort, The Spirit of St. Louis, the Clash would serve as backing band (along with Tymon Dogg and the Blockheads), and six of the LP’s dozen tracks were written by Jones and fellow Clash  frontman Joe Strummer. “I went from a very American album to a very European album,” Foley told author Damian Love. “Mick and I were both very, at that moment, into Edith Piaf. I wasn’t really surprised that Mick and Joe could write from a woman’s perspective. Joe was a really extraordinary person in how empathetic he was. He was such a bohemian, y’know, and he was open to anything.”

Much of The Spirit of St. Louis was recorded simultaneously with sessions for the Clash’s own ground-breaking triple LP, Sandinista! Foley, alongside Jones, sang lead on that album’s second single, “Hitsville UK,” and she also appears on the album track “Corner Soul.” Sandinista! was released in December 1980, followed by The Spirit of St. Louis in February 1981. Slightly over a year later, Foley would appear on the Clash’s fifth studio album, Combat Rock, providing backing vocals to “Car Jamming.” Many believe that Foley’s rocky relationship with Jones was the inspiration for that album’s worldwide hit, “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

In 1983, a final solo studio album for Cleveland International was released, Another Breath.

Foley’s Broadway stage career includes starring roles in Hair (1977), Into the Woods (1989), and Me and My Girl (1986-1989). It was Foley who originated the role of the witch in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater. Reportedly, Sondheim’s “favorite witch,” he called her the “alpha and the omega.” Foley performed a dance number in the movie version of Hair (1979), choreographed with Twyla Tharp and directed by Miloš Forman. She also had featured film roles in Tootsie (1982), Fatal Attraction (1987), Married to the Mob (1988), Cocktail (1988), and Lies I Told My Little Sister (2014), among others.

Many of her fans know Foley as public defender Billie Young in the TV series Night Court, which she starred in for the first season (1984-1985). She has also appeared on 3 Girls 3 (1977), Spenser: For Hire (1987), All My Children (1992), Ghostwriter (1992-1993), Law & Order (2000), and Body of Proof (2011).

During the mid-2000s, Foley taught voice at the Paul Green School of Rock Music in Manhattan. Director Richard Linklater and actor Jack Black brought this school to global notoriety in the fictionalized 2003 comedy School of Rock.

Foley met her husband, actor/writer Doug Bernstein in 1989 when she was starring in Me and My Girl. “Before I met Doug, I was the walking cliché, always falling for the inaccessible guys,” she says. “But I got smart and fell for the nice Jewish guy. I realized I could just love and be loved.”

By show-business standards, they have been married for an eternity: 31 years. During that time, Foley taught at the School of Rock (featured in the film of the same name starring Jack Black), and continued to act on stage while raising the couple’s two sons, Timothy and Henry. The family are longtime residents of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

It was during a production of a play called Hercules in High Suburbia in 2005, at New York City’s famed experimental theater La Mama, that she was inspired to resurrect her recording career. She met her current collaborator, musician/songwriter Paul Foglino, who wrote the songs and music for the show. Two of the songs in that production — “Madness” and “Everything’s Gonna be Alright” — would appear on Foley’s 2013 solo comeback album, About Time (Urban Noise Music).

“It all happened organically,” says Foley. “I loved the songs Paul wrote for the play and we became friends. His writing is sophisticated and ironic, but he has an earnest, heartfelt integrity about him that I liked.” The album was well received with The Huffington Post calling it “a kickass roots rock affair, aptly titled.”

In spring 2021, Foley announced a new album, Fighting Words, again in collaboration with Foglino. The LP features ten new tracks as well as Foley’s version of “Heaven Can Wait,” a Jim Steinman-penned ballad from Bat Out of Hell on which she hadn’t originally performed. This version of “Heaven Can Wait” first appeared on the soundtrack to Lies I Told My Little Sister, which featured Foley in a supporting role.

Today, Foley has the same rock ‘n roll energy and great stage moves she did when she was fighting off Meatloaf at the dashboard light. “I’ve seen my share of paradise,” says Ellen, “and I will continue to do so.”